Quotes About Catharsis

I write about what is getting to me at the time, about the things you need to talk about, but which would sound silly if you sat down and told them to your friend. I only write for myself, to get my emotions out. It's self-therapeutic.

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

I started writing to save my life.

The act of writing is a kind of catharsis, a liberation, but I never really concerned myself with that. I write because it interests me.

I was surprised to learn from my research, however, that the well-known notion of anger catharsis is poppycock. There's no evidence for the belief that "letting off steam" is healthy or constructive. In fact, studies show that aggressively expressing anger doesn't relieve anger but amplifies it. On the other hand, not expressing anger often allows it to disappear without leaving ugly traces.

Do not imagine you can exorcise what oppresses you in life by giving vent to it in art.

But I have gone back to work; I try to intoxicate myself with ink, the way others intoxicate themselves with brandy, so as to forget the public disasters and my private sorrows.

The first thing you do when you get off tour is let off some steam and, you know, have some type of big breakdown.

A novel is like a gland pill - it nips off the cream of my hysterics and gets them running on track in a book where they belong instead of rioting all over my person.

Write to exhaustion so that you can no longer manage to avoid writing the truth.

So long as you write it away regularly nothing can really hurt you.

I think people would be happier if they admitted things more often. In a sense we are all prisoners of some memory, or fear, or disappointment—we are all defined by something we can't change.

We may only forget and truly let go, if we expunge some memories.

There's nothing I love more than a good cry.

I need - and occasionally love - to write for the same reasons I always did: hard as writing is, it's generally easier than life.

I love to write honest songs that name real people, then get up onstage and live out those emotions in front of 15,000 people.

If love is like a possession, maybe my letters are like my exorcisms.

The peripety was according to the best rules of tragic art.

There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside of you.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside of you.

There is no greater agony that bearing an untold story inside you.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. - Maya Angelou

How did one even fraternize with people who could not entertain vivid scenarios of self-mutilation? How was the sexual act even possible if one's partner could not entertain being crushed under a truck, just as a cathartic exercise? What important piece of her brain was missing that deprived her of such, well, deeply necessary acts of physical editing ?