Crescent Dragonwagon Quotes

They call you heartless; but you have a heart and I love you for being ashamed to show it.

What's often in your heart is the hardest to reach.

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.

I bleed like nobody else.

People have so much pain inside them that they're not even aware of.

I believe that the truest parts of people can be buried, and for many different reasons.

I'm a passionate person; there's a lot going on underneath my carousel of blazers: a cauldron of sensitivity and emotion.

I don't know how to be hurt.

Yes, I think I am like the sea. I appear calm on the surface, but there's a lot going on within. Many a times, I may not react to certain things, but that doesn't mean that I don't care or I don't have emotions.

I would like to be soft and warm. I would be terrified to be that way. I could be hurt if I were soft and warm. I could be hurt by something other than myself. It is harder to be soft than it is to be hard. I could be hurt by something other than myself.

You're so calm and quiet, you never say. But there are things inside you. I see them sometimes, hiding in your eyes.

Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows.

I think all the boys that write the screaming stuff would write the best love songs... because they have the most to hide. The guys that are in the most pain are usually the ones with the biggest hearts.

The Detective was different. Not that he wasn't a good man; Willie had heard enough about him to understand that he was the kind who didn't like to turn away from another's pain, the kind who couldn't put a pillow over his ears to drown out the cries of strangers. Those scars he had were badges of courage, and Willie knew that there were others hidden beneath his clothes, and still more deep inside, right beneath the skin and down to the soul. No, it was just that whatever goodness was there coexisted with rage and grief and loss.

In particular, for my character, Celeste [in Big Little Lies], there was a way in which we wanted to present her, because she has sort of barriers that she has to put up for protection because of things that are going on in her life. Yet she wants to be, I suppose, very presentable but neutral.

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

But the absence of tears wasn't the same as an absence of feeling.

I do not know who lives here in my chest, or why the smile comes. I am not myself, more the bare green knob of a rose that lost every leaf and petal to the morning wind.

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

That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.

Tally turned away. Five minutes was suddenly too long to stand here, eyes burning, unable to cry.

The ways I could hurt her and hurt myself. Those two things were intertwined somehow. It's hard to explain, but when you were as closed off as I was the past few months, opening felt as wrong as stripping naked in church.

What can I expect from myself? My sensation in all their horrible acuity, and a profound awareness of feeling. A sharp mind that only destroys me, and an unusual capacity for dreaming to keep me entertained. A dead will and a reflection that cradles it, like a living child. From, The Book of Disquiet

I try to tighten my heart into a knot, a snarl, I try to learn to live dead, just numb, but then I see someone I want, and it's like a nail, like a hot spike right through my chest, and I know I'm losing.