Self Injury Quotes

• I always hated when my scars started to fade, because as long as I could still see them, I knew why I was hurting.

  Jodi Picoult

  Hurt, Pain, Long

  Jodi Picoult (2009). “Handle with Care: A Novel”, p.373, Simon and Schuster

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• When I cut myself I feel so much better. All the little things that might have been annoying me suddenly seem so trivial, because I'm concentrating on the pain

  Richey Edwards

  Depression, Pain, Cutting

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• I get fixated when I'm bleeding -- I can see why they went in for blood-letting in the medieval times because it makes you feel a bit better. When I cut myself, the drama of it calms me down.

  Russell Brand

  Drama, Cutting, Blood

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• I can't stop thinking about cutting myself up. Visual bruises can be covered with make-up, but down to the core, I'm all bruises.

  Majandra Delfino

  Cutting, Thinking, Bruises

  Song: Bruises

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• Why? You want to know why? Step into a tanning booth and fry yourself for two or three days. After your skin bubbles and peels off, roll in coarse salt, then pull on long underwear woven from spun glass and razor wire. Over that goes your regular clothes, as long as they are tight.

  Laurie Halse Anderson

  Glasses, Two, Clothes

  Laurie Halse Anderson (2009). “Wintergirls”, p.124, Penguin

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• I know what it's like to want to die. How it hurts to smile. How you try to fit in but you can't. You hurt yourself on the outside to try to kill the thing on the inside.

  Susanna Kaysen

  Hurt, Girl Interrupted, Trying

  "Girl, Interrupted". www.imdb.com. 1999.

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• We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

  Sad, Suicide, Veins

  Jeffrey Eugenides (1993). “The Virgin Suicides: A Novel”, p.243, Macmillan

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• Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence– whether much that is glorious– whether all that is profound– does not spring from disease of thought– from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Depression, Spring, Science

  Edgar Allan Poe (1927). “Tales by Edgar Allan Poe”, p.117, Dimitrios Spyridon Chytiris

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• I stopped. She was bleeding after all. Perfect lines crossed her wrists, not near any crucial veins, but enough to leave wet red tracks across her skin. She hadn;t hit her veins when she did this; death hadn't been her goal.

  Richelle Mead

  Track, Perfect, Goal

  Richelle Mead (2007). “Vampire Academy”, p.158, Penguin

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• She felt so much emotionally, she would say, that a physical outlet - physical pain - was the only way to make her internal pain go away. It was the only way she could control it.

  Richelle Mead

  Pain, Self Harm, Going Away

  Richelle Mead (2013). “Vampire Academy: The Complete Collection”, p.90, Penguin

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• When you're starving or wrapped up in a cycle of binge-ing-and-purging, or sexually obsessed with (someone), it is very hard to think about anything else, very hard to see the larger picture of options that is your life, very hard to consider what else you might need or want or fear were you not so intently focused on one crushing passion. I sat in my room every night, with rare exceptions, for three and a half years.

  Caroline Knapp

  Crush, Passion, Night

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• That was when I cut my arms with a razor blade as a means of creative expression. I only did it lightly, just grazing the skin, to see the way the blood would bleed out, to make myself look tougher. Not like some of those kids who keep going deeper and deeper, wondering what they look like down to the bone, because it's a world that's so close and yet so far and so dangerous and so much their own. The only world that is their own.

  Francesca Lia Block

  Mean, Kids, Cutting

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• It was that summer, too, that I began the cutting, and was almost as devoted to it as my newfound loveliness. I adored tending to myself, wiping a shallow red pool of my blood away with a damp washcloth to magically reveal, just above my naval: queasy. Applying alcohol with dabs of a cottonball, wispy shreds sticking to the bloody lines of: perky. I had a dirty streak my senior year, which I later rectified.

  Gillian Flynn

  Summer, Senior, Dirty

  Gillian Flynn (2006). “Sharp Objects: A Novel”, p.62, Broadway Books

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• these are the screams within these are the life streams bleeding from skin

  Patrick Jones

  Skins, Bleeding, Scream

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• I inscribe three lines, hush hush hush, into my skin. Ghosts trickle out.

  Laurie Halse Anderson

  Skins, Lines, Three

  Laurie Halse Anderson (2014). “Wintergirls”, p.60, Scholastic UK

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• I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.

  John Keats

  Sad, Depression, Water

  Letter to Benjamin Bailey, 25 May 1818, in H. E. Rollins (ed.) 'The Letters of John Keats' (1958) vol. 1, p. 287

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• A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough.

  Adrienne Rich

  Cutting, Flesh, Scar

  Adrienne Rich (2013). “The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977”, p.63, W. W. Norton & Company

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• You can close your eyes to reality but not to memories

  Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

  Depression, Memories, Eye

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• There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: We know her woof, her texture; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an angel's wings.

  John Keats

  Depression, Philosophy, Angel

  'Lamia' (1820) pt. 2, l. 229

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• Here's me opening my wrists before breakfast, Christmas day, and here's you asking if it hurt. Here's where I choose between mea culpa and Why the hell should I tell you?

  Michael Donaghy

  Hurt, Asking, Breakfast

  Michael Donaghy (2011). “Collected Poems”, p.104, Pan Macmillan

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• There were also the razor marks on her wrists and forearms, half a dozen per arm, not very deep, not very convincing really, just a lame, hapless attempt at hurting herself. There hadn't even been that much blood and nobody at the hospital had been at all surprised. These scars, for some reason, he didn't mind. Maybe they even appealed to him. They showed that she was weak and in need of him.

  Geoff Nicholson

  Hurt, Blood, Mind

  Geoff Nicholson (1998). “Bleeding London”, p.62, The Overlook Press

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• No one need punish me for any wrongs, real or imagined. I am very good at doing it all by myself. I have the scars to prove it.

  Katharine O'Shea

  Depression, Real, Needs

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• I've never hit anybody in my life. I never would, and the only way I could make a point was by hurting myself...It's something I've done since I was a teenager.

  Richey Edwards

  Depression, Hurt, Teenager

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• I find cutting myself attractive ... I find it sexual.

  Richey Edwards

  Cutting, Attractive, Cutting Myself

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• For exactly the same reason, it is sometimes satisfying to cut yourself and bleed. On those gray [sic] days where eight in the morning looks no different from noon and nothing has happened and nothing is going to happen and you are washing a glass in the sink and it breaks - accidentally - and punctures your skin. And then there is this shocking red, the brightest thing in the day, so vibrant it buzzes, this blood of yours. That is okay sometimes because at least you know you're alive.

  Augusten Burroughs

  Suicide, Morning, Self Harm

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