Denis Diderot Quotes

Helpless lust and unreasoning anxiety were just part of growing up.

They mistake the first manifestations of a developing sexual nature for the voice of God calling them to Himself; and it is precisely when nature is inciting them that they embrace a fashion of life contrary to nature's wish.

When I was 18 years old I went to Shakespeare Company, the school, and I wrote a poem about my leaves - I felt like a tree that had no leaves. That is the life at 18.

For me, the teen years were all about searching for a place for myself, wondering why I seemed so different than everyone else, wondering especially why no one could look past the surface and figure out who I really was underneath.

It hurts to want everything and nothing at the same time.

In early youth, if we find it difficult to control our feelings, so we find it difficult to vent them in the presence of others. On the spring side of twenty, if anything affects us, we rush to lock ourselves up in our room, or get away into the street or the fields; in our earlier years we are still the savages of nature, and we do as the poor brutes do. The wounded stag leaves the herd; and if there is anything on a dog's faithful heart, he slinks away into a corner.

If I stayed here, something inside me would be lost forever—something I couldn't afford to lose. It was like a vague dream, a burning, unfulfilled desire. The kind of dream people have only when they're seventeen.

Go! you may call it madness, folly; You shall not chase my gloom away! There 's such a charm in melancholy I would not if I could be gay.

My brain said no. But my heart!

Sometimes I got my majors mixed up. A number of my fellow religious-studies students - muddled agnostics who didn't know which way was up, who were in the thrall of reason, that fool's gold for the bright - reminded me of the three-toed sloth; and the three-toed sloth, such a beautiful example of the miracle of life, reminded me of God.

I want to live but I want to die. What do I do?

and I try to draw the line but it ends up running down the middle of me most of the time.

You have moments of clarity, things become clear to you that you didn't understand before. But there's never any making ends meet or finding any time of longstanding peace of mind about something.

Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.

There's a constant conflict, really, within me. As much as I really enjoy what I do at home... I play on my own little soccer team and I've been taking part in the community and living the life of any ordinary guy, I always find myself wistful and enveloped in a feeling I can't really get out of my system.

I need the pain of loneliness to make my imagination work.

Thus I am not able to exist either with you or without you; and I seem not to know my own wishes.

When I was young, I used to be so jealous of other girls that it crippled me.

I'm not trying to imply I can keep up this silent, isolated facade all the time. Sometimes the wall I've erected around me comes crumbling down. It doesn't happen very often, but sometimes, before I even realize what's going on, there I am--naked and defenseless and totally confused. At times like that I always feel an omen calling out to me, like a dark, omnipresent pool of water. ~page 10

I would stare at the grains of light suspended in that silent space, struggling to see into my own heart. What did I want? And what did others want from me? But I could never find the answers. Sometimes I would reach out and try to grasp the grains of light, but my fingers touched nothing.

Despair was so familiar to me; it could be banished by the sight of a beautiful mannikin in the window. It could be dispelled by the spectacle of lights surrounding a tower. It could be lifted by the great ghostly shape of St. Patrick's coming into view. And then despair would come again.

What does it mean when nightmares dream of peace? When shadows wish for light?

Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave My heart into my mouth.

When I'm carried away, isn't it clear that my heart contradicts my mouth?

two souls, alas, are housed within my breast, and each will wrestle for the mastery there.