Quotes About Repression

The whole point of not talking about it, of silencing the memory, is to make it go away. It won't.

but good girls dont do that, dont make a fuss, dont upset parents. and i was a good girl so i curled up on the floor and sobbed silently instead

Deliberately she shrouded the light in her eyes, but it shone against her will in the faintly perceptible smile.

All kinds of frankness and honesty are terrible crimes in the eyes of society.

Sorry, but they're burning the State archives." The furnaces burned for eight days, turning most of the Congo state records to ash and smoke in the sky over Brussels. "I will give them my Congo," Leopold told Stinglhamber, "but they have no right to know what I did there.

It was not by mere coincidence that sex so disturbed us for thousands of years: repressive religious dictates and social taboos grew out of aspects of our nature that cannot now just be wished away.

Repression, a degree of restraint, and a little dedication to self-editing belong to love just as surely as a capacity for explicit confession.

Poets speak truth when no one else can or will. That's why the hunger for poetry grows when the world grows dark. When repression grows, when people speak in whispers or not at all, they turn to poetry to find out what's going on.

I talk too much because I have been made so miserable by what you are keeping hushed.

In a repressive society, a writer can be deeply influential, but in a society that's filled with glut and repetition and endless consumption, the act of terror may be the only meaningful act.

Fear is unnatural. Lightning and thunder are unnatural. Pain, death, reality, these are all unnatural. We can't bear these things as they are. We know too much. So we resort to repression, compromise and disguise. This is how we survive the universe. This is the natural language of the species.

It is when we lose control that we repress the emotions, not when we are in control.

The big diffrence between a warrior and a victim is that the victim represses and the warrior refrains.

If there is one thing I've learned in my short life, it's this: Never repress anything.

As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.

I was raised in a truly typical Midwestern home with a lot of repression. My life, and the creation of Playboy, were a response to that repression.

Not for nothing did H. L. Mencken define Puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

I like repressed characters. That gives me a lot of freedom to make a lot of different choices through subtleties.

Each culture probably needs its own scapegoats as expressions of society's ills. Just as the hysterics of Freud's day exemplified the sexual repression of that era, the borderline, whose identity is split into many pieces, represents the fracturing of stable units in our society.2

Only by massive denial, repression of affect, and severe numbing of our human faculties and sensitivities could a person not feel a sense of remorse, apprehension, and dread.

But while they were aware of their knowledge and used it, we repress our knowledge immediately, because if it were conscious it would make life too difficult and, as we persuade ourselves, too "dangerous.

There is no point in lingering on the fallacies of the revolutionaries of unrepression; one could go on and on, but everything would come back to the same basic thing: the impossibility of living without repression.

Therefore in normal times we move about actually without ever believing in our own death, as if we fully believed in our own corporeal immortality. We are intent on mastering death… . A man will say, of course, that he knows he will die some day, but he does not really care. He is having a good time with living, and he does not think about death and does not care to bother about it, but this is a purely intellectual, verbal admission. The affect of fear is repressed.

The great boon of repression is that it makes it possible to live decisively in an overwhelmingly miraculous and incomprehensible world, a world so full of beauty, majesty, and terror that if animals perceived it all they would be paralyzed to act.