“Life is too hard, too much to handle. Nobody told me there’d be days like these. How could nobody tell me there’d be days like these? How could they let me grow up like that—happy and pink and stupid?”

Source: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

Source: Twisted

Referring to himself in the third person, page 39. Cited also in " The lady behind those Keane-eyed kids https://books.google.com/books?id=2FMEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA56," LIFE 69, no. 21 (20 November 1970), p. 56; by Amy M. Spindler, " Style; An Eye for an Eye http://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/23/magazine/style-an-eye-for-an-eye.html," The New York Times (23 May 1999); and by Jesse Hamlin, " Artist Margaret Keane hasn't lost wide-eyed enthusiasm for work http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Artist-Margaret-Keane-hasn-t-lost-wide-eyed-5955625.php," SFGate (14 Decembet 2014).
1965, Cited by Jane Howard

On spending her adolescent years on a sailboat, The Los Angeles Times http://articles.latimes.com/1992-11-07/entertainment/ca-1268_1_band-daisy-chainsaw (1992)

As quoted in New York Times article "The Einstein Theory of Living; At 65 he leads the simplest of lives — and grapples with the most complex thoughts." http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F00713FA3A58157A93C0A81788D85F408485F9 (12 March 1944)
Variants:
Why is it that nobody understands me, yet everybody likes me?
As quoted in The Dark Side of Shakespeare : An Elizabethan Courtier, Diplomat, Spymaster, & Epic Hero, p. 126 https://books.google.com/books?id=-5SxGKrTRUEC&pg=PA126 (2003) by W. Ron Hess
Everyone likes me, yet nobody understands me.
As quoted in "The culture of Einstein" at MSNBC (18 March 2005) http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7406337/
1940s

Jan Schakowsky, to Chicago Magazine, 2009
Source: Chicago Straight, David, Bernstein, June 2009, Chicago magazine, Tribune Media Group, June 29, 2015 http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/June-2009/Chicago-Straight/,

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Source: The Stand