And the more I drink the more I feel it. That's why I drink too. I try to find sympathy and feeling in drink. . . . I drink so that I may suffer twice as much!
Alone at last. Oh, the pleasure of the pain. (Zarek) You really do suffer from insanity, don’t you? (Thanatos) Hardly. I have to say I enjoy every minute of it. (Zarek)
It is hard to be with another's pain if we cannot be with our own. Since I was a child I have always felt a deep sense of responsibility to ease others' pain. But I have discovered that often, beneath this genuine and admirable desire, lies an inability to be with my own sorrow. Several years ago, watching a close friend suffer when a brain aneurysm took away her life as she knew it, I wrote in my journal, "I won't ask much. But if you would just let me save your life, perhaps it will not hurt so much to know I cannot save my own.
A society whose moral ideas, inhibit their own defense will always suffer defeat by the very predators they deem immoral. In any conflict the boundaries of behavior are defined by the party that cares the least about morality.
I have cultivated my hysteria with delight and terror. Now I suffer continually from vertigo, and today, 23rd of January, 1862, I have received a singular warning, I have felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me.