Ben Gibbard Quotes

You cannot escape what you have to deal with inside yourself. It will never bring good things. It will only bring madness.

I only write about stuff that’s happened to me.. stuff I can’t get past personally. Luckily, I'm quite self-destructive.

When the beginnings of self destruction enter the heart, it seems no bigger than a grain of sand.

There's a lot of effort expended once you begin to completely trash your life. Sometimes, writing feels like this to me.

Elaine is just in pain. I think Elaine has become very, very sad woman. She is someone who is in deep need of many hours of analysis and I like to think that I'm not that type of person.

Reality is never as bad as a nightmare, as the mental tortures we inflict on ourselves.

Every faculty and virtue I possess can be used as an instrument with which to worry myself.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always (Still the dead one lay moaning) I was much too far out all my life And not waving but drowning.

He did not go much further, but sat down on the cold floor and gave himself up to complete miserableness, for a long while. He thought of himself frying bacon and eggs in his own kitchen at home - for he could feel inside that it was high time for some meal or other; but that only made him miserabler.

I found a very diabolical way of making myself suffer - not in the same way [my mother ] was suffering but to prevent me from enjoying my own life.

There was a sentence in your letter that struck me, “I wish I were far away from everything, I am the cause of all, and bring only sorrow to everybody, I alone have brought all this misery on myself and others.” These words struck me because that same feeling, just the same, not more nor less, is also on my conscience.

I don't think you're human unless you go through some [self-destructi on].

Even now, as I write this, I can still feel that tightness. And I want you to feel it--the wind coming off the river, the waves, the silence, the wooded frontier. You're at the bow of a boat on the Rainy River. You're twenty-one years old, you're scared, and there's a hard squeezing pressure in your chest. What would you do? Would you jump? Would you feel pity for yourself? Would you think about your family and your childhood and your dreams and all you're leaving behind? Would it hurt? Would it feel like dying? Would you cry, as I did?

The mind is its own beautiful prisoner. Mind looked long at the sticky moon opening in dusk her new wings then decently hanged himself,one afternoon. The last thing he saw was you naked amid unnaked things.

My greatest affliction... is perhaps the major theme of my writings, the affliction of loneliness that follows me like a shadow, a very ponderous shadow too heavy to drag after me all of my days and nights.

It's a spooky thing to be left alone inside an angry innerverse.

When you’re hurting deeply, you go inward.

She wants to go home, but nobody's home. That's why she lies, broken inside. With no place to go, no place to go, to dry her eyes, broken inside.

Tally turned away. Five minutes was suddenly too long to stand here, eyes burning, unable to cry.

“Do you take pride in your hurt?” Samuel asked. “Does it make you seem large and tragic?” “I don't know.” “Well, think about it. Maybe you're playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience.”

Only self-hatred could lead him to ruin himself because his heart was "broken.

Shedding off one more layer of skin, Keeping one step ahead of the persecutor within.

I had my eyes closed in the dark, I sighed a million sighs, I told a million lies, to myself, to myself.

The private terror of the liberal spirit is invariably suicide, not murder.