Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen.
Quote from The Chancellor Who Agreed To Play Spy (May 8, 1973) (The New York Times) by John le Carré in Popular Culture - Quote published by Gabrielle 5 months ago ()
I’m down here all alone, but as happy as a king — at least, as happy as some kings — at any rate I should think I’m about as happy as King Charles the First when he was in prison.
Quote from letter to Menella Wilcox (July 20, 1886) (A Selection From The Letters Of Lewis Carroll To His Child-Friends) by Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture - Quote published by Gabrielle 5 months ago ()
I always believed I was different; as long as I can remember I have felt like an outcast, as if I didn’t really belong to my family, or to my surroundings, or to any group. I suppose that it is from that feeling of loneliness the questions arise which lead one to write, and that books are conceived in the search for answers.
[M]y Solitude is sublime. Then instead of what I have described, there is a Sublimity to welcome me home--The roaring of the wind is my wife and the Stars through the windowpane are my Children. The mighty abstract Idea I have of Beauty in all things stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness--an amiable wife and sweet Children I contemplate as a part of that Beauty. but I must have a thousand of those beautiful particles to fill up my heart. I feel more and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone but in a thousand worlds...
Quote from letter to George and Georgiana Keats (October 1818) (The Letters Of John Keats) by John Keats in Popular Culture - Quote published by Gabrielle 6 months ago ()
Through months of shame and humiliation I have come to hug my solitude. I no longer seek help from the outside world. I no longer answer the doorbell. I live by myself, in turmoil of my own fears. Trapped in my own phantasms, I wait for the flood to rise and drown me out.
Her gaze way cold, clear, and steady as usual, it was never levelled exactly on the object she regarded but in some disturbing way always a little past it, hardly perceptibly, but yet unquestionably past it, not from weakness, apparently nor from embarrassment, nor from duplicity, but from a persistent and dominating desire for isolation, which she herself perhaps only became conscious of in this way.
I feel so lonely. I feel worse — strange. And when I leave [...] I cry in the car. And I say to myself that the trouble with life is that people are strangers.
Anne…people are strangers.
I don’t know if I can go on spilling myself out to people — those strange strangers.
As I may have said, I am not at home in myself.
[...]
I seem to be a ship that is sailing out of my own life.
Quote from letter to Anne Clark (March 23, 1964) (Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters) (Linda Gray, Lois Ames) by Anne Sexton in Popular Culture - Quote published by Gabrielle 6 months ago ()
And then around teatime, from nowhere, I smashed all the dirty plates and mugs into the washing-up bowl.
Something swept through me, swept out of and over me, something unstoppable, like water surging from a broken tap and flooding across the kitchen floor.
I don’t quite understand why I felt that way, why I reacted like that.
I wanted to be saying it’s just something that happens.
But I was there, that day, slamming the kitchen door over and over again until the handle came loose.
Smacking my hand against the worktop, kicking the cupboard doors, throwing the plates into the sink.
Going fuckfuckfuck through my clenched teeth.
I wanted someone to see me, I wanted someone to come rushing in, to take hold of me and say hey hey what are you doing, hey come on, what’s wrong.
But there was no one there, and no one came.
My name is Gabrielle and I am twenty-eight years old. I began to self-injure at age fifteen -- so nearly thirteen years minus a two year period. This website is one about self-injury (self-harm), made to let self-injurers know that they are not alone and to help their friends and family learn more about self-injury and how it affects their loved one.
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