By Category: Self

“Certain people, in their eagerness to construct a world which no external threat can penetrate, build exaggeratedly high defenses against the outside world, against new people, new places, different experiences, and leave their inner world stripped bare. It is there that Bitterness begins its irrevocable work.

The will was the main target of Bitterness (or Vitriol, as Dr. Igor preferred to call it). The people attacked by this malaise began to lose all desire, and within a few years, they became unable to leave their world, where they had spent enormous reserves of energy constructing high walls in order to make reality what they wanted it to be.

In order to avoid external attack, they had also deliberately limited internal growth, they continued going to work, watching television, having children, complaining about the traffic, but these things happened automatically, unaccompanied by any particular emotion, because, after all, everything was under control.

The great problem with poisoning by Bitterness was that the passions -- hatred, love, despair, enthusiasm, curiosity -- also ceased to manifest themselves. After a while, the embittered person felt no desire at all. They lacked the will either to live or to die, that was the problem.”

-Veronika Decides To Die, Paulo Coelho

~

“A woman watches her body uneasily, as though it were an unreliable ally in the battle for love.”

-The Favorite Game, Leonard Cohen

~

“Come on, oh my star is fading
And I see no chance of release
And I know I'm dead on the surface
But I am screaming underneath.”

-Amsterdam, Coldplay

Recommended by Shay.

~

“When you try your best, but you don't succeed
When you get what you want, but not what you need
When you feel so tired, but you can't sleep
Stuck in reverse.”

-Fix You, Coldplay

Recommended by Shay.

~

“Questions of science
Science and progress
Do not speak as loud as my heart.”

-The Scientist, Coldplay

~

“It had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know... and the whisper proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.”

-Heart Of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

~

“My faith in the firmness of time slips away gradually. I begin to believe that chronological time is an illusion and that some other principle organizes existence. My memories flash like clips of film from unrelated movies. I wonder, suddenly, if I am alive. I know I'm not dead, but am I alive? I look into the memories for reassurance, searching for signs of life.”

-Stop-Time, Frank Conroy

~

“I am covered in skin
No one gets to come in
Pull me out from inside
I am folded and unfolded and unfolding
I am colorblind.”

-Colorblind, Counting Crows

Recommended by Shay.

~

“All the blue light reflections color my mind when I sleep
And the lovesick rejections that accompany the company I keep
All the razor perceptions that cut just a little too deep
Hey, I can bleed as well as anyone but I need someone to help me sleep.”

-Mrs. Potter's Lullabye, Counting Crows

Recommended by Shay.

~

“She thought about her life and how lost she'd felt for most of it. She thought about the way that all truths she'd been taught to consider valuable invariably conflicted with the world as it was actually lived. How could a person be so utterly lost, yet remain living?”

-All Families Are Psychotic, Douglas Coupland

~

“At what point in our lives do we stop blurring? When do we become crisp individuals? What must we do in order to end these fuzzy identities - to clarify just who it is we really are?”

-Girlfriend in a Coma, Douglas Coupland

~

“Nobody believes the identities we've made for ourselves. I feel like everybody in the world is fake now - as though people had true cores once, but tucked them away and replaced them with something more attractive but also hollow.”

-Girlfriend In A Coma, Douglas Coupland

~

“And then...and then I felt truly old for the first time—old in the sense that I was beyond the point of ever doing something radical or bold to change the course of my life...I was sick of wanting money. I was sick of being without a goal.”

-Hey Nostradamus!, Douglas Coupland

~

“to be nobody - but - myself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make me everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting”

-A Poet's Advice, ee cummings

~

“my mind is
a big hunk of irrevocable nothing which touch and
taste and smell and hearing and sight keep hitting and
chipping with sharp fatal tools
in an agony of sensual chisels i perform squirms of
chrome and execute strides of cobalt
nevertheless i
feel that i cleverly am being altered that i slightly am
becoming something a little different, in fact
myself
Hereupon helpless i utter lilac shrieks and scarlet
bellowings.”

-my mind is..., ee cummings

~

“When I was younger all my lovers had been clenched, possessive people. My husband Denny had danced six hours a day, and still despised himself for dilettantism. My lover Helene had had screaming opinions on every subject from women's rights to washing spinach. I myself had had trouble deciding whether or not to wear a hat. In my twenties I'd suspected that if you peeled away my looks and habits and half-dozen strong ideas you'd have found an empty spot where the self ought to be. It had seemed like my worst secret.”

-A Home at the End of the World, Michael Cunningham

~

“I'll try to make this perfectly clear
I'm so transparent I disappear.”

-Sink to the Beat, Cursive

~

“It's not like boyscout badges
nor are they medals of honor
my skin's my mother earth -
I'm just trying to exert some control upon her.

I don't think I'll make it to the end
of when this tug of war is over.
The give and take of slice and fake
a smile - my cheeks are sore and I'm not sober.

(all of these increasing scars
have become my prison bars)”

-The Abyss, Dan

~

“'You'll be sick or feeling troubled or deeply in love or quietly uncertain or even content for the first time in your life. It won't matter. Out of the blue, beyond any cause you can trace, you'll suddenly realize things are not how you perceived them to be at all. For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You'll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you'll realize it's always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won't understand why or how. You'll have forgotten what granted you this awareness in the first place.

'Old shelters—television, magazines, movies—won't protect you anymore. You might try scribbling in a journal, on a napkin, maybe even in the margins of this book. That's when you'll discover you no longer trust the very walls you always took for granted. Even the hallways you've walked a hundred times will feel longer, much longer, and the shadows, any shadow at all, will suddenly seem deeper, much, much, deeper.

'You might try then, as I did, to find a sky so full of stars it will blind you again. Only no sky can blind you now. Even with all that iridescent magic up there, your eye will no longer linger on the light, it will no longer trace constellations. You'll care only about the darkness and you'll watch it for hours, for days, maybe even for years, trying in vain to believe you're some kind of indispensable, universe-appointed sentinel, as if just by looking you could actually keep it all at bay. It will get so bad you'll be afraid to look away, you'll be afraid to sleep.

'Then no matter where you are, in a crowded restaurant or on some desolate street or even in the comforts of your own home, you'll watch yourself dismantle every assurance you ever lived by. You'll stand aside as a great complexity intrudes, tearing apart, piece by piece, all of your carefully conceived denials, whether deliberate or unconscious. And then for better or worse you'll turn, unable to resist, though try to resist you still will, fighting with everything you've got not to face the thing you most dread, what is now, what will be, what has always come before, the creature you truly are, the creature we all are, buried in the nameless black of a name.

'And then the nightmares will begin.'”

-House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski

~

“"I still get nightmares. In fact I get them so often I should be used to them by now. I'm not. No one ever really gets used to nightmares. For a while there I tried every pill imaginable. Anything to curb the fear. Excedrin PMs, Melatonin, L-tryptophan, Valium, Vicodin, quite a few members of the barbital family. A pretty extensive list, frequently mixed often matched, with shots of bourbon, a few lung rasping bong hits, sometimes even the vaporous confidence-trip of cocaine. None of it helped. I think it's pretty safe to assume there's no lab sophisticated enough yet to synthesize the kind of chemicals I need.”

-House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski

~

“Self-revelation is a cruel process. The real picture, the real 'you' never emerges. Looking for it is as bewildering as trying to know how you really look. Ten different mirrors show you ten different faces.”

-The Long Silence, Shashi Deshpande

~

“Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape. ”

-Great Expectations, Charles Dickens

~

“It struck me -- every Day --
The Lightning was as new
As if the Cloud that instant slit
And let the Fire through --

It burned Me -- in the Night --
It Blistered to My Dream --
It sickened fresh upon my sight --
With every Morn that came --

I though that Storm -- was brief --
The Maddest -- quickest by --
But Nature lost the Date of This --
And left it in the Sky -- ”

-It struck me -- every Day --, Emily Dickinson

Recommended by Shay.

~

“The first Day's Night had come --
And grateful that a thing
So terrible -- had been endured --
I told my Soul to sing --

She said her Strings were snapt --
Her Bow -- to Atoms blown --
And so to mend her -- gave me work
Until another Morn --

And then -- a Day as huge
As Yesterdays in pairs,
Unrolled its horror in my face --
Until it blocked my eyes --

My Brain -- begun to laugh --
I mumbled -- like a fool --
And tho' 'tis Years ago -- that Day --
My Brain keeps giggling -- still.

And Something's odd -- within --
That person that I was --
And this One -- do not feel the same --
Could it be Madness -- this?”

-The first Day's Night had come, Emily Dickinson

~

“My tea's gone cold, I'm wondering why I got out of bed at all
The morning rain clouds up my window and I can't see at all
And even if I could it'd all be grey.”

-Thank You, Dido

Recommended by Shay.

Navigation

Back to 'Quotes'
Back to 'Do You SI?'