Quotes About Denial

I stopped painting in 1990 at the peak of my success just to deny people my beautiful paintings. And I did it out of spite.

The secret of all success is to know how to deny yourself. Prove that you can control yourself, and you are an educated man; and without this all other education is good for nothing.

Big success requires big sacrifices. Don't find out later that the cost was too high. Denial is said to be even more potent than cocaine; neither drug enhances your marketability.

Il n'y a que les méchants qui nient l'amitié, parce qu'ils ne la comprennent pas.

The only nations which deny the utility of provincial liberties are those which have fewest of them; in other words, those who are unacquainted with the institution are the only persons who passed censure upon it.

Foyle was brought up with a jolt. 'You mean I've been running away from something?' 'Obviously.' 'From what?' 'From reality. You can't accept life as it is. You refuse. You attack it . . . try to force it into your own pattern. You attack and destroy everything that stands in the way of your own insane pattern.

That was the way love was, invisible, there whether or not you wanted to see it or admit to it.

I did my best to pretend it wasn't so. ... I didn't have time to be ill. Now I know you can't run away by ignoring the truth. Truth follows you; it comes in through open windows and drifts under doors.

In the morning, she told everyone she was perfectly fine, even though she wasn't, even though she wished she was still on that green hill where Levi had been buried, where the grass smelled so sweet, where there was no beginning and no end.

Elinor would have surely ignored them, such was her habit and her inclination, even though she knew whenever someone ignored what hurt her most, she'd wind up in grave circumstances. Ignore love, she now understood, and a person might bleed forever, even if no one could tell.

Some things, however, are true no matter how hard you might try to block them out and a lie is always a lie no matter how prettily told.

Some people believe that if you don't open your eyes to sorrow and you don't talk about it, you can pretend it never happened.

As long as she lives she will never figure out why it is that some boys refuse to see that somebody loves them.

There are so many ways to stop the knowing, and I tried them all. I tried silence, I tried heroin, I tried calling it love. And then I stopped trying to call my dumbness any one of ten thousand names.

Some secrets were much harder to keep than others, especially ones you kept from yourself.

A secret is always hard, a stone wedged just beneath the skin. A constant reminder that won't go away, a secret invokes longing; it takes on a life of its own. In order to keep one well, certain things have to be done backward: Laughter instead of tears, a slow walk when the urge is to run. Always deny what is most important, at least in the presence of others.

Você não pode fingir que algo real não existe.

Sorry," Mary said. "I had some errands to run." Pauline eyed her. It would be Pauline's way to say, No you didn't. It would be Pauline's way to refuse the decorum of the fib, to embrace the painful honesty. It would be her way to say, You just didn't feel like having lunch with me. Which would have been true, of course. And no less embarrassing, regrettable, awkward, no less vigorously denied, because it was true.

Both the depressive and the grandiose person completely deny their childhood reality by living as though the availability of the parents could still be salvaged: the grandiose person through the illusion of achievement, and the depressive through his constant fear of losing "love." Neither can accept the truth that this loss or absence of love has already happened in the past, and that no effort whatsoever can change this fact.

Individuals who do not want to know their own truth collude in denial with society as a whole, looking for a common enemy on whom to act out their repressed rage. But as the inhabitants of this shrinking planet near the end of the twentieth century, the danger inherent in self-deception is growing exponentially- and we can afford it less than ever. Fortunately, at the same time, we now have the tools we need to truly understand ourselves, as we were and as we are.

To escape this vicious cycle we must face the truth. And we can do it. We were humiliated children; we were the victims of our parents' ignorance, the victims of their history, of the unconscious scars with which childhood left them. We had no choice but to deny the truth.

A person is not likely to conceive something monstrous if he does not know it somehow or other from experience. We simply tend to refuse to take a child's suffering seriously enough.

they ward off any kind of accusation from the parents who once maltreated them so severely. They do not know what that treatment has done to them, they do not know how much they have suffered from it. Above all, they do not want to know. They see it as something beneficial, something inflicted on them for their own good. Self-therapy

fact, grandiosity is the defense against depression, and depression is the defense against the deep pain over the loss of the self that results from denial.