Colleen McCullough Quotes

If you bring forth what is within you, it will save you. If you do not bring it forth, it will destroy you.

Men become cannibals of their own hearts; remorse, regret, and restless impatience usurp the place of more wholesome feeling: every thing seems better than that which is.

There will be no song on our lips if there be no anguish in our hearts.

Pain - physical, emotional and spiritual pain - is more than just a condition that needs to be silenced, numbed or "fixed." Pain in all its forms is also a message, a kind of distress signal to our hearts and minds. There are times when it's really important to tune into that message and just listen to it. When we don't listen, our understanding of the world gets more and more distorted, and we become capable of doing things we very often regret.

in the caves of my heart, where pain taps out its rhythms and sorrow sets its loss, i am without direction.

It is a rose planted in your heart, and as it's thorns tear you, so does it thrive and flower

Singing what's in your heart? Naming the things you love and loathe? You can get hurt that way. Hell, you will get hurt that way. But you'll get hurt trying to hide away in all that silence and leave your life unsung. There's no future without tears. Are you really setting your hopes on not getting hurt at all? You think that's an option? You clearly aren't listening to enough Morrissey songs.

I cut a hole in my heart and wrote with the blood.

He who loves his neighbor burns his heart, and the heart, like green wood, groans when it burns, and distills itself in tears. There is no point in taking opium; it is better to put salt and vinegar in the soul's wound, for if you fall asleep and no longer feel the pain, then you no longer exist. And the point is to exist.

Your heart knows the truth of openness and suffers the tense lie of your closure.

...the heart has no tears to give,--it drops only blood, bleeding itself away in silence.

Does the human heart know chasms so abysmal?

Her mind lives tidily, apart from cold and noise and pain. And bolts the door against her heart, out wailing in the rain.

Pain is the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart.

Grief is the agony of an instant; the indulgence of grief the blunder of a life.

This tragic brow, these closed eyes, eyebrows raised and knotted.

I bleed like nobody else.

The line between what I really am, and what I am on reel, is slowly diminishing.

The human heart dares not stay away too long from that which hurt it most. There is a return journey to anguish that few of us are released from making.

We all want to be someone else but without ceasing to be ourselves. I think it's very important to defend this idea in real life too.

But I do nothing upon myself, and yet I am my own executioner.

There is no detachment where there is no pain. And there is no pain endured without hatred or lying unless detachment is present too.

I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.

What makes the pain we feel from shame and jealousy so cutting is that vanity can give us no assistance in bearing them.

Even though I present myself at the height of glamour and beauty, part of my truth is being desperate and emotional and unafraid of being unattractive.