Self-Mutilation Quotes

The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.

I slept in van Gogh's bed. I worked in the room where he painted. I saw the place where he was cared for when he cut off his ear. I lived in the jail cell where he stayed. And I looked out the window. You remember that picture of the cornfields through the bars? That was what I saw.

I don't have any plugs or tucks but people do what they want. I look at it as mutilation.

For those who need a name, there's a gift basket of medical terms. All I know is cutting made me feel safe. It was proof. Thoughts and words, captured where I could see them and track them. The truth, stinging, on my skin, in a freakish shorthand. Tell me you're going to the doctor, and I'll want to cut worrisome on my arm. Say you've fallen in love and I buzz the outlines of tragic over my breast. I hadn't necessarily wanted to be cured.

I think we have become obsessed with beauty and personally I'm really saddened by the way women mutilate their faces today in search of that.

Van Gogh cut off his ear for his art. I'm not tryin' to cut off my ear. I'm not humiliating myself.

One could only damage oneself through the harm one did to others. One could never get directly at oneself.

I have the words 'love' and 'life' on my knuckles, and I would half like those removed.

Sometimes I even cut myself to see how much it bleeds It's like adrenaline, the pain is such a sudden rush for me.

And I am still alive-what though, my damnation is eternal. A man who deliberately mutilates himself is truly damned, is he not? I believe that I am in hell, therefore I am.

A man who would mutilate himself is well damned, isn't he?

Kids piercing themselves, piercing their tongues, what kind of masochism is that? Is it to show you can just take it?

The whole faculties of man must be exerted in order to call forth noble energies; and he who is not earnestly sincere lives in but half his being, self-mutilated, self-paralyzed.

Some people go shopping - I cut myself.

That was when I cut my arms with a razor blade as a means of creative expression. I only did it lightly, just grazing the skin, to see the way the blood would bleed out, to make myself look tougher. Not like some of those kids who keep going deeper and deeper, wondering what they look like down to the bone, because it's a world that's so close and yet so far and so dangerous and so much their own. The only world that is their own.

Delia's arms were inscribed with a grid of self- inflicted wounds, an intricate text of self-loathing

In the desert I saw a creature, naked, bestial, Who, squatting upon the ground, Held his heart in his hands, And ate of it. I said, ‘Is it good, friend?’ ‘It is bitter — bitter,’ he answered, ‘But I like it Because it is bitter, And because it is my heart.

I notice faint scars on her wrists and forearms, thin lines too symmetrical to be accidents.

The man who looks for security, even in the mind, is like a man who would chop off his limbs in order to have artificial ones which will give him no pain or trouble.

I'm not a very patient person. I'll take those quick risks to see if it's going to work versus taking the long and tortuous road of trying to guarantee myself that something will work. That's like self-mutilation to me.

Lust and self-mutilation are closely related impulses. There are also self-mutilators among knowers: they do not want to be creators under any circumstances.

Don't cut your nose off yourself.

It is not a garment I cast off this day, but a skin that I tear with my own hands.