Quotes About Pressure

It is not the stars that make us, Dr. Butts, it is circumstance and necessità, the choices we make under pressure; our virtues make us, but virtues are not enough, we must deploy our vices at times. Or don't you agree?

I am in over my head. I am drowning.

She feels as though she has something to prove at all times. Feels as though she has to earn the crown on her head over and over again.

I don't buy that overused line about a woman's job making her a better mother. The children need more time. Everything in our home needs more time.

I felt sad because everyday I had to wake up early to practice before going to school. After school I had to go back to tennis again, and then after tennis I had homework. I didn't have time to play.

It's because we live in a beauty-obsessed society where the most important thing a woman can do is make herself attractive to men.

She was a far better mother when she had an audience.

She found it soothing to get caught up in a brightly colored, plastic world where all that mattered was how much you ate and exercised, where pain and anguish were suffered over no greater tragedy than push-ups, where people spoke intensely about calories and sobbed joyfully over lost kilos. And then they all lived happily, skinnily ever after.

Tess is a bit shy," her mother used to tell people in an audible whisper, her hand over her mouth. "Gets it from her father, I'm afraid." Tess had heard the cheerful disrespect in her mother's voice and had come to believe that any form of shyness was wrong- morally wrong, in fact. You should want to go to parties. You should want to be surrounded by people. No wonder she felt so ashamed of her shyness, as if it were an embarrassing physical ailment that needed to be hidden at all costs.

She'd paid full price, but life was a competition and she knew non-working wives of wealthy men loved to talk about how they'd saved by bargain-shopping for designer clothes. It was their contribution to the household finances.

Full-time work caused a kind of claustrophobic terror to build and build within her chest until one day there was a humiliating emotional spillage that resulted in her termination or resignation

Each obligation on its own seemed laughably easy. It was the sheer volume that threatened to bury her.

Would there be that subtle one-upmanship like there was between mothers? "It's so stressful having a gifted child." What would be the equivalent for a prison wife? "It's such a strain when your husband is a model prisoner! The others are constantly beating him up!

You never changed your appearance for men, you changed it for other women, because they were the ones carefully tracking each other's weight and skin tone, along with their own, they were the ones trapped with you on the ridiculous appearance obsession merry-go-round that they couldn't or wouldn't get off.

The thing is, I hate cooking," said Joy. The words rushed out of her mouth: traitorously, venomously. "You've no idea how much I hate cooking, and it just never ends, the cooking, night after night after bloody night. Each night at five o'clock, like clockwork, your father says, 'What's for dinner?' and I grit my teeth so hard I can feel it in my jaw.

It was annoying that the better stuff you got, the less relaxed you could be about it.

Men often used that phrase: "drop some weight." They said it without shame or emotion, as if the weight were an object they could easily put down when they chose. Women said they needed to "lose weight," with their eyes down, as if the extra weight was part of them, a terrible sin they'd committed.

Think of your worst pre-match nerves. Except there's no match. It's just Tuesday morning. That's how it feels to be me.

Jane had tried that with Mothers Group and failed. She just couldn't relate to those bright, chatty women and their bubbly conversations about husbands who weren't "stepping up" and renovations that weren't finished before the baby was born and that hilarious time they were so busy and tired they left the house without putting on any makeup! (Jane, who was wearing no makeup at the time, and never wore makeup, had kept her face blank and benign, while she inwardly shouted: What the fuck?)

My head felt like it was going to crack down the middle, like some demented dwarf was driving glass pins through my brain.

It came to him that he didn't like holidays. . . . They bore down on you. Each one always ended up feeling like an exam . . .

Why with our emphasis on the individual are we still so blinded by the urge to conform?

You have so much to offer, she was often told, as if she had a tray of cigarettes and candy perpetually strapped to her waist.

The trouble with being in the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.