Internal Turmoil Quotes

A man's greatest battles are the ones he fights within himself.

There is dissatisfaction in all of us. Some of us take out that dissatisfaction by attempting to ruin whatever you are attempting to do. This is a fact of life.

Of course I tensed up when he touched me. To be with him was to hurt him-inevitably. And that's what I'd felt as he reached for me: I'd felt as though I were committing an act of violence against him, because I was.

Hate hurts the hater more'n the hated.

And when Eleanor smiled, something broke inside of him. Something always did.

It was that summer, too, that I began the cutting, and was almost as devoted to it as my newfound loveliness. I adored tending to myself, wiping a shallow red pool of my blood away with a damp washcloth to magically reveal, just above my naval: queasy. Applying alcohol with dabs of a cottonball, wispy shreds sticking to the bloody lines of: perky. I had a dirty streak my senior year, which I later rectified.

I have had more trouble with myself than with any other man.

Historically, the 19th century is defined by annexations and internal turmoil. For instance, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 gave more than half of Mexican territory to the United States.

life's endless war against the self you cannot live without.

I am the source of my own suffering, because of the habits of my mind.

I think for a minute. Watching my wife fade into the distance, I put a hand on my heart. "Dead." I wave a hand toward my wife. "Dead." My eyes drift toward the sky and lose their focus. "Want it...to hurt. But...doesn't." Julie looks at me like she's waiting for more, and I wonder if I've expressed anything at all with my halting, mumbled soliloquy. Are my words ever actually audible, or do they just echo in my head while people stare at me, waiting? I want to change my punctuation. I long for exclamation marks, but I'm drowning in ellipses.

Self-destructive patterns cause as much suffering as outer catastrophes.

Instead of relief or gratitude, more guilt washes over me. Andy's certainly not faultless - no one ever is in a marriage

She was owner and captive, both, of a bitterly divided heart.

The trouble is I don't believe my unbelief.

When we weren't being transcendent we specialized in self-inflicted disaster.

You tell me you were happier with him, but you want me to stay.

I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?

I cling to depression, thinking it a form of truth.

I think maybe I know why,' she finally said. 'Why?' 'Maybe all the strings inside him broke,' she said.

Everybody’s at war with different things…I’m at war with my own heart sometimes.

Something invisible snapped inside her.

Maybe all the strings inside him broke.

The body shuts down when it has too much to bear; goes its own way quietly inside, waiting for a better time, leaving you numb and half alive.

If I was in a bad mood, then maybe I won't talk about it, but you're going to know about it somehow. If something was bothering me, maybe I would have acted a little bit like a child, meaning I go break something in a room.