Susan Sullivan Quotes

It's been so long since I've let myself feel anger that I don't just feel it. It covers my mouth and I swallow it down, the taste sharp and metal as though I'm gnawing through foilware.

I grew up in a family that despised displays of strong emotion, rage in particular. We stewed. We sulked. When arguments did occur, they were full-scale conniptions, and we regarded them as family failings.

It's maybe hard to believe, but as a kid I really had a lot of self-doubts. My father was very ill - he was an alcoholic - so there were a lot of things that built up for me. And because I was going to a Catholic school in a small German town, a lot of it was suppressed. I was angry and didn't know how to get it out.

If you allowed yourself to hear or feel amusement, you would hear and feel pain.

I've pent up all my aggression, kept swallowing it and swallowing it.

I like people and get along, and I'm afraid to express my anger and my rage.

All through life I've harbored anger rather than expressed it at the moment.

How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him.

I've always turned my anger inwards towards self-destruction.

I don't display emotions. I have every feeling that everyone else has, but I've developed ways to suppress them. Anger is one of my most comfortable feelings.

I was angry with my friend: I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe: I told it not, my wrath did grow.

I know I probably have a lot of rage in me that I don't show. But I'm not about to wallow in it or reveal it.

Have you ever had so much to say that your mouth closed up tight struggling to harness the nuclear force coalescing within your words? Have you ever had so many thoughts churning inside you that you didn’t dare let them escape in case they blew you wide open? Have you ever been so angry that you couldn’t look in the mirror for fear of finding the face of evil glaring back at you?

... In our family, if you said the words 'I feel,' they better be followed with 'hungry' or 'cold'. Because we didn't get personal, that's just how it was.

It is kind of hard to hold a lot in. But for me… it’s sometimes even harder to let it out.

My beautiful Win. I wanted to kiss him on every last broken place, but his mother and my lawyer were there. So, instead I started to cry.

The child had indeed shut up but all the questions that had accumulated on his tongue circulated in his mouth, moved through the passages of his nose and climbed up from there to tickle into his teardrop ducts, so in his moss green pupils, curious, insistent, accusing sparks of questions continued to light up and fade away like fireflies flitting about on summer nights.

I have a tendency to really stuff things — like, I don't really express certain feelings.

My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, or else my heart concealing it will break.

I drive around the streets an inch away from weeping, ashamed of my sentimentality and possible love.

The neurotic lies awake at night, composing letters to those he hates. He seldom thinks of dropping a line to those he loves.

At least I hate myself as much as I hate anybody else.

Somewhere, far down, there was an itch in his heart, but he made it a point not to scratch it. He was afraid of what might come leaking out.

When we speak, we want to say something sweet, but we don't say something sweet because something is ordering us from deep down to say something unkind. We want to open our hearts to people, but we can't do it, because we are being ordered around by the sufferings we have concealed deep in our consciousness.

Stuff your feelings because feelings buried alive don't die. And that fear or that upset or that anger or that whatever it is, it'll turn into something inside of you. So you want to get it out.