Christina Baker Kline Quotes

I'm kind of weird - I don't get excited. Sometimes I fake that I'm excited just to make people happy.

Sometimes you do have a good time. But when it gets to the point where you're sitting in your home and you're just trying to cover what you don't want people to know. It's painful. And then you want more just so that you don't let anybody see you cry. Or anybody to see we're not happy.

How much of my true self I camouflage and choke in order to commend myself to him, denying the fullness of me. How often have I paraded sweetness and interest when I felt otherwise; pretended to take careful leave of him on many an occasion when I would rather have walked right out. How I've toned myself down, diluted myself to maintain his approval.

All of us have ways in which we mask and cover our pain.

It's important not to indicate. People don't try to show their feelings, they try to hide them.

I was a pretty happy kid, I had to fake it. I had to get into this miserable character before I wrote poems.

We're all strange inside. We learn how to disguise our differences as we grow up.

So I learned to hold my tongue and to turn my features into an indifferent mask so that no one could ever read my thoughts.

I can’t really act the way I want to act, or say what I want to say all the time. And a lot of times, I cover that up with a smile.

I've pretty much grown up to hide my emotions for the most part.

But the gates of my happy childhood had clanged shut behind me; I had become adult enough to recognize the need to conceal unbearable emotions for the sake of others.

Praises reap not! Joys laugh not! Sorrows weep not!

Because my mouth Is wide with laughter And my throat Is deep with song, You do not think I suffer after I have held my pain So long? Because my mouth Is wide with laughter You do not hear My inner cry? Because my feet Are gay with dancing You do not know I die?

They ignore what is deep and true to a man's heart, his real passions, and simply try to shape him up through various forms of pressure.

Elizabeth had never been more at a loss to make her feelings appear what they were not. It was necessary to laugh, when she would rather have cried.

You think you're in a place where you're all 'I'm thrilled to be gay, I have no issues about being gay anymore, I don't feel shame about being gay,' but you actually do. You're just not fully aware of it. I think I still felt scared about people knowing. I felt awkward around gay people; I felt guilty for not being myself.

For years and years, I convinced myself that I was unbreakable, an animal with an animal strength or something not human at all. Me, I told people, I take damage like a wall, a brick wall that never falls down, never feels anything, never flinches or remembers. I am one woman but I carry in my body all the stories I have ever been told, women I have known, women who have taken damage until they tell themselves they can feel no pain at all.

I did grow up in a household in which I felt that to be myself was to damage the people I loved.

When you're busy blocking out difficult emotions and feelings, you're not going to feel the good stuff, either.

I've been ignoring my feelings lately. That works pretty well. Might also settle for less this week, just to try it out.

To be able to shut off your emotions drastically, I think that the only way you can do that is if you have some of sociopathic qualities.

I used to hide my real emotions in gobbledegook, like in In His Own Write. When I wrote teenage poems, I wrote in gobbledegook because I was always hiding my real emotions from Mimi.

It was odd how one found oneself making trivial conversation on important occasions. Perhaps it was because one could not say what was really in one's mind.

It's funny how three or four notes of anger can be struck at once, creating the perfect chord of fury.

He loved Nirvana, but at his age they were kind of a guilty pleasure. All that rage and pain and self-hatred! Will got a bit...fed up sometimes, but he couldn't pretend it was anything stronger than that. So now he used loud angry rock music as a replacement for real feelings, rather than as an expression of them, and he didn't even mind very much. What good were real feelings anyway?