Jerome K. Jerome Quotes

It’s funny—when people call you “shy,” they usually smile. Like it’s cute, some funny little habit you’ll grow out of when you’re older, like the gaps in your grin when your baby teeth fall out. If they knew how it felt—really being shy, not just unsure at first—they wouldn’t smile. Not if they knew how the feeling knots up your stomach or makes your palms sweat or robs you of the ability to say anything that makes sense. It’s not cute at all.

They mustn't know my despair, I can't let them see the wounds which they have caused, I couldn't bear their sympathy and their kind-hearted jokes, it would only make me want to scream all the more. If I talk, everyone thinks I'm showing off; when I'm silent they think I'm ridiculous; rude if I answer, sly if I get a good idea, lazy if I'm tired, selfish if I eat a mouthful more than I should, stupid, cowardly, crafty, etc. etc.

Vengeance is the act of turning anger in on yourself. On the surface it may be directed at someone else, but it is a surefire recipe for arresting emotional recovery.

Everybody tends to think I'm crazy, which is the biggest problem in my life.

My childhood, I would say, was a bit sad. Society resents that.

I've never been married, but I tell people I'm divorced so they won't think something is wrong with me.

Why is it you feel like a dope if you laugh alone, but that's usually how you end up crying?

Anxiety has afflicted me all my life.

There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.

I was a quiet teenager, introverted, full of angst.

The root of the problem I have is anxiety, and it's all derived from something - I'm just going to say it, some kind of sadness. It manifests in so many different ways and it affects people differently.

The main thing I don't like about myself is an absurd level of self-consciousness that makes any sort of social encounter an ordeal for me.

I have tremendous social anxiety.

I'd go into the pub and start crying even before I'd had my first drink.

I don't know how to be hurt.

I know a lot of people who are depressed, and they walk around, and they're smiling every day, but no one's asking them how they're really doing.

I feared vulnerability more than my actual emotional pain itself!

All by yourself, unable to express the pain of your distress with your deeper inside. You alienate yourself and everybody else.

Those of us with ravaged faces, lacking in the social graces, desperately remained at home, inventing lovers on the phone.

He's a shy man. Life has taught him not to show off what is most precious to him.

Raw hatred took its time making an outpost of its rage and prepared for me a savage crown with rusty, bloodstained spikes. It wasn't pride that made me keep my heart at a distance from such terror, nor did I waste on revenge or the pursuit of power the forces that came from my selfish griefs or my accumulated joys. It was something else-my helplessness.

Hatred, revenge, bitterness - these are negative emotions. The person harbouring those emotions suffers more.

The worst pain in the world is shame.

I loved being in my own head so much, it was getting harder and harder being with other people.

Shy” was the sympathetic interpretation she got from older people. “Snotty” was the interpretation she got from people her own age.