Quotes About Coping

A lot of things seem one way but are another. And how a thing seems is often just the game we play to save ourselves from great, panicking pain.

That's your solution?' asked Wardani in a small, cold voice. 'Take drugs and watch it all slide out of view?' 'Do you have a better idea?' She turned away.

Wardani had donned the emotional equivalent of a vacuum suit, the only response left in the human armory when the moral parameters of the outside environment have grown so outrageously variable that an exposed mind can no longer survive unshielded.

Fortified with self-loathing, with the reserves of sardonic contempt he'd absorbed in his time spent around Milacar, he'd gone to the gate tight-lipped and filled with a strange, queasy energy, as if walking to his own execution as well as Jelim's. He'd known at some deep, cold level that he would cope. He was wrong. Utterly.

Faced with a divorce or separation, faced with the need to terminate a long-standing friendship, I must remind myself that sometimes the most loving involvement is a non-involvement.

In times of pain, when the future is too terrifying to contemplate and the past too painful to remember, I have learned to pay attention to right now.

Many artists begin a piece of work, get well along in it, and then find, as they near completion, that the work seems mysteriously drained of merit. To therapists, this surge of sudden disinterest ... is a routine coping device employed to ... ward off vulnerability.

It may be different for others, but pain is what it took to teach me to pay attention. In times of pain, when the future is too terrifying to contemplate and the past too painful to remember, I have learned to pay attention to right now. The precise moment I was in was always the only safe place for me. Each moment, taken alone, was always bearable. In the exact now, we are all, always, all right.

Perhaps grief, which destroys all patterns, destroys even more: the belief that any patterns exist. But we cannot, I think, survive without such belief. So each of us must pretend to find, or re-erect, a pattern.

At best you have one of those debilitating conditions which come in many forms, and which some people decline to admit actually exist.

Let others argue about that; his only concern was to get to the end of each day. He had become a technique for survival. Below a certain point, that was what all men became: techniques for survival.

even if he did sometimes flirt lightly with Betty of Betty's Best Home-Made Pies. It passed the time. Ah, that phrase. A sudden memory of Susan talking about Joan. "We're all just looking for a place of safety. And if you don't find one, then you have to learn how to pass the time." Back then, it had sounded like a counsel of despair; now, it struck him as normal, and emotionally practical.

Poetry was a barrier against raw emotions. It distilled them into bearable music, allowed one to accommodate them a little at a time. Alexander Moncrieffe

She didn't usually mind being just a bit in over her head. She generally flailed like a becalmed ship, irritable and purposeless and panicked, when things were simple.

I'm the kind of person, who, when bored or unhappy, either drinks myself into oblivion or cooks very unhealthy things; Sally is the kind of person who, when bored or unhappy, goes jogging or cleans the bathroom with a toothbrush or matriculates at rabbinical school.

When you felt sad or angry or hopeless, a story could help. A story could lead you into a different world for a while.

I stuck a cigarette through the slit in the bandage and asked myself with a nervous fidget what I had lost along with my face.

All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.

Sorrows don't drown; they briefly submerge only to float to the surface with greater fierceness.

My court-appointed therapist would say I was trying to fill a hole." "Is that what you call your vagina?" Claire chuckled under her breath.

She had seen this before. She knew that you could put it all in a little box and close it up later, that you could go on with your life if you didn't sleep too much, didn't breathe too much, didn't live too much so that death came back and snatched you away for the taking.

Personality shots," her roommates used to call the first drinks of the night. Liquid courage. Whatever you called it, the point was to turn off the voice in your head that reminded you of everything wrong in your life.

The shooting. It had a name now, an after that calved her life away from the before.

I want to feel normal again," she once told me. "Maybe if I pretend I am for long enough, it might actually happen.