Margaret Stohl Quotes

You are at the same time arrogant and self-loathing. You are a puzzle. But the ancient truth remains: as the light grows dimmer, things begin to become harder to see. I came to love you in time, but I feared the dark side as well. I still do. You have tremendous potential, potential for joy or hate, light or dark, life or death. But in the end, you choose. What a gift, what a joy to witness.

I guess he'll have to figure out someday that he is supposed to have this dark side, that it is part of what it means to be human, to have the darkness just as much as the light- that in fact the dark parts make the light visible; without them, the light would disappear. But I guess he has to figure other stuff out first, like how to keep his neck from flopping all over the place and how to sit up.

Ten thousand million nightmares, temptation by the score, I used to get so high, and still I wanted more. You think my time is wasted in search of who I am, I tried so hard to kill the boy inside the man.

You don't go through a deep personal transformation without some kind of dark night of the soul.

The story of your life is the story of the long and brutal assault on your heart by the one who knows what you could be and fears it.

My abyss speaks, I have turned my ultimate depth inside out into the light.

Clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most

Every man is crucified upon the cross of himself.

Smile with instinct, then lick your wounds in the darkest of dark corners. Trace the scars back to your own fingers and remember them.

A failed personal experience is just fear and anxiety.

There is a dark place calling to me, but I will not go just yet. I know I can't return from it.

In a dark time, the eye begins to see / I meet my shadow in the deepening shade...Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.

There is no greater valor nor no sterner fight. He who would be what he ought to be must stop being what he is.

The years of anxious searching in the dark, with their intense longing, their alternations of confidence and exhaustion and the final emergence into the light -- only those who have experienced it can understand it.

The essence of our whole path is in that place of discomfort, and what do we do with it?

I am terrified by this dark thing That sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Human nature is divided; it contains both darkness and light. You can choose to accept the darkness and lament it, or you can choose to expand the light until the darkness no longer dominates.

If I let them take away my demons, I'll have to give up what I've found.

There is no need to sally forth, for it remains true that those things which make us human are, curiously enough, always close at hand. Resolve, then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving and tiny blasts on tiny trumpets, we shall meet the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us.

In the antiseptic world we try to purge ourselves of difficult things. Don't dwell on it, switch off the light and go home. But this is home. I have to be a home to myself. I am the place I come back to and I can't keep hiding difficult things in trunks. Soon the house will be full of trunks and I perched on top of them with the phone saying, "Yes, I'm fine, of course, I'm fine, everything's fine." The trunks shudder.

If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.

The value of solitude - one of its values - is, of course, that there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within, just as there is nothing to help balance at times of particular stress or depression.

It is not a garment I cast off this day, but a skin that I tear with my own hands.