"It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying onceself Cathy in "Wuthering Heights" with one's head in a Food Fair bag."

I get in the dumps at times, and don't open my mouth for days on end. You must not think I am sulky when I do that. Just let me alone, and I'll soon be right.

Going around in a sulk will get you nowhere. Pain is unavoidable, but suffering is optional.

There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.

I put my head under my pillow and let the quiet put things where they are supposed to be.

Have you sunk into so deep a stupor that you are happy only in your unhappiness?

-<i>Anywhere, Out of this World</i>

Poetry is a useful place for lamentation...poems are a place where we can cry out.

By all means use sometimes to be alone.
Salute thyself: see what thy soul doth wear.
Dare to look in thy chest; for ’tis thine own:
And tumble up and down what thou find’st there.
Who cannot rest till he good fellows find,
He breaks up house, turns out of doors his mind.

I go into solitude so as not to drink out of everybody's cistern. When I am among the many I live as the many do, and I do not think I really think. After a time it always seems as if they want to banish my self from myself and rob me of my soul.

Well, I cannot find, and have never found, any way of comforting such people, except to express great sorrow at their trouble, which, when I see them so miserable, I really do feel. It is useless to argue with them, for they brood over their woes and make up their minds that they are suffering for God’s sake, and thus never really understand that it is all due to their own imperfection.

The same ten minutes that magazines urge me to use for sit-ups and triceps dips, I used for sobbing.

You have to create your own space which has a lot of silence in it and a lot of books.

Fortunately, when you spend a lot of time in space, you learn how to shit in a bag.

"If
you scream, you're marked "insane."
But silence is a place in which to scream!"