Ellen Hopkins Quotes

I feel too much. It's like being drummed to death from within. You know?

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?

If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.

A million words were going through my head and honestly I didn't say one of them. I wanted to let it sit, simmer, you know I wanted to soak it all in - the moment was amazing.

There is scarcely any passion without struggle.

He struggled with himself, too. I saw it -- I heard it. I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.

With subtle and finely-wrought temperaments it is always so. Their strong passions must either bruise or bend. They either slay the man, or themselves die. Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and the sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude.

As sure as this Earth is turnin, souls burnin / In search of higher learnin, turnin in every direction seeking direction / My moms cryin cause her insides are dyin / Her son tryin her patience, keep her heart racin / A million beats a minute, I know I push you to your limit / But it's this game, love—I'm caught up all in it / They make it so you can't prevent it, never give it / You gotta take it, can't fake it, I keep it authentic

Love and hatred are not blind, but are blinded by the fire they bear within themselves.

All my life, from birth, it's been a fight. And it always seemed to be another man's war. I always seemed to be fighting for someone else. But it always came back to me. The Word says we're born into sin, and sin always comes back to war.

Every word I say has chains round its ankles; every thought I think is weighted with heavy weights. Since I was born, hasn't every word I've said, every thought I've thought, everything I've done, been tied up, weighted, chained? And mind you, I know that with all this I don't succeed. Or I succeed in flashes only too damned well. ...But think how hard I try and how seldom I dare. Think - and have a bit of pity. That is, if you ever think, you apes, which I doubt.

In one moment I was feeling everything and I was feeling nothing.

The vehemence of emotion, stirred by grief and love within me, was claiming mastery, and struggling for full sway; and asserting a right to predominate: to overcome, to live, rise, and reign at last; yes,--and to speak.

I'm tired," she uttered complainingly. "I know you are." "You don't know anything about it. Why should you know? I never was so exhausted in my life. But it isn't unpleasant. A thousand emotions have swept through me to-night. I don't comprehend half on them. Don't mind what I'm saying; I am just thinking aloud.

I adore the struggle you carry in yourself. I adore your terrifying sincerity.

The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.

I'm standing here, holding a half a lemon in my hand. I'm speechless, I'm excited . . . I'm a wreck. Caleb wants to be where I am.

My feelings of disgust had been so loud within me, they’d nearly drowned out everything else.

Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave My heart into my mouth.

What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with this extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.

I often don't say things out loud, even when I should. I contain and compartmentalize to a disturbing degree: In my belly-basement are hundreds of bottles of rage, despair, fear, but you'd never guess from looking at me.

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

I know the anger lies inside of me like I know the beat of my heart and the taste of my spit. It is easier to be furious than to be yearning. Easier to crucify myself in you than to take on the threatening universe of whiteness by admitting that we are worth wanting each other.

She opened her mouth but did not immediately speak, and I felt, simultaneously, the impulse to coax the words from her and the impulse to suppress them. I always thought I wanted to know a secret, or I wanted an event to unfold – I wanted my life to start – but in those rare moments when it seemed like something might actually change, panic shot through me.

For me the most interesting characters are outwardly static, but inwardly charged by an overriding passion.