suppressing emotion Quotes

“I soon found out this much:—terror can be endured so long as a man simply ducks;—but it kills, if a man thinks about it.”

“After all, guilt and remorse were worthless emotions, weren’t they? Well, I knew they weren’t; but I had no time for them. Forward motion; that was the key. Run as fast as you can and don’t look back.”

“The jealousy… it has to be eating at you. You can’t be as sure of yourself as you seem. Unless you have no emotions at all.”

“Talking, talking, spinning a spell, pale skin of words that closes me in like a coffin.”

“Okonkwo never showed any emotion openly, unless it be the emotion of anger. To show affection was a sign of weakness; the only thing worth demonstrating was strength.”

“He had been wont to despise emotions: girls were weak, emotions–tears– were weakness. But this morning he was thinking that being a great brain in a tower, nothing but brain, wouldn’t be much fun.”

“When negative feelings are suppressed positive feelings become suppressed as well, and love dies.”

“Feeling pain is still better than not feeling, isn’t it?”

“I also keep most of my pain, anger and feelings inside. I refuse to be vulnerable to anyone, especially my husband. The only people who see that more emotional or softer side are my children. That too because of my mother.”

“At most, I could allow myself only a few minutes to cry for him—to grieve our lives, and then I had to push the memories away, burying them deep inside of me once again so that I could function. So that I could go on.”

“It was hard to let go of that; to let go of the life I had before, but the truth was, it was harder for me to stay there inside the pain. I wasn’t strong enough to live there no matter how much I wanted to.”

“I’m just gonna go ahead and nip this thing in the bud. Cuz you know, they say pregnancy often leads to, you know... an infant.”

“’I’m a businessman,’ he’d told her. ‘No more, no less.’”

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

“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.”

“But while the adversaries forgot the war to remember things of the past, Úrsula had the gloomy feeling that her son was an intruder. […] He was preserved against imminent old age by a vitality that had something to do with the coldness of his insides. He was taller than when he had left, paler and bonier, and he showed the first symptoms of resistance to nostalgia.”

“You knew all along that your sanctioned world was only half the world and you tried to suppress the second half the way the priests and teachers do. You won’t succeed. No one succeeds in this once he has begun to think.”