Stephen Vincent Benet Quotes

I remember one day sitting at the pool and suddenly the tears were streaming down my cheeks. Why was I so unhappy? I had success. I had security. But it wasn't enough. I was exploding inside.

My soul is dark with stormy riot: directly traced over to diet.

Remembering how my mother looked before she gave birth to my sister is frightening. But even more frightening is the feeling that I wanted them to catch me and beat me. Why did I want to be punished? Shadows out of the past clutch at my legs and drag me down. I open my mouth to scream, but I am voiceless. My hands are trembling, I feel cold, and there is a distant humming in my ears.

Forced to define 'irrational subconscious,' I would say that it is a small padded room inside all of us, where the only furnishing is a small card table, and the only thing on the card table is a revolver loaded with flexible bullets.

Had I left those images hidden in the emotions, I might have been torn to pieces by them.

No sooner do we think we have assembled a comfortable life than we find a piece of ourselves that has no place to fit in.

I know what it's like to have someone coming home who looks at you not in the way they used to in the old days, and I've seen my own face contorted with sadness and rage in the mirror.

Minds that are ill at ease are agitated by both hope and fear.

Most of what one feels compelled to write stems from a deep emotional uncertainty.

The neurotic is nailed to the cross of his fiction.

I think that human beings, even the ones who are sometimes hurting you, are often very, very confused at their center.

The part of me which wanders through my mind and never sees or feels actual objects, but which lives in and moves through my passions and my emotions, experiences this world as a horrible nightmare.

I don't have any dark desires. And I think most people don't. A few have dark desires and don't sublimate them.

Sometimes my heart hurts so much, I beat it with my fists. I try to run. But you cannot run from this. It waits for you. Even when you think you have escaped it, it is there.

Men never cling to their dreams with such tenacity as at the moment when they are losing faith in them, and know it, but do not dare yet to confess it to themselves.

We can never flee the misery that is within us.

I have so many different personalities in me and I still feel lonely.

There's something in human nature that says we need to have at least one symbolic place where chaos and dark desires can live.

People have so much pain inside them that they're not even aware of.

Of all afflictions, the worst is self-contempt.

All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams.

My professional dreams were coming true while I was living a personal nightmare.

Conscience: something that feels terrible when everything else feels well.

I'm trying to put the past to rest, but things just keep popping up to just pull me back in.

When you're at war with yourself, you will go under.