Karen Elson Quotes

...a disgruntled reflection on my own life as a sort of desperate improvisation in which I was constantly trying to make something coherent from conflicting elements to fit rapidly changing settings.

I am hopelessly divided between the dark and the good, the rebel and the saint, the sex maniac and the monk, the poet and the priest, the demagogue and the populist. Pen to paper, I put it all down - I'm out on a limb here, so watch my back.

Are you coming down with something?" Mom asks. And just for the tiniest of seconds, I wonder what would happen if I told them the truth. That school is nothing like I imagined it would be. That I'm not the girl in the catalog at all. I'm not a Happy College Student. I don't know who I am. Or maybe I do know who I am and I just don't want to be her anymore.

There are some things about myself I can’t explain to anyone. There are some things I don’t understand at all. I can’t tell what I think about things or what I’m after. I don’t know what my strengths are or what I’m supposed to do about them. But if I start thinking about these things in too much detail the whole thing gets scary. And if I get scared I can only think about myself. I become really self-centered, and without meaning to, I hurt people. So I’m not such a wonderful human being.

Where I fit in is confusing to me.

There are times I can't even figure myself out.

I feel confidence in myself, but at the same time there's these cracks in the facade and those little things underneath that are unstable.

I feel like I go in on a lot of things that I want to be going in for.

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.

Sometimes I wish I was less of a maniac; sometimes I wish I was more.

There was a time where I was really confused about who I was and what I was doing, and I was just kind of depressed.

Personally, I've struggled with a lot of doubt in myself at times.

I have absolutely no sense of my success whatsoever, in fact, I only have a sense of not doing what I intended to do. I don't know who I am.

Sometimes I feel like a man; sometimes I feel like a child.

I hate you." I love you." You're a freak, you know that? Everyone says so. They always have." I'm trying not to be.

During those formative times, I really didn't know what was going on, and I was sort of torn in a thousand different directions with how I felt about what I was doing.

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.

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

As I go clowning my sentimental way into eternity, wrestling with all my problems of estrangement and communion, sincerity and simulation, ambition and acquiescence, I shuttle between worrying whether I matter at all and whether anything else matters but me.

I'm a Gemini, so I'm very dual. I love something and I hate it at the same time, so that probably comes out in the lyrics.

Rebellion flamed up in her soul as the dark hours passed by – not because she had no future but because she had no past.

And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life simple and strange as a bird's life, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and willful as a bird's heart?

Because she was raw and uncertain, and she liked to keep all the messy parts of herself to herself. ... As much as Lena liked to hide the mess and display the finished product, by this point she was all mess and no product.

All through the night, she battled herself. Or battled to know herself. She fell apart and then put herself back together and then she fell apart again and put herself back together, over and over.

I have filled 3 Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me.