Jeff Buckley Quotes

I try to dig deep into my soul to figure out something positive in the pain. I think I go to certain places when I play to heal.

I'm able to laugh now, because I've gone through a lot of mental and physical therapy to heal over the years, my music's been wonderful for me. But I was a shell of my former self at one point. I was not myself. To be fair, I was about 19, so ... I went to Catholic school and all this crazy stuff happened, and I was going, 'Oh, is this just the way adults are?' I was very naive.

There was a period when I stopped talking so much, because I was just going through certain things. I just did the gigs and just stayed in, tried to stay away.

I was left to painstakingly deal with the aftermath of my avoidance later in life, in therapy or through the lyrics of my songs.

For people like me, who have blocked out a chunk of their past, you wonder - if you open that door, if you walk into that room of your memories, what will happen? Will it destroy you or will it make you stronger?

I realized going back and writing and explaining in details the difficulties I had lived actually became emotional again. It's like therapy but sometimes therapy can be painful. But it's part of life and part of the autobiography so I'll have to finish it sooner or later.

A lot of people say they want to get out of pain, and I'm sure that's true, but they aren't willing to make healing a high priority. They aren't willing to look inside to see the source of their pain in order to deal with it.

You're always searching for the thing to heal you, and I thought therapy would give me that. But it didn't - it just helps you recognize your demons.

Why am I so soft in the middle when the rest of my life is so hard?

I'm a creative person who had a lot of dark time in my life. I can still get to it: I can still go to a relationship or a time when things weren't great. But it's getting further and further from me.

What happened to me in Somalia doesn't define me.

Awareness is the first step in healing.

I believe that literature always goes precisely there where the damage to a person has been done.

Everybody has their demons that they face, and I went through a time when I thought it was impossible to love myself.

I wrote 'Road Less Traveled' to make myself feel better and process what I was going through.

Just having that time alone, away from the team, just going through the progression of being healthy again with the brain work that I was doing in the hospital and building that company, all I could do is think and it just dawned on me that, hey, it's time for the next chapter of my life. I need to walk away and try something else.

I'm grateful to songwriting and recovery to bringing me to a place of peace.

Recovery stabilized me; songwriting gave me a purpose.

I hollowed out, stopped listening to music, never picked up a pencil, started slipping into old habits. All of the vibrancy I used to see became de-saturated. Lost Slowly, once I had done enough damage to myself, I began to climb out of the hole. Clean. When I made it out, the only thing left inside was the voice, and for the second time in my life, I no longer ignored it - because it was my own.

Being sick allows you to check out of life. Getting well again means you have to check back in. It is absolutely crucial that you feel ready to check back into life because you feel as though something has changed from the time before you were sick. Whatever it was that made you feel insecure, less than, or pressured to live in a way that was uncomfortable to you has to change before you want to go back there and start over.

Recovery isn’t easy, at first. It takes time. It takes more work, sometimes, than you think you’re willing to do. But it is worth every hard day, every tear, every terrified moment. It’s worth it, because the trade-off is this: you let go of your eating disorder, and you get back your life.

I'm a big believer in the idea that while we are the sum of our tears, we are also the product of our choices in how we deal with those tears.

Some people are afraid of what they might find if they try to analyze themselves too much, but you have to crawl into your wounds to discover where your fears are. Once the bleeding starts, the cleansing can begin.

Over and over again, I'm trying to express or communicate these big and small struggles to the world, and really to myself.

In the last couple of years I've been facing down a lot of the demons of the past and trying to find out, who I am, It's something I think I'll be doing for the rest of my life.