Quotes About Denial

Time after time, history demonstrates that when people don't want to believe something, they have enormous skills of ignoring it altogether.

Everything was perfectly healthy and normal here in Denial Land.

We're ostriches and the whole world is sand.

Harry? Bob asked. Are your feet wet? And can you see the pyramids? I blinked. What? Earth to Dresden, Bob said. You are standing knee-deep in de Nile.

The capacity of humanity to deny what is right in front of it is staggering.

We're ostriches and the whole world is sand.

What's the point in answering, Warden? It's obvious that you've already tried and convicted me. If I tell you I am involved, you will believe me guilty. If I tell you I am not involved, you will believe me guilty. The only thing I can do is deny you your precious moral justification. She lifted a hand to her lips and pantomimed turning a key and throwing it away.

As a race, we're an enormous bunch of idiots. We're more than capable of ignoring facts if the conclusions they lead to make us too uncomfortable. Or afraid.

Time after time, history demonstrates that when people don't want to believe something, they have enormous skills of ignoring it altogether.

I had just been defeated by a literal hallucination built from denial and the most determined and pettily self-interested stupidity I had ever encountered.

I knew–though I didn't recognize the fact–that I wasn't all right.

Marriage is memory, marriage is time. Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time.

A doctor to whom I occasionally talk suggest that I have made an inadequate adjustment to aging. Wrong, I want to say. In fact I have made no adjustment whatsoever to aging. In fact I had lived my entire life to date without seriously believing that I would age.

Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time. For forty years I saw myself through John's eyes. I did not age.

Emergency, I continue to believe, is what happens to someone else. I say that I continue to believe this even as I know that I do not.

As I recall this I realize how open we are to the persistent message that we can avert death. And to its punitive correlative, the message that if death catches us we have only ourselves to blame. Only

Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception.

Marriage is memory, marriage is time. Marriage is not only time: it is also, paradoxically, the denial of time. For forty years I saw myself through John's eyes. I did not age.

Marriage is not only time: it is also, paradoxically, the denial of time. For forty years I saw myself through John's eyes. I did not age. This year for the first time since I was twenty-nine I saw myself through the eyes of others. This year for the first time since I was twenty-nine I realized that my image of myself was of someone significantly younger.

What's the matter, Maria said, standing in the doorway in the dark. It isn't any better. How do you know. He said nothing, I mean we didn't even try. You don't want it. I do too. No, he said. You don't.

She understood very well that when you took a good look under a clear, hard light, the world was a fucked-up hellhole. Most people knew this, she'd known this, but nobody wanted to think about it all the time. It didn't pay to forget for too long.

Just because you keep something a secret doesn't mean it never happened, no matter how much you want that to be true.

You can fool yourself, you know. You'd think it's impossible, but it turns out it's the easiest thing of all.

You'll tell yourself anything you have to, to pretend that you're still the one in control.