Henrik Ibsen Quotes

People can perfect whatever facade they want, but everyone holds their sins close to their skin.

Everybody is probably guilty of something. I'm sure that if anyone looked into my heart long enough, they could say, you know, 'Bill had some unkind thoughts back in second grade.'

I was lucky enough to be raised by a man of great integrity and rectitude. That said, he was also human and had his secret sins, as we all do.

Penetrate deeply in the secret existence of anyone about you, even of the man or woman whom you count happiest, and you will come upon things they spend all their efforts to hide. Fair as the exterior may be, if you go in, you will find bare places, heaps of rubbish that can never be taken away, cold hearths, desolate altars, and windows veiled with cobwebs.

Every man bears something within him that, if it were publicly announced, would excite feelings of aversion.

It was a shut door, and shut doors meant things kept to yourself. There were reasons you kept things to yourself, and they usually weren’t good, happy, open-air sort of reasons. Still, I didn’t want to see behind that door. You think you want to know everything there is to know about everything there is to know. But you don’t. Not really. I had pried the lid off of the dark places of another person before, I had seen inside. Down deep. You don’t want to look at what’s rotting there.

The heart of another is a dark forest.

Virtue is not loved enough, because she is not seen; and vice loseth much detestation, because her ugliness is secret

I grew up in suburbia, so it's a world I'm familiar with... but in my experience, all the families that I grew up thinking were the perfect families who kept it together... all their secrets would come out, and it'd be something dark and disgusting beneath the surface, so I wanted to exploit that.

Aren't all people flawed?

We all have dark shadows in our self that come out every now and then.

We are only as emotionally strong as our deepest/biggest secret!

Don't invite me to a surprise birthday party. I don't have room for that secret. I've got enough real secrets I have to keep: dark, life-destroying secrets.

If you look at the Kennedys, if you look at Bill Clinton, I think our country has decided or learned that we are all flawed, that we all have imperfections, and if all of that were revealed about each one of us, we would all be tainted.

I think everyone has shame about something, whether it's a lack of a relationship with a child or maybe their weight or a lack of communication within their marriage. Everyone can relate to that because we all have something that we're like, 'God, I can work on that,' or, 'I wish I was better at doing this.'

All of us have darkness inside us, and at times it possesses and seduces us in ways we never thought possible.

The sweetest smiles hold the darkest secrets.

For God's sake stop making people in your image. Harry was real. He wasn't just your hero and my lover. He was Harry. He was in a racket. He did bad things. What about it? He was the man we knew.

The true confessors have been aware that not only is life mostly failure, but that in one's failure or pettiness or wrongness exists the living drama of the self.

People are basically irritating. Myself included.

Secret guilt by silence is betrayed.

Secret sins commonly lie nearest the heart.

I don't pretend for a second that I'm that great of a person on a day-to-day basis. I'm a deeply flawed human.

Humankind's chief fault is that they have so many small ones.

Don't try to touch my heart, it's darker than you think. And don't try to read my mind, because it's full of disappearing ink.