Chris Cleave Quotes

The facts of his existence are plain. I know that he will never silence those unspeakable voices. He heard how people killed, and how they died and their voices infected him, coursed through his body, poisoned him. He didn't know how to turn off the noise, or turn the hate back out onto the world like the rest of us. He turned it on himself. You could see that from the scars on him.

When you talk about people being haunted or wrestling demons, that is a rich metaphor.

You cannot escape what you have to deal with inside yourself. It will never bring good things. It will only bring madness.

All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams.

The counterpart of the suicide is the seeker; but the difference between them is slight.

There have been times in my life that I've had a ton of vices, and my demons have run amok for years and years and years.

Such persons are windows through which one looks into terrible worlds.

There’s no conscious thing on the face of the world that doesn’t know dread more intimately than its own heartbeat.

Actually, it was only part of myself I wanted to kill: the part that wanted to kill herself, that dragged me into the suicide debate and made every window, kitchen implement, and subway station a rehearsal for tragedy.

Curiosity, that's what kills us. Not muggers or all that bullshit about the ozone layer. It's our own hearts and minds.

I've always been a sad person. I'm a happy person too, but it's a thing in my brain or my spirit or something, I'm just sad and really acutely aware of mortality and loss.

I just want to sleep. A coma would be nice. Or amnesia. Anything, just to get rid of this, these thoughts, whispers in my mind. Did he rape my head, too?

GET RID OF MEANING. YOUR MIND IS A NIGHTMARE THAT HAS BEEN EATING YOU: NOW EAT YOUR MIND.

Do I want to die from the inside out or the outside in?

I suddenly realized. The zebra. It is not something outside of us. The zebra is something inside of us. Our fears. Our own self-destructive nature. The zebra is the worst part of us when we are face-to-face with our worst times. The demon is us!

The thing about wounded people is wounded people are scared that those wounds are going to end up killing them. They pretend like they're not there, or they ignore them.

...I knew he would be dead, because Dally Winston wanted to be dead and he always got what he wanted.

The punishment of every disordered mind is its own disorder.

We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.

From the moment of my birth, the angels of anxiety, worry, and death stood at my side, followed me out when I played, followed me in the sun of springtime and in the glories of summer. They stood at my side in the evening when I closed my eyes, and intimidated me with death, hell, and eternal damnation.

Even if she be not harmed, her heart may fail her in so much and so many horrors; and hereafter she may suffer--both in waking, from her nerves, and in sleep, from her dreams.

They were the screams of riders torn apart by the twisted reflections of their own inner selves.

A man's subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour.

July 24, 6:03 A.M. The laundry was warm and the rafters were firm, and Michael Holzapfel jumped from the chair as if it were a cliff... Michael Holzapfel knew what he was doing. He killed himself for wanting to live.

Don't tell me that [broken heartstrings] hurt less than a broken bone, that an ingrown life is something surgeons can cut away, that there's no way for it to metastasize - it does.