Jeff Mangum Quotes

Every man is crucified upon the cross of himself.

I have fought and kicked and fasted and prayed and cursed and cried myself to the point of existing.

I am a strange compound of weakness and resolution! However, if I must suffer, I will endeavour to suffer in silence. There is certainly a great defect in my mind my wayward heart creates its own misery Why I am made thus I cannot tell; and, till I can form some idea of the whole of my existence, I must be content to weep and dance like a child long for a toy, and be tired of it as soon as I get it.

It is clear to me that one of the biggest obstacles we face as human beings is the pain we put ourselves through when we resist and wrestle with our emotions.

My neediness is not a hole to be filled but something beneath the skin scratching to get out.

I am always with myself, and it is I who am my tormentor.

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small Durance deal with that steep or deep.

The ordinary man puts up a struggle against all that is not himself, whereas it is against himself, in a limited but all-essential field, that the artist has to battle.

As Lucretius says: 'Thus ever from himself doth each man flee.' But what does he gain if he does not escape from himself? He ever follows himself and weighs upon himself as his own most burdensome companion. And so we ought to understand that what we struggle with is the fault, not of the places, but of ourselves

Somewhere deep down there's a decent man in me, he just can't be found.

I have written only what I have thought through, felt through and suffered through.

The anguish of the neurotic individual is the same as that of the saint. The neurotic, the saint are engaged in the same battle. Their blood flows from similar wounds. But the first one gasps and the other one gives.

My bones are tired from all the tragedy in me.

It's something that I had been pushing down my whole life. The search for meaning, I guess, the whispering of the soul.

Identity has been such an explosive territory for me... so hard, so painful at times.

You talk about crying! The spring of 1988, I spent a fair length of time trying to come to grips with who I was and the habits I had and what they did to people that I truly loved. I really spent a period of time where, I suspect, I cried three or four times a week.

It feels weird to say there's more to me than that, like I'm being overdramatic, and a tear rolls down my cheek. But, no - I do like I feel like there's more to me than just baseball.

You can't escape from yourself, can you?

How is it possible to exist with so much pain?

She was struggling against a current that brought her inside herself.

I'm fighting against my will to control. I think that is what I am doing. I would like to accept things in life, in all matters of life I would like to accept, but it's so difficult. I think we all have this struggle.

The truth was that I could not manage my soul, and I was becoming aware of old age because of my weakness in the face of love.

You have left me so long to struggle against death, alone, that I feel and see only death! I feel like death!

Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.