Conrad Aiken Quotes

People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night. I carry this thought, the child's mystery and terror of this thought, I feel this immensity in my soul every second of my life.

Even after he was gone, I still loved my father. I looked Norwegian, like him, with a long face, strong jaw, thin mouth, and flashing eyes. And, like him, I was verbal, easygoing, and low-key on the surface, and, deep down, proud, socially paranoid, full of self-loathing, and prone to rage at injustice.

There are so many ways in which the heart of man conceals itself from man!

People think I'm just sort of this P. T. Barnum, razzle-dazzle guy. They think I go out of my way to be outlandish and theatrical at the expense of having emotions. They don't get that there's another side to me, and I keep trying to show that other side.

I look in the mirror, and what I see is someone who has never grown up - a crashing sentimentalist who alternates between great heights and black depths.

There's a strong melancholic streak in me.

What can I say? I'm a complicated guy.

I am not a calm, happy person. I am complicated.

Somebody once said that you can never act and be another person; you're only acting facets of yourself. I think there's a lot of truth in that.

No one masters the heart.

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

I never feel the need to go out and make some grand statement that I'm dark and twisty and complicated, because I'm not that either. It's just not as simple as ponies and rainbows, though I do love ponies and rainbows.

My mirror probes down to the heart. I write words on the forehead and around the corners of the mouth. My human faces are truer than the real ones.

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

To be an actor you have to have a certain amount of madness in you. That’s why, when people meet you and you seem very together, they are quite surprised - they don’t see you behind closed doors.

...he said, with sort of a little derisive smile, "How can you walk down the street with all this stuff going on inside you?" I said, "I don't know how you can walk down the street with nothing going on inside you.

I think, myself, that one's memories represent those moments which, insignificant as they may seem, nevertheless represent the inner self and oneself as most really oneself.

There are no watertight compartments in our inmost nature.

A man is like a two-story house. The first floor is equipped with an entrance and a living room. On the second floor is every family member's room. They enjoy listening to music and reading books. On the first underground floor is the ruin of people's memories. The room filled with darkness is the second underground floor.

As an experience, madness is terrific ... and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about.

I do not know what makes a writer, but it probably isn't happiness.

While I did a lot of research, I ended up feeling that the best way to write about grief was to describe it from the inside out - the show the strange intensities that come along with it, the peculiar thoughts, the longing for that past - all the strange moments of thinking you glimpse the dead person on the street, or in your dreams.

Each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant; impossible socially, but full scale; and it's the knockings and battering we sometimes hear in each other that keep our banter from utter banality.

Sometimes it is painful to be oneself; at other times it seems impossible to escape oneself.