Jack Gantos Quotes

Of course there are times when I think, 'I'd be better out of this.'

I think one of the scariest things about depression is that it exists along with the happiness and the joy, and it kind of plays with it and sucks the color from it.

I want that. I want that awful intense and serious unhappiness, cos then I might feel better, and then I might be happy.

Oh, darling, I've been so miserable.

When I was younger, I did self-mutilate. I'd be upset, so I'd do it, & it would calm me down. It's a horrible way to feel better. But there are two parts of your brain - one that really wants to destroy the other. & sometimes the idea of self-destruction is very romantic. I got over that.

…I hate myself for not being able to go downstairs naturally and seek comfort in numbers. I hate myself for having to sit here and be torn between I know not what within me.

How I hated the dark part of me that continually foretold of failure or futility.

And the pleasures and rewards of the intellect are inseparable from angst, uncertainty, conflict and even despair.

Day after day I look in the mirror and I still see something

You make me miserable. You really do, I want you to know that. Much as I love you, much as I need you, much as I can't exist without you, you make me miserable.

She was trying to get rid of a religious hangover.

My whole life has been merely a succession of miserable and unsuccessful denials of feelings or reason.

I know very well that I have no reason to feel aggrieved - I am fully aware of how lucky I am, but knowing it and still being down makes me hate myself all the more.

Why are you leaving me? He wrote, I do not know how to live. I do not know either but I am trying. I do not know how to try. There were some things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So i buried them and let them hurt me

What I really hated, of course, was my mind. There must have been an off switch somewhere, but I was damned if I could find it.

Strong mental agitation and disturbance was no novelty to him, even before his late sufferings. It never is, to obstinate and sullen natures; for they struggle hard to be such.

I'd rather be mad than feel pleasure.

It was not as easy to commit suicide as to contemplate it.

...you are battered and bruised in the collisions between reminiscence and reality.

I don't hate myself, as a general rule. I'd say the best way to describe it is that I have moments of self-loathing at fairly regular intervals.

Neurosis is an inner cleavage-the state of being at war with oneself.

I am a fool with a heart but no brains, and you are a fool with brains but no heart; and we’re both unhappy, and we both suffer.

... the first step of the terrible journey toward feeling somebody should act, that ends in utter confusion and hopelessness, east of the sun and west of the moon.

We both have war inside us. Sometimes it keeps us alive. Sometimes it threatens to destroy us.

We burn so hard, but we shed so little light; it makes us crazy and sad.