The notion of picking one time of year to be decent to other people is obscene because it's actually validating the notion of being miserable wretches the rest of the year.
When forced to leave my house for an extended period of time, I take my typewriter with me, and together we endure the wretchedness of passing through the X-ray scanner. The laptops roll merrily down the belt, while I’m instructed to stand aside and open my bag. To me it seems like a normal enough thing to be carrying, but the typewriter’s declining popularity arouses suspicion and I wind up eliciting the sort of reaction one might expect when traveling with a cannon. It’s a typewriter,’ I say. ‘You use it to write angry letters to airport security.
I'm ruined beyond repair, is what I fear...And if so, in time we'd both be wretched and bitter." "I know people can be mended. Not all, and some more immediately than others. But some can be. I don't see why not you." "Why not me?
It is a consolation to the wretched to have companions in misery.
Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul, But I do love thee! and when I love thee not, Chaos is come again.
Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.
Can't stand all these poisonous creatures, all these snakes and insects and fish and things. Wretched things, biting everybody. And then people expect me to tell them what to do about it. I'll tell them what to do. Don't get bitten in the first place. (quoting Dr. Struan Sutherland)
It is the mind that maketh good or ill, that maketh wretch or happy, rich or poor.
Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly.
I felt once more how simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea. Nothing else.