John Cassavetes Quotes

The need to go astray, to be destroyed, is an extremely private, distant, passionate, turbulent truth.

They self-inflict punishment on their own broken lives, put their faith in their possessions, in their jobs, or their wives.

The most difficult times for many of us are the ones we give ourselves.

When you live as I do, you cannot indulge in jealousy. If you do, it will rip you apart.

Part of him wanted to weep... but his purpose was rigid within him. He felt he could not bend to gentleness without breaking.

I can hurt myself more than anyone else can, she told her sister. I can do it with my eyes closed.

Everything mattered and nothing did, and I was tired of trying to find out how both of those things were true. I was an itch that I'd scratched so hard I was bleeding. I had set out to do the impossible, whatever the impossible might be, only to find out that it was living with myself. Suicide became an expiration date, the day after which I no longer had to try.

I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.

She was as one who, in madness, was resolute to throw herself from a precipice, but to whom some remnant of sanity remained which forced her to seek those who would save her from herself.

I'm more interested in the psychic intricacies that they build up and try to run away from, and how they self-construct. A lot of my work is about self-construction. Here, it's those folks who are deeply wounded and bewildered. They're not just victims of trauma; they've been shaken so forcefully that they don't quite know how or where to stand.

"It almost always happens that people enjoy a few moments and then afterwards feel very guilty. The guilt arises because of the ego. The ego starts torturing them, "What are you doing? Have you decided to kill me? And I am your only treasure. Killing me? You will be destroyed. Killing me is destroying yourself."

It is not the passion of a mind struggling with misfortune, or the hopelessness of its desires, but of a mind preying on itself, and disgusted with, or indifferent to all other things.

To caress the serpent that devours us, until it has eaten away our heart.

Mattie sat at the table, obsessing, orbiting around herself. She was sick of her worried, hostile mind. It would have killed her long before, she felt, if it hadn't needed the transportation.

What you must understand about me is that I’m a deeply unhappy person.

Resentment or grudges do no harm to the person against whom you hold these feelings but every day and every night of your life, they are eating at you.

I want to say somewhere: I've tried to be forgiving. And yet. There were times in my life, whole years, when anger got the better of me. Ugliness turned me inside out. There was a certain satisfaction in bitterness. I courted it. It was standing outside, and I invited it in.

No temple can still the personal griefs and strifes in the breasts of its visitors.

That's the illusion - the idea that you can be all right on the inside and not act it out - and it has affected us in many ways. That's a part of the idea that professing is enough.

Some of my troubles are so familiar, I know them by their first names.

I'm not crazy, I'm just a little unwell; I know right now you can't tell; But stay a while and maybe then you'll see; A different side of me

I have a good friend who says, "We're all just dodging bullets." It seems to me the trick to living a good life is to try to move away from the gun you turn on yourself.

I don't know why, but there's always the part of you, the part that hides in the shadows protecting the self-destruct button, that doesn't ever want to leave the dark behind.

The wolf howled under the leaves And spit out the prettiest feathers Of his meal of fowl: Like him I consume myself.