Ellen Glasgow Quotes

Obsessed? I don't know what the word means. I know there were times when I couldn't think of anything else. I used to stay in every weeknight in the hope that he might get free and call me. It felt like I had a disease I didn't want to get rid of. I suppose that's a definition of obsession, yes.

Any technique, however worthy and desirable, becomes a disease when the mind is obsessed with it.

For most of my life, I believed that my father had broken many of my bones. They were emotional and psychological bones; things no one could see, things that caused me to limp through life clutching for and holding on to people and situations that often rendered me immobile.

I hated my father long before I knew there was a word for hate.

I think when people are repressing things, or burying things, that can manifest in all sorts of ways.

I had a mother who was very emotionally demanding, wanting to be the centre of attention. As they say in EastEnders, she thought it was all about 'er. I spent a lot of time trying to work out what was going on.

It really is like a disease. I just couldn't get away from the theater.

I think women let themselves be burdened by failures much more than men do. They agonize - and I do it a lot, too - and rethink them.

Somehow I know there was something so right about my doing Frankenstein and taking so long over it that I've probably been laying some ghost inside myself. It was a very necessary job for me to do, but it'll take some time to recover from it.

You must be a deeply anxiety-ridden person, otherwise chain-smoking is not possible; chain-smoking is a by-product. You must be so concerned about a thousand and one disturbances inside, you must be carrying such a big load of worries on your heart, on your chest, that you don't even know how to forget them. You don't know how to drop them - smoking at least helps you to forget about them.

Addiction is when you can't get enough of what you don't want any more.

Listen up. Let me tell you something. A man ain’t a goddamn ax. Chopping, hacking, busting every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can’t chop down because they’re inside.

Men take their misfortunes to heart and keep them there.

Farid had brought an invisible guest with him. Fear.

The hatred we bear our enemies injures their happiness less than our own.

Hold to a thing long enough, a secret, a desire, maybe a lie, and it will shape you.

From the body of one guilty deed a thousand ghostly fears and haunting thoughts proceed.

There are certain parts of a classic nerd's brain that can destroy that person - obsessing about things to the detriment of everything else in your life. But those are the same tools that you can use to turn everything around.

But when you kill someone you love, the hard part is never over. It just gets easier to distract yourself from what you've done.

The world is wrong. You can't put the past behind you. It's buried in you; it's turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you. Who did what to whom on which day? Who said that? She said what? What did he just do? Did she really say that? He said what? What did she do? Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my mouth, his mouth, your mouth? Do you remember when you sighed?

The longer I live, the more I observe that carrying around anger is the most debilitating to the person who bears it.

We often think that tragedies happen because of great earthquakes in people's lives. I think they sometimes occur because of small things that become obsessive to a particular person.

As soon as extreme attachment comes, a man loses himself, he is no more master of himself, he is a slave.

I feel that if I kept it secret it might grow in my mind (as poisonous things grow in the dark) and take its place with the other terrible thoughts that gnaw me

The failure to think positively can weigh on a cancer patient like a second disease.