avoidance Quotes

“When I was supposed to be awake, I was asleep. When I was supposed to sleep, I was silent. When a pleasure offered itself to me, I avoided it.”

“Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology.”

“I did everything I could to avoid being alone or having too much time to think.”

“Junior, Talloi, and I listened to rap music, trying to memorize the lyrics so that we could avoid thinking about the situation at hand.”

“Take avoidance to an extreme, and you have denial: a deep burial of the trauma.”

“Avoidance occurs on two levels. On the first level, there is an emotional avoidance of all distressing memories, thoughts, and feelings about the trauma. On the second, there is a behavioral avoidance of the people, places, conversations, activities, objects, and situations that cause those distressing trauma-related memories, thoughts, or feelings.”

“The polestar that will guide you into a more loving future is already shining bright in the night sky of your soul. But to see it, you must accustom your eyes to the fertile darkness you have tried to avoid.”

“No human beings, regardless of who they might be, want to look directly at their own shortcomings.”

“Kids chase the love that eludes them.”

“The attempt to avoid legitimate suffering lies at the root of all emotional illness.”

“When we avoid the legitimate suffering that results from dealing with problems, we also avoid the growth that problems demand from us. It is for this reason that in chronic mental illness we stop growing, we become stuck. And without healing, the human spirit begins to shrivel.”

“Each memory was brought to life before me and within me. I could not avoid them. Neither could I rationalize, explain away. I could only re-experience with total cognizance, unprotected by pretense.”

“She’d felt ragingly alive in the dream, but now she’s as inert as the eggs cooling on a plate. Ther’s a mirror her in the bedroom, too, but she chooses not to look at it, just in case her hunch is true and she’s invisible.”

“It’s the little things that find us out, the little things we refuse to do in order to avoid doing the big things that can save us.”

“What she did not want was the embarrassment of someone trying to make friends with her. It was easier to stay out of it from the beginning, rather than face the disappointment which inevitably followed.”

“I’m invisible, see? One of the invisible people. Right now I’m sitting in a doorway watching the passers-by. They avoid looking at me. They’re afraid I want something they’ve got, and they’re right.”

“The main thesis of this book is that it does much more than that: the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man.”

“She was so changed in appearance that Mirrim, passing her table just before the evening meal, almost failed to recognize her. Menolly had been worrying that Mirrim was deliberately avoiding her because Menolly had Impressed nine fire lizards, but there was no restraint in Mirrim’s manner.”

“Avoidance is no solution. In an attempt to change a self-defeating pattern within a relationship, some people decide to avoid trouble by keeping their feelings to them selves. Staying angry and living with the pain seems to be a better choice than having another argument. The problem is, if you do not deal with hurt and disappointment quickly enough, those feelings harden into resentment, anger and hate. They fester inside and eventually turn into physical symptoms and/or emotional powder kegs. In the long run, it’s much less self-defeating to acknowledge the problem early on and deal with it effectively with compassion, respect, and empathy.”