Sarah Addison Allen Quotes

There's a lot of times when I just want to scream into the void.

It is dreadful when something weighs on your mind, not to have a soul to unburden yourself to. You know what I mean. I tell my piano the things I used to tell you.

They're caught where there's no way out or where you can't see out. What are you going to do about it? I don't have the answer. If I did there would be no insane asylums. But I see a lot of people, a lot of my friends in the same predicament. Many times in my life, I was there myself.

One can never change the past, only the hold it has on you.

I wouldn't want to waste any of my brain cells on forgiving if it's holding me back.

I wanted to talk to someone. But who? It’s moments like this, when you need someone the most, that your world seems smallest.

Resentments are hardened chunks of anger. They loosen up and dissolve with forgiveness and letting go.

In this world, I've got no choice: there is nothing left at all; and you don't notice, but that's all right: you don't know what it's like.

No one to hear, you might as well scream.

I want to undo this. To make it right. But I have no idea how. I don't seem to know how to open up to people without getting the door slammed in my face. So I do nothing.

If grief is to be mitigated, it must either wear itself out or be shared.

Jesus, Jesus help me. I'm alone in this world.

People always talk about good time rock and roll, Chuck Berry or whatever, like this liberating force for feeling good. But what I need in my life is to be liberated into feeling bad. Not sad. I have plenty of sad. What I need is a place where I can spray anger in sparks like a gnarled piece of electrical cable. Just be mad at stuff and soak in the helplessness.

The mind wants to forget because it weighs so much on the heart and soul. I am tired of crying and feeling so helpless. I want to breathe again -just for a little while.

So now I have sworn to bury All this dead body of hate I feel so free and so clear By the loss of that dead weight

When we think we have been hurt by someone in the past, we build up defenses to protect ourselves from being hurt in the future. So the fearful past causes a fearful future and the past and future become one. We cannot love when we feel fear.... When we release the fearful past and forgive everyone, we will experience total love and oneness with all.

A lot of the time it feels like… music is some sort of excuse to be a human. It’s kind of like people need that excuse to go and put their arms in the air and sing their hearts out.

When something tragic has happened, you'll find that you, the tragicee, become the person that has to make everything comfortable for everyone else.... As a tragicee and future divorcee, you'll also find that people will question you on the biggest decisions you've ever made in your life as though you hadn't thought about them at all before – as though, through their twenty questions and dubious faces, they're going to shine light on something that you missed the hundredth time around during your darkest hours.

Some tears have to be cried no matter what the hour- until they are, they simply rave and burn inside.

When I talk of forgiveness I mean the belief that you can come out the other side ... a better person than the one being consumed by anger and hatred. Remaining in that state locks you in a state of victimhood, making you almost dependent on the perpetrator. If you can find it in yourself to forgive then you are no longer chained to the perpetrator. You can move on.

It's so great to be able to make people laugh, because this is so often how we get our selves back.

And we could all sit around and wonder and feel bad about each other and blame a lot of people for what they did or didn’t do or what they didn’t know. I don’t know. I guess there would always be someone to blame.

A hotel, he told me, was a big house where a lot of people lived and ate and slept, but no one knew each other. He said that described most families in the outside world.

Even if you are loaded down with guilt about everything you did in the past, you still are experiencing the guilt in the moment.