Ellen Willis Quotes

Violence is always an effort toward greater freedom or love. Openness is freedom and love. Even the most violent or self-destructive emotions are rooted in the heart's need for openness, to be free, to give and receive love.

When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.

I pull my lower lip all the way in between my teeth. If I try hard enough, maybe I can gobble my whole self this way.... I didn't try hard enough to swallow myself.

Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it's much the same.

Abysmal vermin that I am, I couldn't of course tell her that it was her incredible mother that I wanted to see again… I knew only as I drove through the cold, night autumn air that somewhere Freud, Sophocles and Eugene O’Neill were laughing.

There is no need for me to curse you -the murderer survives the victim only to learn that it was himself that he longed to be rid of. Hatred is self-hatred.

Sometimes seeming happy can be self-destructive even when you're sane.

There's also a part of me that's self-destructive, and another part that's a hero who's going to stand up for a principle.

A simple line painted with the brush can lead to freedom and happiness.

Everything that I bear within me bound, is to be found somewhere else free.

I have angst in my life, but I'm like anybody. We all have angst in our lives that we pick up and fidget with and then we put down and look at some other things that make us feel good or enjoy our lives.

If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the 'I' and the 'self' that 'I' cannot live with. Maybe, I thought, only one of them is real.

You got a death wish, Truant?' Which was the thing that scared me. 'Cause maybe I did.

I don't know why, but there's always the part of you, the part that hides in the shadows protecting the self-destruct button, that doesn't ever want to leave the dark behind.

This is wonderful, wonderful! Be the bird. You are the bird. Sacrifice yourself to abandoned family values.

...You know the mistrust of heights is the mistrust of self, you don't know whether you're going to jump.

Ourselves within us lethal forces nurse; We make of our own enemies our guests.

Welcome to a life of insecurity and paralyzing self-doubt.

Love's but the frailty of the mind, When 'tis not with ambition joined; A sickly flame, which if not fed expires; And feeding, wastes in self-consuming fires.

Self-destruction would be a brief, almost autoerotic free-fall into a great velvet darkness

A dissolute character is more dissolute in thought than in deed. And the same is true of violence. Our violence in word and deed is but a feeble echo of the surging violence of thought in us.

God defend me from myself.