Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

I used to suppress all my feelings, and it doesn't do anybody any good.

Holding a tear back makes them drain upward, higher and higher, until one day your head just explodes and you're left with a stub of a neck and nothing more.

As a kid, all I thought about was death. But you can't tell your parents that.

If you don't find some way to discuss what's going on inside you, it can come out in other ways that are self-destructive.

I started having anxiety attacks and panic attacks. I would cry myself to sleep every night and wish I could go back in time and get my life back and be a human again instead of a photo op.

I couldn't deal with a normal life.

I hit my head against the wall because I don't want to know all the terrible things that I know about. I don't want to feel all these wretched things, but they're in me already. If I don't get rid of them, I'm not ever going to feel anything else.

She's letting out her feelings. The scary thing is not being able to do that. When your feelings build up and harden and die inside, then you're in big trouble.

I just want to sleep. A coma would be nice. Or amnesia. Anything, just to get rid of this, these thoughts, whispers in my mind. Did he rape my head, too?

I am a cutter, you see. Also a snipper, a slicer, a carver, a jabber. I am a very special case. I have a purpose. My skin, you see, screams. It's covered with words - cook, cupcake, kitty, curls - as if a knife-wielding first-grader learned to write on my flesh. I sometimes, but only sometimes, laugh. Getting out of the bath and seeing, out of the corner of my eye, down the side of a leg: baby-doll. Pulling on a sweater, and in a flash of my wrist: harmful. Why these words?

All the same, my depression and self-hatred, my desire to mutilate myself with broken bottles, my numbness and crying fits, my inability to get out of bed for days and days, the feeling of the world moving in to crush me, went on and on. But I knew I wouldn't go mad, even if that release, that letting-go, was a freedom I desired. I was waiting for myself to heal.

Grief is not as heavy as guilt, but it takes more away from you.

Dr. Barney stared at me, his lips puckered. What was he so serious about? Who hasn’t thought about killing themselves, as a kid? How can you grow up in this world and not think about it?

There's no such thing as mental illness. We're all mentally ill and we're all haunted by something, and some people manage to find a way to ride it out so that they don't wind up needing extra help. So I think that "mental illness," as a term, is garbage. Everybody is in various states of needing to transcend something.

You might find it difficult to see anything but your own sadness, the way smoke can cover a landscape so that all anyone can see is black. You may find that if someone pours water all over you, you are damp and distracted, but not cured of your sadness, the way a fire department can douse a fire but never recover what has been burnt down.

I feel that if I kept it secret it might grow in my mind (as poisonous things grow in the dark) and take its place with the other terrible thoughts that gnaw me

Never had it occurred to me that the things that had happened to me...might be a kind of trauma.

...grief can derange even the strongest and most disciplined of minds.

For there is no folly so great as keeping one's sorrows hidden.

I was in a very dark place for a long time. It's just so hard to have normalcy.

How can you write if you can't cry?

Shame produces trauma. Trauma produces paralysis.

Once shame touches your being at any point, even the most distant nerve is implicated, whether you know it or not; any fleeting encounter or random thought will rake up the anguish and add to it.

We all know that being able to express deep emotion can literally save a person's life, and suppressing emotion can kill you both spiritually and physically.

I am a human being. When you are frustrated, you do cry. It's more than once that I cried.