Jenny Han Quotes

In the antiseptic world we try to purge ourselves of difficult things. Don't dwell on it, switch off the light and go home. But this is home. I have to be a home to myself. I am the place I come back to and I can't keep hiding difficult things in trunks. Soon the house will be full of trunks and I perched on top of them with the phone saying, "Yes, I'm fine, of course, I'm fine, everything's fine." The trunks shudder.

I have spent much of my adult life flinching with pain as I tried to pull out the threads that bound the shadows of my past to me.

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.

She and Thomas had helped construct the Maze; at the same time she’d exerted a lot of effort to build a wall holding back her emotions.

She can never tell him what she started to say: that we come to love those who save us. For although Anna does believe this is true, the word that stuck in her throat was not save but shame.

We become imprisoned by our memories, and that makes our lives wretched.

Many an attack of depression is nothing but the expression of regret at having to be virtuous.

I was left to painstakingly deal with the aftermath of my avoidance later in life, in therapy or through the lyrics of my songs.

We all have a dark side. Most of us go through life avoiding direct confrontation with that aspect of ourselves, which I call the shadow self. There's a reason why. It carries a great deal of energy.

Why am I so soft in the middle when the rest of my life is so hard?

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.

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.

You know, some people can't get past their past, I guess. I certainly haven't.

I bury things in the back of my mind I don't really want to deal with.

It's impossible to exorcise the darkness out of you. We can pretend it's not there until something bursts.

The past doesn't haunt us, we haunt the past.

Writers, like elephants, have long, vicious memories. There are things I wish I could forget.

Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the one you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take.

But I can't confront the doubts I have. I can't admit that maybe the past was bad, and so, for the sake of momentum I'm condemning the future to death so it can match the past.

You have to look at what you have right in front of you, at what it could be, and stop measuring it against what you've lost. I know this to be wise and true, just as I know that pretty much no one can do it.

Girls were born knowing how destructive the truth could be. They learned to hold it in, tamp it down, like gunpowder in an old fashioned gun. Then it exploded in your face on a November day in the rain.

Our most merciless enemy is our past.

You surround yourself with your pain or you avoid it and let it find you when you are trying to do other things

You become the victim of the past, and your tormentor today is your self left over from yesterday.