John Steinbeck Quotes

I hit my head against the wall because I don't want to know all the terrible things that I know about. I don't want to feel all these wretched things, but they're in me already. If I don't get rid of them, I'm not ever going to feel anything else.

Anxiety is our agitated soul scrambling for control.

I can't sleep with you tonight, baby, my head's all messed up, you've no idea. It's somewhere else and it's full of voices and songs and bad things.

Remembering how my mother looked before she gave birth to my sister is frightening. But even more frightening is the feeling that I wanted them to catch me and beat me. Why did I want to be punished? Shadows out of the past clutch at my legs and drag me down. I open my mouth to scream, but I am voiceless. My hands are trembling, I feel cold, and there is a distant humming in my ears.

I've never had a person come to me and say, 'I want to take down this person.' They come and say, 'I need help. This thing is killing me. It's weighing me down. It's sitting in the pit of my stomach.'

Fear and Guilt are the only enemies of man.

Billy covered his head with his blanket. He always covered his head when his mother came to see him in the mental ward - always got much sicker until she went away. It wasn’t that she was ugly, or had bad breath or a bad personality. She was a perfectly nice, standard-issue, brown-haired, white woman with a high school education. She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone through so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn’t really like life at all.

I mean, to me, freaking out is different. More of a running away, not telling anyone what's wrong, slowly simmering until you burst kind of thing.

Look at it this way: There are many here among us for whom the life force is best represented by the livid twitching of one tortured nerve, or even a full-scale anxiety attack. I do not subscribe to this point of view 100 percent, but I understand it, have lived it. Thus the shriek, the caterwaul, the chainsaw gnarlgnashing, the yowl and the whizz that decapitates may be reheard by the adventurous or emotionally damaged as mellifluous bursts of unarguable affirmation.

Mattie sat at the table, obsessing, orbiting around herself. She was sick of her worried, hostile mind. It would have killed her long before, she felt, if it hadn't needed the transportation.

Can I confess something? I tell you this as an artist, I think you'll understand. Sometimes when I'm driving on the road at night I see two headlights coming toward me. Fast. I have this sudden impulse to turn the wheel quickly, head-on into the oncoming car. I can anticipate the explosion. The sound of shattering glass. The flames rising out of the flowing gasoline.

I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul. God keep me, if only for the sake of those dear to me!

I don't know what's wrong with me. It's like all I can do is keep writing this gibberish to keep from breaking apart.

I've got many, many demons that affect me on many, many levels. A few years ago, I was convinced of that - I thought I truly was possessed by the devil. I remember sitting through the Exorcist a dozen times, saying to myself, 'Yeah, I can relate to that. I really wish I knew why I've done some of the things I've done over the years. I don't know if I'm a medium for some outside source. Whatever it is, frankly, I hope it's not what I think it is - Satan.”

Anxiety prepares the organism badly for an ordeal which even under more favorable circumstances would not be an easy thing to bear.

Minds that are ill at ease are agitated by both hope and fear.

So being two different people in one day unnerved me to no end.

I think when people are repressing things, or burying things, that can manifest in all sorts of ways.

Every human being you see in the course of a day has a problem that's sucking up at least 70 percent of his or her radar.

I'm very emotional; I think I may go mad in several years' time.

Unrest of spirit is a mark of life.

Sometimes my past is extraordinarily heavy. That's when I scream and cry until I feel like I can breathe again.

You never know what they're going through. Maybe they failed a test. Maybe they're going through a state of depression. Kids go through so much.

Melancholy is the nurse of frenzy.

i swore i could feel my lies slithering inside me like snakes, wrapping themselves around me and constricting. i felt they were squeezing the air from my lungs, tightening around my heart.