Janet Malcolm Quotes

The times in my life when I've been my thinnest, I've been a walking psycho wreck. Forget the fact that I was basically starving myself; skinny was usually due to some kind of loss. Death. Rejection. Divorce.

The death of an illusion tends to disconcert.

I only have two kinds of dreams: the bad and the terrible. Bad dreams I can cope with. They're just nightmares, and the end eventually. I wake up. The terrible dreams are the good dreams. In my terrible dreams, everything is fine. I am still with the company. I still look like me. None of the last five years ever happened. Sometimes I'm married. Once I even had kids. I even knew their names. Everything's wonderful and normal and fine. And then I wake up, and I'm still me. And I'm still here. And that is truly terrible.

so your father told you once that you were his princess you won't see the castle you cannot find your prince and now you've grown a lot and your dress don't fit right your daddy's not a hero he stole your chariot so here you are in pieces trying to prove to us it's real the softness of your smile and the lies you want to feel the scales beneath your skin are showing off today there's evil in your heart and it wants out to play there's evil in your heart and it wants out to play there's evil in your heart and I have made a home here for me you'll burn it down with your fantasy

It's total bullshit," he said. "The whole thing. Eighty percent survival rate and he's in the twenty percent? Bullshit. He was such a bright kid. It's bullshit. I hate it. But it was sure a privilege to love him, huh?

How many young hearts have revealed the fact that what they had been trained to imagine, the highest earthly felicity, was but the beginning of care, disappointment, and sorrow, and often led to the extremity of mental and physical suffering.

They promised me that this would be my home. That girls like you would always be my sisters. But they weren't my sisters, were they?" Catherine asked, but then the lunacy broke, a quick and fleeting crack, and through it I saw anger and bitterness and rage.

My stomach gets that hollowed-out feeling. It's amazing how words can do that, just shred your insides apart.

Down the hall came the wife. She was glorious, burning. She didn't know yet that her husband was dead. We knew. That's what gave her such power over us. The doctor took her into a room with a desk at the end of the hall, and from under the closed door a slab of brilliance radiated as if, by some stupendous process, diamonds were being incinerated in there. What a pair of lungs! She shrieked as I imagined an eagle would shriek. It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it! I've gone looking for that feeling everywhere.

I’ll never speak to God again.

I am Joe's Enraged, Inflamed, sense of rejection.

I would have thought this would make me feel better.. getting to be the one to leave and not the one left behind. But it didn't. Not at all.

And an inky-colored despair of rejection enveloped me like the black tortilla of depression around a pain burrito.

All these poses of classical torture ruined my mind like a snake in the orchard. I did go from wanting to be someone, now I'm drunk and wearing flip-flops on Fifth Avenue.

Suicide is the worst form of murder, because it leaves no opportunity for repentance.

Fear is the destructive energy in man. It withers the mind, it distorts thought, it leads to all kinds of extraordinarily clever and subtle theories, absurd superstitions, dogmas, and beliefs.

We have wandered into a state of prolonged neurosis because of the absence of a direct pipeline to the unconscious and we have then fallen victim to priestcraft of every conceivable sort.

That was when Leonard realized something crucial about depression. The smarter you were, the worse it was. The sharper your brain, the more it cut you up.

And as the bullet ripped through his flesh, Ralston was consumed by a single thought: I never told her that I loved her.

In the end, he was nobody to Adam, he was nobody to Ronan. Adam spit his words back at him and Ronan squandered however many second chances he gave him. Gansey was just a guy with a lot of stuff and a hole inside him that chewed away more of his heart every year.

There was something dead in my heart. I tried to figure out what it was by the strength of the smell. I knew that it was not a lion or a sheep or a dog. Using logical deduction, I came to the conclusion that it was a mouse. I had a dead mouse in my heart.

You'll catch your death of cold. Clouseau: Yes, yes I probably will but . . . its all part of life's rich pageantry, you kneau.

I repeat his words in my head. What's going on? What's going on? Oh, well, since you asked, I got a bunch of tapes in the mail today from a girl who killed herself. Apparently, I had something to do with it. I'm not sure what that is, so I was wondering if I could borrow your Walkman to find out. 'Not much,' I say.

Nothing makes sense, why should I?

If I die, I die friendless and abandoned. What choice did that leave him, but to live?