Emily Dickinson Quotes

I am terrified by this dark thing That sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

If you allow your mind to carp at all and sundry, it will turn against itself: the majority of our sorrows are self-inflicted.

But fear doesn't need doors and windows. It works from the inside.

A lot of the time, I write in the third person, but I'm mostly describing my own ordeals. When those unsettled struggles prey on your mind, you become haunted. To get free, you must defeat your ghosts.

For me, what really excites me about my characters and what pushes their core is the kind of dark, sad side of life.

We all - if we are honest with ourselves, we all have these dark spaces within our souls that we don't always want to talk about or acknowledge.

Desire, despair, desire. So many monsters.

Fear is not a disease of the body; fear kills the soul.

The very air had screams smeared on it. He flinched from the noise in this silent room.

The experience of separateness arouses anxiety; it is, indeed, the source of all anxiety.

That was one of the saddest things about people--their most important thoughts and feelings often went unspoken and barely understood.

Do I believe in ghosts? I believe in the ghosts that haunt the human mind.

Our most merciless enemy is our past.

The disturbers of our happiness, in this world, are our desires, our griefs, and our fears.

I am gay on the outside, especially among my own folk (I count Poles my own); but inside something gnaws at me; some presentiment, anxiety, dreams - or sleeplessness - melancholy, indifference - desire for life, and the next instant, desire for death; some kind of sweet peace, some kind of numbness, absent-mindedness.

Closing my eyes doesn't help. Fire burns brighter in the darkness.

I am the perpetrator of my suffering - but only all of it.

A wicked conscience mouldeth goblins swift as frenzy thoughts.

A man's subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour.

You are digging for the answers until your fingers bleed, to satisfy the hunger, to satiate the need.... And as you pray in your darkness for wings to set you free, you are bound to your silent legacy.

We have all our private terrors, our particular shadows, our secret fears. We are afraid in a fear which we cannot face, which none understands, and our hearts are torn from us, our brains unskinned like the layers of an onion, ourselves the last.

A monster lies in wait in me,a stew of wounds and misery.But fiercer still in life and limb,the me that lies in wait in him

What I've learned about being angry with people is that it generally hurts you more than it hurts them.

The imagination is far better at inventing tortures than life because the imagination is a demon within us and it knows where to strike, where it hurts. It knows the vulnerable spot, and life does not, our friends and lovers do not, because seldom do they have the imagination equal to the task.