#miser

The art of our necessities is strange That can make vile things precious. ↗

— William Shakespeare

#misery #necessity #need #art

I need you to be happy. I need one of us to be happy. ↗

— Holly Black

#happy #life #miserable #sad #life

He did not care if she was heartless, vicious and vulgar, stupid and grasping, he loved her. He would rather have misery with one than happiness with the other. ↗

— W. Somerset Maugham

#misery #obsession #romance #love

change isn't easy, Micky. Changing the way you live means changing how you think. Changing how you think means changing what you believe in life. That's hard sweetie. When we make our own misery, we sometimes cling to it even when we want so bad to change, because misery is something we know. The misery is comfortable ↗

— Dean Koontz

#change

The scaffold is the accomplice of the executioner; it devours, it eats flesh, it drinks blood; the scaffold is a sort of monster fabricated by the judge and the carpenter, a spectre which seems to live with a horrible vitality composed of all the death which it has inflicted. ↗

— Victor Hugo

#les-miserables #death

You see, Mersualt, all the misery and cruelty of our civilisation can be measured by this one stupid axiom: happy nations have no history. ↗

— Albert Camus

#happiness #history #misery #death

Love is responsible for nearly every kind of insanity in the world though greed, vanity, and pure meanness contribute their portion to general misery. ↗

— P.N. Elrod

#insanity #life #love #meanness #misery

Before him he saw two roads, both equally straight; but he did see two; and that terrified him--he who had never in his life known anything but one straight line. And, bitter anguish, these two roads were contradictory. ↗

— Victor Hugo

#equality

I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen, and so I swung into action and wrote a poem, and it was miserable, for that's how I thought poetry worked: you digested experience and shat literature. [from "Mingus at the Showplace"] ↗

— William Matthews

#poetry #teenagers #experience

The misery of other people is only an abstraction [...] something that can be sympathized with only by drawing from one's own experiences. But as it stands, true empathy remains impossible. And so long as it is, people will continue to suffer the pressure of their seemingly singular existence. ↗

— Nicole Krauss

#experiences #loneliness #misery #experience