Barbara de Angelis Quotes

jealousy is the direct result of self-betrayal.

Why am I always at war with myself? Why have I told, as if upon compulsion, what I knew all along I ought to have withheld? Why am I making a friend of this woman beside me, in spite of the whispers against her that I hear in my heart?

Men are inconsolable concerning the treachery of their friends or the deceptions of their enemies; and yet they are often very highly satisfied to be both deceived and betrayed by their own selves.

why can't we love the right people? what is so wrong with us that we rush into situations to which we are manifestly unsuited, which will hurt us and others? why are we given emotions which we cannot control and which move in exact contradiction to what we really want? we are walking conflicts, internal battles on legs.

I always have strong urges to sabotage myself. Whenever someone says they like something about my music, I tend to not want to do that anymore. It's not even that I don't like it anymore: it's that I keep trying to find ways for people to dislike me.

All the shitty stuff people do to themselves... it can all be the same thing, you know? Just a way to drown out your own voice. To kill your memories without having to kill yourself.

But he kept finding new pockets of shallow inside himself. He kept finding new ways to betray her.

I have won important things for myself, but I'm going to destroy them, because I tell myself they have lost their meaning. I know that is not true. I know they are important, and that if I destroy them, I'll be destroying myself, as well.

I wonder if I will ever have the strength to hold onto something. Or if I will always be someone who destroys.

No matter how many times she was told that she was loved, there was no recognition that the proof was in the abandonment.

There's nothing worse than betraying yourself.

Every man naturally persuades himself that he can keep his resolutions, nor is he convinced of his imbecility but by length of time and frequency of experiment.

Sometimes we are devils to ourselves When we will tempt the frailty of our powers, Presuming on their changeful potency.

You become the victim of the past, and your tormentor today is your self left over from yesterday.

It's just a feeling I have. What you see with your eyes is not necessarily real. My enemy is, among other things, the me inside me.

She went around with a broken heart, and she wasn't sure who'd broken it. She thought it was herself, mostly.

Your enemy is your own self in a different uniform.

I drive around the streets an inch away from weeping, ashamed of my sentimentality and possible love.

Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.

The repentant man rightfully loses trust in himself. He recognizes his self-dependence as the source of his problems, not the solution.

No matter how we defend ourselves against the outside we're always licked by something from the inside. Ther's no defense against betrayal, and we all betray ourselves.

Obstinate are the trammels, but my heart aches when I try to break them. Freedom is all I want, but to hope for it I feel ashamed. I am certain that priceless wealth is in thee, and that thou art my best friend, but I have not the heart to sweep away the tinsel that fills my room. The shroud that covers me is a shroud of dust and death; I hate it, yet hug it in love. My debts are large, my failures great, my shame secret and heavy; yet when I come to ask for my good, I quake in fear lest my prayer be granted.

I am always with myself, and it is I who am my tormentor.

Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother. Doubt is a foundling unhappy and astray, and though his own mother who gave him birth should find him and enfold him, he would withdraw in caution and in fear.