Ellen Hopkins Quotes

What makes me deeply vulnerable? Probably the thing I suffer most from and have the most uncontrollable reactions from is still social anxiety.

We live in a constant fear that our shortcomings will be exposed to family, to friends and to the world.

I had a very easy time loving an audience. But when it's one-on-one with somebody, all I wanted to do was run away, because maybe they're going to want something from me I can't give, or they're going to hurt me.

I just have a harder time, I think, feeling close to people without self consciousness.

I'm very insecure.

My greatest fear is to be misunderstood.

Because I am basically so insecure and anxious and afraid, I never, ever in my life learned to reach out for help, ever.

I started to wear the sunglasses all the time at school, hiding behind them... I'd walk down the hallways, practically hugging the wall, dragging my head against it like I was crazy.

For years I would sit on the side when my friends swam in the water. There is no feeling worse than that, to be afraid of what people will say about you, or to be embarrassed by who you are and what you are.

I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over.

Save me from the ranks of the freaks who suspect they can never love anyone.

I am dreading the publication, for it will be impossible not to mind what is said. I have exposed my heart to be shot at.

I remember secretly going off and crying. All of a sudden I'm being blocked and have to be intimate in a scene, and I'm going, 'I can't even look people in the eye very well. How am I ever going to do this?'

Everyone fears rejection.

I never trusted anybody at all. I don't know why it was so hard, I just didn't.

I was wracked with insecurity.

I've always been really shy. I was always afraid of any kind of confrontation.

I'm not one of those guys that has a great worldview. I kind of deal with terror and fear and isolation and abandonment.

I'm always a little worried when people have met me in person because I'm worried they'll be disappointed.

I do have an outsider's complex of getting made fun of. I was made fun of as a kid, and I don't have the stomach for it.

My egotistical concern was less that I would fail to relate to my classmates than that they would know nothing of my uniquely tortured life's course and, thus, me.

I spent much of my life hiding.

I was painfully shy as a child.

The main thing I don't like about myself is an absurd level of self-consciousness that makes any sort of social encounter an ordeal for me.

You know why I fear people's judgment? Because I know they're judging. I know they are.