I cannot grasp all that I am.

When I consider the dead and their families, I cannot repress my mental agony.

Sometimes I find that misery is so vast that I am afraid of needing it.

I stood in unimaginable trance
And agony that cannot be remembered.

I can't let them see my doubts, or the wounds they've inflicted on me.

Mine has been a life of much shame. I can't even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being.

The word can't cope with my load of anguish,/and my exalted pain can't fit in my verse.

Rightly it is said of utter, utter misery, that it 'cannot be remembered'; itself, being a rememberable thing, is swallowed up in its own chaos.

Oh, darling, I've been so miserable.

Behind me the past was darker than I had known it, not only irrecoverable, but unexplored, unexplorable.

What I have suffered you cannot imagine. But what I'm going through [circa 1878] now is even worse, much more so than when I was young.. ..because now I feel as if I have no future. Even so, if I had to do it again, I still think I wouldn't hesitate.

Bad as I am thought, I cannot express the horror I feel at this atrocity.

My suffering left me sad and gloomy.

Of most dreadful suffering, I am the cause.