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Abyss Quotes

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Abyss Quotes

“Deal with all this, live with myself, you mean? I honestly don't know. I stand often enough at the abyss of my soul, asking that same question, looking down into the dark crevices where the black monsters dwell on the bottom. They gaze up at me, and I look them in the eyes. “This also you are,” they say, and I almost fall into the void.” “And then?” Anaxantis shrugged. “And then? I turn around and go do what needs to be done. What else is there?”

“And any room that I enter may become a sideshow tent where I must take my place upon a rickety old bench on the verge of collapse. Even now the Showman stands before my eyes. His stiff red hair moves a little toward one shoulder, as if he is going to turn his gaze upon me, and moves back again; then his head moves a little toward the other shoulder in this never-ending game of horrible peek-a-boo. I can only sit and wait, knowing that one day he will turn full around, step down from his stage, and claim me for the abyss I have always feared. Perhaps then I will discover what it was I did - what any of us did - to deserve this fate.”

“But the mighty course of human destinies proceeds: like the change of season, with measured pace: great designs ripen slowly; stealthily and hesitantly the dark suggestions of deadly malice quit the abysses of mind for the light of day. and, as Horace, with equal truth and beauty observes, "the flying criminal is only followed limpingly by penal retribution.”

“I am scared of snapping. That something, some random day, it will simply make ‘click’ in my mind and all of the sudden I will absolutely lose my mind. In other words having gazed into the abyss for too long. Go completely and totally insane! How does one decent into madness? What makes one click so all of the sudden life is upside down and people don’t know themselves anymore?”

“He had hundreds of monsters inside him wearing his face as a mask. Screaming and trying to tear him apart and take his place. He always fought furiously to hold them back and it created an unending chaos inside him. Eventually, in the end, he lost all his strength and battles. He was dragged down into the abyss. He cried and fought hard to find his way back home. To get out from there again and to be himself. But among all these masks, the real he was lost forever. He never made it back again, and he was not himself anymore.”

“The self who is undone in the encounter with the abyss, that is, the preabyssal self, lives with a misguided consciousness. Without having faced or embraced the vertiginous depths beneath the precarious ground of its being, this self views itself as coherent and independent. I am here referring to the self who operates in clearly demarcated binaries and boundaries, the self who views God as distinct from the world, the other as separate from the "I," the spiritual as distinct from the physical. Conversely, the new self that emerges—if it does at all—from the abyss understands its nature not as an immutable substance but as multiple, fragmented, and always-in-becoming. In the abyss the old self is dissolved, emptied, abandoned, annihilated, lost, crushed, dismembered, shattered, and drowned.”

“After reading Burgum, [Patricia Highsmith] wrote in her cahier that, like Kafka, she felt she was a pessimist, unable to formulate a system in which an individual could believe in God, government or self. Again like Kafka, she looked into the great abyss which separated the spiritual and the material and saw the terrifying emptiness, the hollowness, at the heart of every man, a sense of alienation she felt compelled to explore in her fiction. As her next hero, she would take an architect, 'a young man whose authority is art and therefore himself,' who when he murders, 'feels no guilt or even fear when he thinks of legal retribution'. The more she read of Kafka the more she felt afraid as she came to realise, 'I am so similar to him.”

“As the new year began, [Patricia Highsmith] felt completely paralysed, incapable of reading or picking up the phone. 'I can feel my grip loosening on my self,' she wrote. 'It is like strength failing in the hand that holds me above an abyss.' She wished there was a more awful-sounding word for what she was feeling than simply 'depression'. She wanted to die, she said, but then realised that the best course of action would be to endure the wretchedness until it passed. Her wish was, 'Not to die, but not to exist, simply, until this is over'.”

“I open my eyes. I want to know: what is in the abyss of a kiss? Are stars born in these black caves that house bated breaths and unspoken words? Do our souls crawl on these tender cheeks to greet one another by ivory gates? What happens when we kiss? Where do you go? Don’t tell me. For I have lost my desire to know. Kiss me so that I forget myself. I close my eyes and fall in the abyss.”

“The abyss was awake, and its entire population was stirring, some to flee, some to investigate, but many, all too many, to feed. Fishes with fangs came. Bulbous bloated creatures came. Shelled monsters with massive jaws came. Things that defied description came. Every form or shape that stalked the nightmares of a child lurked there in the deep, and they all descended on the Lifemaker, no eyes to see, but many mouths to taste.”

“Life is painful and messed up. It gets complicated at the worst of times, and sometimes you have no idea where to go or what to do. Lots of times people just let themselves get lost, dropping into a wide open, huge abyss. But that's why we have to keep trying. We have to push through all that hurts us, work past all our memories that are haunting us. Sometimes the things that hurt us are the things that make us strongest. A life without experience, in my opinion, is no life at all. And that's why I tell everyone that, even when it hurts, never stop yourself from living.”

“Ignorance has one virtue: persistence. It will insist through dogged persistence on leading others to follow its vision no matter how misguided. Ignorance will drive the world to the brink of failure and catastrophe and beyond into the abyss with arrogance and anger because wisdom is often too polite to fight. Wisdom doesn’t like to impose its will, but that is all ignorance understands—force over free will and choice. Sooner or later the world comes to its senses, but oh the damage that has been done.”

“It began raining harder and my thoughts drifted towards the waterfall from the night before. I wondered if the water might work itself into a frenzy around me and drag me down the cliff with it. Flash floods were common in this type of landscape; they came every time it rained. It kept coming down, harder and harder. I cozied up closer to the frigid rock and buried myself deeper in my tank top. By this point, the rain was building into streams and flowing off the rocks around me. I sat there in the fetal position, wondering if the rain was going to sweep me from my feeble perch and down into the dark abyss.”