Abyss Quotes

But first whom shall we sendIn search of this new world, whom shall we findSufficient? Who shall tempt, with wand'ring feetThe dark unbottomed infinite abyssAnd through the palpable obscure find outHis uncouth way, or spread his aery flightUpborne with indefatigable wingsOver the vast abrupt, ere he arriveThe happy isle?

The human soul is an abyss

Fernando Pessoa

To see someone you love in so much pain—especially emotional pain that can’t be remedied—was the worst form of torture.

There is no feeling that is comparable to that of being truly lost. I don’t mean lost in the woods, or desert, but lost in the way that only can happen internally. Lost to the deepest,blackest pit of your soul, clinging to ghosts of past times, when you thought you knew who andwhat you were. When this happens, you have two choices; you can give in to your darkest inclinations,and accept what you are, or you can fight, knowing that it is a losing battle, that the good halfof your soul is strong, but can never erase the bad part.

Pride is born as a mountaintop on a valley, but dies as an abyss in which it is too deep and too dark to see the better.

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.