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Self-Destruction
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“Nora robbed herself for everyone; incapable of giving herself warning, she was continually turning about to find herself diminished. Wandering people the world over found her profitable in that she could be sold for a price forever, for she carried her betrayal money in her own pocket.”
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“I've often found myself preferring second-rate people to supposedly superior people, simply and solely because of their uncontrollable tendency to bang themselves against the sides of life's vast lampshade like fireflies or moths.”
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“... it's a sad day when you find out that it's not accident or time or fortune but just yourself that kept things from you.”
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“Give him enough rope and he will hang himself.”
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“The mind is its own enemy, that fights itself with the innumerable pliant and ineluctable arms of the octopus.”
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“Neurotics, who cause less distress to themselves and their neighbours than those in the other category, are at war with their own natures. Their right hands are in conflict with their left. Psychotics, and it is those who commit purposeless crimes and prefer death to life, are at war with their environment. Right and left hands strike against the womb that carries them.”
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“... destruction is ultimately self-destruction.”
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“Self-destructive patterns cause as much suffering as outer catastrophes.”
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“I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain, the same way carvings on stone are worn down by water.”
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“very often / you are / the one / who creates the traps / you fall into.”
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“Every man is his own worst enemy”
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“Who would play the foolish part / Of fueling a fire / Above whose flame he sees his heart / Dangling from a wire.”
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“When Harold, and many others like him, obeyed an irresistible urge to move on to new and wilder places, they carried with them the seeds of the very things from which they were trying to escape. ... So the shunners became the spreaders, and people like Harold were hard at work destroying their own salvation.”
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“I saw this thing turn, like a flower, once picked, turning petals into bright knives in your hand. And it was so much desired, so lovely, that your fingers will not loosen, and you have only disbelief that this, of all you have ever known, should have the possibility of pain. All the time you are seeing the blood trickling a red answer slowly down your hand.”
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“All human beings hold the tools of their own destruction.”
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“I've always burned my bridges before me.”