Patty Duke Quotes

I’m not a romantic, I’m a half-wit. Only stupid people would think I’m smart. I’m not something anyone should know. I’m a lunatic wandering around for scraps, I’m like every single miserable moron I’ve scorned and pretended I didn’t recognize. I’m all of them, every last ugly thing in a bad last-minute costume. I’m not different, not at all, not different from any other speck of a thing. I’m a blemished blemish, a ruined ruin, a stained wreck so failed I can’t see what I used to be.

I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.

It is difficult to write about any form of mental disease, especially your own, without sounding as if you were examining a bug under glass.

Horrible experiences lead us to wonder whether the person who experiences them might not be something horrible.

How sick i am! that thought Always comes to me with horror. Is it this strange for everybody? But such fugitive feelings have always been my metier.

In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.

Something really is wrong with me. And I don't know what it is.

The need to document my insanity is an affliction I have not yet cured myself of.

I'm either mentally ill or Jewish. I can't sometimes tell the difference.

It's tough being me.

I had a series of mini-breakdowns where the public persona - this thing, this face, this person who writes this music... I would walk past that person in the mirror or listen to that person playing guitar and I didn't know who they were.

No matter how I look, the freak inside me leaks out.

I'm sure I'm a schizophrenic. The problem is I can't tell the difference between which one's which, which one is the real me.

People tell me they idolise me, want to be like me, but I tell them, 'trust me, you don't want my life.' I've been a very tortured soul.

Depression - it falls into that small category of things like combat that, if you haven't been in it, you can say you can imagine it all you like. But it's truly different.

Of all afflictions, the worst is self-contempt.

It's really hard to watch yourself.

I've always had mental problems, so to speak.

People say nice things about me but they don't know what's been going on between my ears.

Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.

Shame works like the zoom lens on a camera. When we are feeling shame, the camera is zoomed in tight and all we see is our flawed selves, alone and struggling.(page 68)

I have managed to conceal my madness fairly effectively, and as far as I know it hasn't hurt anybody badly, for which I am grateful.

I hear voices in my mind and you're worried that you're the freak,” he laughed.

Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.

What is it with me? Am I absolutely nobody, but merely inordinately vain? I do not know…. But I am most fearfully unhappy. That is all. I am so unhappy that I wish I was dead—yet I should be mad to die when I have not yet lived at all.