Charlie Kaufman Quotes

Sometimes, yeah, I wish I would have protected my heart a little more, absolutely.

Do not tell everyone your story. You will only end up feeling more rejected. People cannot give you what you long for in your heart. The more you expect from people's response to your experience of abandonment, the more you will feel exposed to ridicule.

On one level, I am a total softie, sort of depressed and afraid of losing the people I love or failing them. To disguise that, there's all this harsh, poop-centric, external swagger, full of nastiness. I'm a cloaking device.

Two things are terrible in childhood: helplessness (being in other people's power) and apprehension - the apprehension that something is being concealed from us because it is too bad to be told.

I'm always telling myself I don't have many feelings. Even when something does affect me I'm only moderately moved. I almost never cry. It's not that I'm stronger than the ones with teary eyes, I'm weaker. They have courage. When all you are is skin and bones, feelings are a brave thing. I'm more of a coward. The difference is minimal though, I just use my strength not to cry. When I do allow myself a feeling, I take the part that hurts and bandage it up with a story that doesn't cry, that doesn't dwell on homesickness.

I am a grenade," I said again. "I just want to stay away from people and read books and think and be with you guys because there's nothing I can do about hurting you: You're too invested, so just please let me do that, okay? "I'm going to go to my room and read for awhile, okay? I'm fine. I really am fine: I just want to go read for a while.

When we speak of being vulnerable, it suggests being especially vulnerable to pain. People for whom personal dignity and self-sufficiency are everything, do all they can to shut it out. Noli mi tangere. They are well aware that any intimate relationship has pain in it, forces a special kind of awareness, is costly, and so they try to keep themselves unencumbered by shutting pain out as far as it is possible to do so.

It was less humiliating to admit crying because of your feet than because - because somebody had been amusing himself with you and your friends had forgotten you, and other people patronised you.

Our barriers to love are rarely consciously chosen. They are our efforts to protect the places where the heart is bruised.

People carry their secrets in hidden places, not on their faces. They carry suffering on their faces. Also bitterness if there’s room.

It wasn’t that strangers couldn’t hurt you. It was simply that the people you loved could do it so much better.

Loneliness is something we [all people] go through. We go through mourning and longing. We make some bad choices sometimes because we're desperate for something, and that's okay. That's part of life.

There are accounts that, if we open our hearts to them, will cut us too deeply.

We hide the truer part of ourselves when we love.

Each of us has a "soft spot": the place in our experience where we feel vulnerable and tender. This soft spot is inherent in appreciation and love, and it is equally inherent in pain.

I felt as I hadn't felt for ages. I had a foolish desire to burst into tears. for the first time I'd realized how all these people loathed me.

Millions of people have decided not to be sensitive. They have grown thick skins around themselves just to avoid being hurt by anybody. But it is at great cost. Nobody can hurt them, but nobody can make them happy either.

I breathe in slowly. Food is life. I exhale, take another breath. Food is life. And that's the problem. When you're alive, people can hurt you. It's easier to crawl into a bone cage or a snowdrift of confusion. It's easier to lock everybody out. But it's a lie.

The idea is that for ten minutes, we forget that we have feelings. And we forget about protecting ourselves or other people and we just say the truth. For ten minutes. And then we can go back to being lame.

People always want to protect what's really going on inside. They want to kind of make visible something that looks more pleasant than what may be happening inside of themselves.

When is man strong until he feels alone?

I have always been aware of how I break. I know what kind of situations will break me. I know what kind of people will do it. I know how much it will hurt.

In the past I was very open and very generous, and I found that it just exploded in my face. A lot of people weren't there for me when I needed them. So I have become a little shell shocked. Subsequently almost paranoid and frightened of people now. Maybe I'm losing out in meeting some marvelous people, but I am doing the only thing I can to save my spirit.

Do you ever wonder whether people would like you more or less if they could see inside you? But I always wonder about that. If people could see me the way I see myself—if they could live in my memories—would anyone, anyone, love me?