Ellen Hopkins Quotes

Passion and strife bow down the mind.

I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror.

Even now, as I write this, I can still feel that tightness. And I want you to feel it--the wind coming off the river, the waves, the silence, the wooded frontier. You're at the bow of a boat on the Rainy River. You're twenty-one years old, you're scared, and there's a hard squeezing pressure in your chest. What would you do? Would you jump? Would you feel pity for yourself? Would you think about your family and your childhood and your dreams and all you're leaving behind? Would it hurt? Would it feel like dying? Would you cry, as I did?

My whole life has been merely a succession of miserable and unsuccessful denials of feelings or reason.

I couldn't bear to think about it; and yet, somehow, I couldn't think about nothing else.

There are days when I should be writing, and I am so tired that I can't. And the fatigue also affects my emotions, making me not even care about writing. There are days when I wake up so angry I can barely speak, and also days when I am so sad.

Well, I did know - but I just wanted the day to pass and the next day to come and then I wanted that one to pass. It was a horrible cycle. I felt so close to having to pack the game in.

I realize that I live on the bubble of insanity. I feel the weight of human suffering, loneliness and despair on me all the time. It's not getting easier; if anything, it's always right on the edge of my skin.

I have my own demons and dark moods. It's weird.

You know, sometimes I feel well and vital in the world, and sometimes I just feel so distressed I want to pull my hair out by the roots.

Mixed feelings, like mixed drinks, are a confusion to the soul.

It is clear to me that one of the biggest obstacles we face as human beings is the pain we put ourselves through when we resist and wrestle with our emotions.

I think that human beings, even the ones who are sometimes hurting you, are often very, very confused at their center.

There's a lot of reasons you can think of to say why you act, but I can only say that it just felt good. At the same time, it felt really painful. It's still troubling and stressful to me.

Sometimes I feel like a human pin cushion. Every painful emotion hits me with ridiculously exaggerated force. And the anxiety feels like hands inside of me, squeezing my guts really hard.

My soul is dark with stormy riot: directly traced over to diet.

I wept my way through teaching practice.

I'm very emotional; I think I may go mad in several years' time.

I'm half alive but I feel mostly dead.

I have a mind that never stops working. As a matter of fact, it torments me.

My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?

... madness entered my veins.

At work, you think of the children you have left at home. At home, you think of the work you've left unfinished. Such a struggle is unleashed within yourself. Your heart is rent.

I was an emotional wreck even as a young child, fearful and tearful.

I was tormented with guilt for years and years. In fact, it was so bad that if I didn't feel wrong, I didn't feel right!