denial Quotes

Denial is a save now, pay later scheme.

If you tell someone ten times that you don’t want to talk to him, you are talking to them—nine more times than you wanted to.

“Accept the past as past, without denying it or discarding it.”

“Somewhere in her brain a wall formed, a wall that kept out further consideration about what was happening here.”

“Denial can be confusing because it resembles sleeping. We’re not really aware we’re doing it until we’re done doing it. Forcing ourselves—or anyone else—to face the truth usually doesn’t help. We won’t face the facts until we are ready. Neither, it seems, will anyone else. We may admit to the truth for a moment, but we won’t let ourselves know what we know until we feel safe, secure, and prepared enough to deal and cope with it.”

“They had never been there in the dark. But there was enough moon for them to find their way into the castle, and he could tell her about his day in Washington. And apologize. It had been so dumb of him not to ask if Leslie could go, too.”

“I was a little excited but mostly blorft. ‘Blorft’ is an adjective I just made up that means ‘Completely overwhelmed but proceeding as if everything is fine and reacting to the stress with the torpor of a possum.’ I have been blorft every day for the past seven years.”

“Honey, you’re a survivor. No shame in that. Your daddy hurt you something fierce. Life hurt you. Lies are one of the easiest places for survivors to run. They give you a sense of safety, a place where you have to depend only on yourself. But it’s a dark place, isn’t it?”

“He’d had a nightmare. Well, not a nightmare. The nightmare. The one he’d been having a lot lately. The one with the darkness and the wind and the screaming. The one with the hands slipping from his grasp, no matter how hard he tried to hold on.”

“Stories are the wildest things of all, the monster rumbled. Stories chase and bite and hunt.”

“The real monster […], the real nightmare monster, formed of cloud and ash and dark flames, but with real muscle, real strength, real red eyes that glared back at him and flashing teeth that would eat his mother alive.”

“The monster smiled. It was a ghastly sight. If I must force my way in, it said, I will do so happily.”

″ ‘Son,’ his father said, leaning forward. ‘Stories don’t always have happy endings.’ ”

“The blackness was wrapping itself around Conor’s eyes now, plugging his nose and overwhelming his mouth. He was gasping for breath and not getting it. It was suffocating him. It was killing him.”

“And then one day the invisible man decided, the monster said, its voice ringing in Conor’s ears, I will make them see me.”

″ ‘You know that is not true,’ the monster said. ‘You know that your truth, the one that you hide, Conor O’Malley, is the thing you are most afraid of.’ ”

“She told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three days, with the ministers calling on her, and the doctors, trying to persuade her to let them dispose of the body. ”

“Self-contempt, however vague, sharpens our eyes for the imperfections of others. We usually strive to reveal in others the blemishes we hide in ourselves.”

“There is absolutely no problem with the island.”

“‘No one ever thinks they’re awful, even people who really actually are. It’s some sort of survival mechanism.’ ‘I think this is happening because it was supposed to happen.’ Elizabeth speaks very softly. ‘I’d prefer not to think that I’m following a script,’ Miranda says.”

“I was talking to one of my donors a few days ago who was complaining about how memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t see them ever fading.”

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

“It was true, though. Janelle was the only girl to have two dates with Maxon besides me. Not that I was counting.”

“Stop treating your wound like it’s something you imagined. If you see the wound is real, then you can heal it.”

″‘He thinks great folly, child,’ said Aslan. ‘This world is bursting with life for these few days because the song with which I called it into life still hangs in the air and rumbles in the ground. It will not be so for long. But I cannot tell that to this old sinner, and I cannot comfort him either; he has made himself unable to hear my voice. If I spoke to him, he would hear only growlings and roarings. Oh Adam’s sons, how cleverly you defend yourselves against all that might do you good! But I will give him the only gift he is still able to receive.‘”

“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.”

“He succeeded in having Macondo raised to the status of a municipality and he was therefore its first mayor, and he created an atmosphere of confidence that made people think of the war as an absurd nightmare of the past.”

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

“What you don’t know, you don’t miss.”

“I couldn’t believe it: but what I mean by that is that I couldn’t find any room for it anywhere inside of me. I had kept it outside me for a long time. I hadn’t wanted to know.”

″‘Oh, it wasn’t him!’ Mrs. Grose with emphasis declared. ‘It was Quint’s own fancy. To play with him, I mean—to spoil him.’ She paused a moment; then she added: ‘Quint was much too free.’ This gave me, straight from my vision of his face—such a face!—a sudden sickness of disgust. ‘Too free with my boy?’ ‘Too free with everyone!‘”

“And Clarissa had cared for him more than she had ever cared for Richard. Sally was positive of that. ‘No, no, no!’ said Peter (Sally should not have said that—she went too far).”

“You do not live in America. No such place exists.”

“It’s natural for a person to deny he’s a failure as a human being.”

“What I needed was a way to undo this mess and get Trace back. Better yet, I needed someone to tell me none of this was happening. That it was all just some twisted nightmare I’d dreamed up from years of watching too many horror movies. And most of all, I needed Dominic to stop staring at me that way.”

″ But he kept this knowledge of his fear thrust firmly down in him; his courage to live depended upon how successfully his fear was hidden from his consciousness. ”

“Neither question nor answer was meant as anything more than a polite preamble to conversation. Both [Rahel] and [Comrade Pillai] knew that there are things that can be forgotten. And things that cannot – that sit on dusty shelves like stuffed birds with baleful, sideways-staring eyes.”

“Oh come on!” Chacko said. “You can’t dictate what she does with her own spit!” “Mind your own business,” Ammu snapped. “It brings back Memories,” Estha, in his wisdom, explained to Chacko.

“We’ll see what happens when we say yes while this rigor mortis world screams no.”

“When the drawbridge was lowered, a chill wind sighed across the moat. The touch of it made him shiver. It is the cold, nothing more, Theon told himself, a shiver, not a tremble. Even brave men shiver. ”

“Furthermore, I have met only a very few people—and most of these were not Americans—who had any real desire to be free. Freedom is hard to bear.”

“He had never met anyone like her before. He sought her jauntily but earnestly to send him away; he didn’t want to fall in love. He wasn’t coming to see her any more--already she had haunted too many of his ways.”

“Denial is the lid on our emotional pressure cooker: the longer we leave it on, the more pressure we build up. Sooner or later, that pressure is bound to pop the lid, and we have an emotional crisis.”

“Our perception of this Antigua—the perception we had of this place ruled by these bad-minded people—was not a political perception. The English were ill-mannered, not racists.”

″... every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.”

“Trying not to believe things when in your heart you are almost sure they are true, is as bad for the temper as anything I know.”

“Mr. Valentine would never do something like that! Katherine said he couldn’t even bring himself to shoot a wolf cub! You’re lying!”

“Denial is the ultimate comfort zone.”

“Better to accept than pretend that he never existed.”

“You’ll see some bad things, but if you didn’t see them, they’d still be happening.”

“A true vampire knows he is dead. He accepts his death. But you, you think you are still one of the living. It is that which makes you so dangerous. You cannot acknowledge that you are no longer alive.”

“Part of me still wants to hold on to this one last moment - the moment where you still get to believe this is a joke, an error, a big nothing; the moment before you know for sure that something has started that you can no longer stop.”

But then one always went about imagining that these things didn’t happen—except to other people. It was difficult to believe in them just at first, when they happened to yourself.

“If there has been any shooting done, it has been done by somebody else.”

“When you ran off the platform after the fairy dialogue one of your roses fell out of your hair. I saw Gil pick it up and put it in his breast pocket. There now. You’re so romantic that I’m sure you ought to be pleased at that.” “It’s nothing to me what that person does,” said Anne loftily. “I simply never waste a thought on him, Diana.”

“Yet some men bury their secrets thus,”

He remembered that he had often felt a slight pain in bed, perhaps caused by lying awkwardly, but that had always turned out to be pure imagination and he wondered how his imaginings would slowly resolve themselves today. He did not have the slightest doubt that the change in his voice was nothing more than the first sign of a serious cold, which was an occupational hazard for travelling salesmen.

“You’ve got to get rid of the idea that that’s Gregor. We’ve only harmed ourselves by believing it for so long. How can that be Gregor? If it were Gregor he would have seen long ago that it’s not possible for human beings to live with an animal like that and he would have gone of his own free will.”

How often during those eight years of happy life with his wife Alexey Alexandrovitch had looked at other men’s faithless wives and other deceived husbands and asked himself: “How can people descend to that? how is it they don’t put an end to such a hideous position?” But now, when the misfortune had come upon himself, he was so far from thinking of putting an end to the position that he would not recognize it at all, would not recognize it just because it was too awful, too unnatural.