Category: sickness
Quotes of Category: sickness
Jane, my little darling {so I will call you, for so you are}, you don't know what you are talking about; you misjudge me again: it is not because she is mad I hate her. If you were mad, do you think I should hate you?""I do indeed, sir.""Then you are mistaken, and you know nothing about me, and nothing about the sort of love of which I am capable. Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear. Your mind is my treasure, and if it were broken, it would be my treasure still: if you raved, my arms should confine you, and not a strait waistcoat--your grasp, even in fury, would have a charm for me: if you flew at me as wildly as that woman did this morning, I should receive you in an embrace, at least as fond as it would be restrictive. I should not shrink from you with disgust as I did from her: in your quiet moments you should have no watcher and no nurse but me; and I could hang over you with untiring tenderness, though you gave me no smile in return; and never weary of gazing into your eyes, though they had no longer a ray of recognition for me. book-quotepainrelationshipsicknessI was deluded, and I knew it. Worse: my love for Pippa was muddied-up below the waterline with my mother, with my mother's death, with losing my mother and not being able to get her back. All that blind, infantile hunger to save and be saved, to repeat the past and make it different, had somehow attached itself, ravenously, to her. There was an instability in it, a sickness. I was seeing things that weren't there. I was only one step away from some trailer park loner stalking a girl he'd spotted in the mall. For the truth of it was: Pippa and I saw each other maybe twice a year; we e-mailed and texted, though with no great regularity; when she was in town we loaned each other books and went to the movies; we were friends; nothing more. My hopes for a relationship with her were wholly unreal, whereas my ongoing misery, and frustration, were an all-too-horrible reality. Was groundless, hopeless, unrequited obsession any way to waste the rest of my life? book-quotehopegriefpastThe suspense: the fearful, acute suspense: of standing idly by while the life of one we dearly love, is trembling in the balance; the racking thoughts that crowd upon the mind, and make the heart beat violently, and the breath come thick, by the force of the images they conjure up before it; the desperate anxiety to relieve the pain, or lessen the danger, which we have no power to alleviate; the sinking of soul and spirit, which the sad remembrance of our helplessness produces; what tortures can equal these; what reflections of endeavours can, in the full tide and fever of the time, allay them! book-quotesicknesshelplessnessloved-onesParalyticIt happens. Will it go on? ----My mind a rock,No fingers to grip, no tongue,My god the iron lungThat loves me, pumpsMy twoDust bags in and out,Will notLet me relapseWhile the day outside glides by like ticker tape.The night brings violets,Tapestries of eyes,Lights,The soft anonymousTalkers: 'You all right?'The starched, inaccessible breast.Dead egg, I lieWholeOn a whole world I cannot touch,At the white, tightDrum of my sleeping couchPhotographs visit me ----My wife, dead and flat, in 1920 furs,Mouth full of pearls,Two girlsAs flat as she, who whisper 'We're your daughters.'The still watersWrap my lips,Eyes, nose and ears,A clearCellophane I cannot crack.On my bare backI smile, a buddha, allWants, desireFalling from me like ringsHugging their lights.The clawOf the magnolia,Drunk on its own scents,Asks nothing of life. book-quotesicknesspoetryparalytic
