Quotes About Denial

Plenty of people took this way out, looking future damage in the eye and naming it something else.

Until that moment I'd always beloved i could still go home and pretend the Congo never happened

Father stared at the trees, giving no indication he'd heard his poor frightened wife, or any of this news. Father would sooner watch us all perish one by one than listen to anybody but himself.

Think about it. Ever look in a closet or under the bed, when you're alone in the house, to ensure an intruder isn't hiding there? Now, if you really believed the Man in the Black Ski Mask was lurking in those places, would you behave the same way? Of course not. But it's more comfortable to believe the danger only in the abstract, and to act on it only halfheartedly. That's denial.

Is she your first girlfriend?" I asked, my tone gentle. "I told you, she's not really my girlfriend," he said, ducking the question. "If she's occupying enough of your attention to keep you in bed until the sun sets, I feel safe using the word as shorthand.

Men use these words to frighten us, Livia would tell them. To intimidate and paralyze. We need to habituate to what upsets us so we can fight through it. Deny our attackers the weapon of their words.

There was a time when I didn't seem to need such things, when I would have been amused and perhaps even vaguely disgusted at the notion of living like some sort of psychic vampire, a lingering revenant pressed up against one-way glass, looking with forlorn and futile eyes at the ordinary life fate had denied him.

There's a saying I like. 'Denial has no survival value.' If you're going to play, you have to at least recognize what the game is.

If there was one thing Snake knew about people, it was that once they got attached to a theory, it was hard to get them detached. They'd screen out unhelpful facts, invent favorable ones, and ignore contradictions in their own claims. Look at those Sandy Hook truthers, babbling about false flags and crisis actors and all the rest. When people were motivated enough to believe something, they were going to believe it no matter what.

But denial . . . well, you know what they say about denial." Ben nodded, seeing where this was going now, not wanting to show what he really thought of it. "It has no survival value.

When he comes to learn that he is in fact not related to the queen, and so is not the royal heir

Some believers, as though from a drinking bout, go so far as to oppose themselves and alter the original text of the gospel three or four or several times over, and change its character to enable them to deny difficulties in the face of criticism. (Against Celsus 2, 27)

Everything in the universe denies nothing; to suggest an ending is the one absurdity.

If you can blame sickness on somebody, instead of accepting it for what it is, then you can avoid being responsible for it. You don't have to try to end the pain.

W]hat purpose does it serve to deny actual experience in order to run with an idea instead?

You got a boyfriend or something?" I hate it when he figures me out before I have a chance to do it myself. Especially when I've been counting on at least seven more years of denial.

All no means is they don't know for sure or there's a secret being kept, like someone's trying to hide something really good.

The dominant theories of elite art and criticism in the 20th century grew out of a militant denial of human nature. One legacy is ugly, baffling, and insulting art. The other is pretentious and unintelligible scholarship. And they're surprised that people are staying away in droves?

Nonetheless, a movement within the American political right, heavily underwritten by fossil fuel interests, has prosecuted a fanatical and mendacious campaign to deny that greenhouse gases are warming the planet.47 In doing so they have advanced the conspiracy theory that the scientific community is fatally infected with political correctness and ideologically committed to a government takeover of the economy.

James Payne notes a perverse sign of progress. Today's Holocaust deniers at least feel compelled to deny that the Holocaust took place. In earlier centuries the perpetrators of genocide and their sympathizers boasted about it.

People affirm or deny these beliefs to express not what they know but who they are.

Covid quackery, climate denial, and conspiracy theories are symptoms of what some are calling an epistemological crisis and a post-truth era.

In The Blank Slate I argued that the modern denial of the dark side of human nature—the doctrine of the Noble Savage—was a reaction against the romantic militarism, hydraulic theories of aggression, and glorification of struggle and strife that had been popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

There can only be two basic loves... the love of God unto the forgetfulness of self, or the love of self unto the forgetfulness and denial of God.