Anger is easier than shame.
Related Quotes
Yes, I understood, God’s truth, that on the battlefield they wanted only fleeting madness. Madmen of rage, madmen of pain, furious madmen, but temporary ones. No continuous madmen. As soon as the fighting ends, we’re to file away our rage, our pain, and our fury. Pain is tolerated, we can bring our pain home on the condition that we keep it to ourselves. But rage and fury cannot be brought back to the trench. Before returning home, we must denude ourselves of rage and fury, we must strip ourselves of it, and if we don’t we are no longer playing the game of war. Madness, after the captain blows the whistle to retreat, is taboo.
Relationships are hard, all of them, but you have to make your own mistakes and deal with your own dramas. The only way to learn is through experience. We don’t put enough emphasis on the value of failure and how overcoming it is character-building, and how pain can be a useful tool because, without it, you’ll never know happiness. Anger is also a powerful tool that gives you the energy to move on, but you have to let it fade otherwise it will consume and poison your thinking. That’s what ‘Til Morning’, one of my favourite songs on the album, is about.
When I went back to my hotel, I would think about Jeanne and her daughter Andrea. They were watching Ryan die, slowly and painfully. They had prayed for a miracle, but the miracle never came. They had every right to feel angry and resentful. But they didn’t feel that way. They were stoic, they were forgiving, they were patient and kind. Even in the most awful circumstances I loved being around them, but they made me feel ashamed of myself, in a way I’d never felt before. I spent half my life feeling angry and resentful about things that didn’t matter. I was the kind of person who got on the phone and shouted at people because the weather outside my Park Lane hotel didn’t suit me. Whatever else had been wrong with my childhood, I hadn’t been brought up to behave that way. How the fuck had I become like this? I’d always managed somehow to justify my behaviour to myself, or to make a joke of it, but now I couldn’t: real life had barged into my celebrity bubble.
But the biggest lies are often the ones we tell ourselves. I bit my tongue because I did not want to ask questions. I did not ask questions because I did not want to know the answers.
When I was a boy, I wasn’t often seen. I was looked after, cared for. I was held and comforted, especially after some painful experience. But I wasn’t often seen. I was a good boy when inside I wanted to rage. I tried hard, all the time, when inside I wanted not to care. I was compliant, and therefore complicit, in not being fully appreciated.