Bret Easton Ellis Quotes

I've been living with myself all of my life, so I know all of me. So when I watch me, all I see is me. It's boring.

I consider my selfbeing ... that taste of myself, of I and me above and in all things, which is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive than the smell of walnutleaf or camphor, and is incommunicable by any means to another man.

As from a star I saw, coldly and soberly, the separateness of everything. I felt the wall of my skin; I am I. That stone is a stone. My beautiful fusion with the things of this world was over.

However near and dear to you may be your wife, children, friends, they are not you; they are outside of you.

If you can understand the inner life, then you can wear the uniform, the tattoos, or whatnot and realize that the things that are different about us become superficial.

I always try to avoid anything that has to do with my life.

All of us are private to ourselves. Nobody ever really knows anybody else. Everybody in the world keeps something to themselves.

I don't find myself intriguing.

I don't think anyone really knows me.

To every man in the world there is one person of whom he knows little: whom he would never recognize if he met him walking down the street, whose motives are a mystery to him. That is himself.

The basis of the self is not thought but suffering, which is the most fundamental of all feelings. While it suffers, not even a cat can doubt its unique and uninterchangeable self. In intense suffering the world disappears and each of us is alone with his self. Suffering is the university of ego-centrism.

Once more I realize that solitude is my element, and the reason is that extreme awareness of other people (all naturally solitary people must feel this) precludes awareness of one's self, so after a while the self no longer knows that it exists.

It is a sad fate for a man to die too well known to everybody else, and still unknown to himself.

You can't really make people be any different than what they are.

One must be truly able to say I in order to know the mystery of the Thou in its whole truth.

at this point I meet Me face to face. I am Mary MacLane: of no importance to the wide bright world and dearly and damnably important to Me.

For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self.

The self cannot be found in books. You have to find it for yourself, within yourself.

If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things that others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.

Being just yourself means you're unselfconscious in that moment. Or maybe we're all self-conscious to an extent. You meet a pretty girl, you're different from when you meet a tough kid on the street. So perhaps we always are acting, in a sense. But you meet someone you feel you admire or you "know," and it'll be different for that reason. So far, it's an interesting ride, and I'm curious to see what I can find next.

Every one of us is the sum total of his own thoughts

Surely no mere mortal who has at all gone down into himself will ever pretend that his slightest thought or act solely originates in his own defined identity.

For every seeing soul, there are two absorbing facts - I, and the abyss.

It occurs to her that there is one thing about people you can never understand well enough: how entirely inside themselves they are.