Ellen Hopkins Quotes

Faces ...I ...don't ...know ...the real ...me

I think I lived those years very impersonally. It was almost as though I had erected someone outside myself who was the president's wife. I was lost somewhere deep down inside myself. That is the way I felt and worked until I left the White House.

I feel so detached from what I am on the outside. The person I am on the inside is very separate.

I felt that just looking at the world in general, there are so many types of people, and some hide who they truly are. And I feel that every person has some kind of warped identity inside them that they decide if they want to show or not.

What does that mean know me, know me, nobody ever knows anybody else, ever! You will never know me.

You know you're walking around with a mask on, and you desperately want to take it off and you can't because everybody else thinks it's your face.

I have always felt that everybody on earth goes about in disguise.

That's what it felt like - that if I let a little of the hurt out, it would keep pouring out until I was a deflated balloon of a person, with a big monster of hurt in front of me.

The worst thing that happens to people when they dress up and go to a party is that they leave their real selves at home.

I knew then that the person on the outside was only a shell, a presence to be seen and provoked. Inside was the real me, where my tears joined the tears of all the sad people to form the three waterfalls in the night country.

Just as bones, tissues, intestines, and blood vessels are enclosed in a skin that makes it possible to bear the sight of a human being, so the agitations and passions of the soul are wrapped up in vanity: it is the soul's skin.

When people don't express themselves, they die one piece at a time. You'd be shocked at how many adults are really dead inside—walking through their days with no idea who they are, just waiting for a heart attack or cancer or a Mack truck to come along and finish the job. It's the saddest thing I know.

By the end of the session, I am no one at all. Haymitch started drinking somewhere around witty, and a nasty edge has crept into his voice. "I give up, sweetheart. Just answer the questions and try not to let the audience see how openly you despise them.

I quit Paris unwillingly, because I must part from my friends; and I quit the country unwillingly, because I must part from myself.

No matter where you go, you always see yourself in the rearview mirror.

Sometimes it is painful to be oneself; at other times it seems impossible to escape oneself.

I have all the characteristics of a human being: blood, flesh, skin, hair; but not a single, clear, identifiable emotion, except for greed and disgust. Something horrible is happening inside of me and I don't know why. My nightly bloodlust has overflown into my days. I feel lethal, on the verge of frenzy. I think my mask of sanity is about to slip.

I have packed myself into silence so deeply and for so long that I can never unpack myself using words. When I speak, I only pack myself a little differently.

Holding a tear back makes them drain upward, higher and higher, until one day your head just explodes and you're left with a stub of a neck and nothing more.

If he be Mr. Hyde" he had thought, "I shall be Mr. Seek.

But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33)

I done me best when I was let. Thinking always if I go all goes. A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles and is there one who understands me? One in a thousand of years of the nights? All me life I have been lived among them but now they are becoming lothed to me. And I am lothing their little warm tricks. And lothing their mean cosy turns. And all the greedy gushes out through their small souls. And all the lazy leaks down over their brash bodies. How small it's all! And me letting on to meself always. And lilting on all the time.

I think if we all acted the way we felt, four out of eight people at a dinner table would be sitting there sobbing.

So here I am walking around with another person inside of me. Though I think I put it better the day we parted when I said there is a third person we have created from the two of us. And I am stalked now by that other entity.

There's something deep inside of me. There's someone else I've got to be.