Quotes About Avoidance

Whatever White might say about the law getting to "the essence" of things, when your client is in the hot seat in a deposition, the whole point is to avoid the essence.

Death was like an unpleasant neighbor. You didn't talk about him for fear he might hear you and decide to pay a visit.

They drank with quiet determination, avoiding serious discussions of troubling news. In doing this they added a small, sullen silence to the larger, hollow one. It made an alloy of sorts, a counterpoint.

La muerte era como un vecino desagradable: no hablabas de él por temor a que te oyera y decidiera pasar a hacerte una visita.

A skilled observer might notice there was something his gaze avoided. The same way you avoid meeting the eye of an old lover at a formal dinner, or that of an old enemy sitting across the room in a crowded alehouse late at night.

Some small rational part of me realized I was in deep shock. It repeated the fact to me again and again. I did not want to think of what I saw. I did not want to know what had happened here. I did not want to know what any of this meant.

It's not the first time I should be dead, Bast. I'm a fair hand at avoiding it.

It's just another word for the same thing. You want to believe in some hidden purpose. You're trying to persuade yourself there's a reason for what happens in the world. I don't care what you call it--God or luck or harmony-- it all comes down to the same bullshit. It's a way of avoiding the facts, of refusing to look at how things really work.

As long as we avoided the real subject, the spell could not be broken. We both slipped naturally into this kind of banter, and it became all the more powerful because neither of us abandoned the charade. We knew what we were doing, but at the same time we pretended not to.

The trouble you don't get into, you don't have to get out of!

Amusement and annoyance are, perhaps, both forms of denial.

Running from the presence of God has the futility of "trying to shovel smoke with a rake".

I think often we opt for silence, willingly avoiding issues and letting wrong things go on unchecked, not because we love the other person, but because we love ourselves and just don't want to go through the hassle of dealing with something that God says is clearly wrong.

The best kind of self-control is to avoid situations that require self-control

We all have strategies to distract ourselves from what we cannot bear. Memory, for example, serves such a function.

Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It's a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write.

Neurosis is the way of avoiding nonbeing by avoiding being

What we can't bear to know or feel, we often find a way to hide from ourselves, and hide well.

When men [sic] avoid encounter they become inflexible and treat others as mere objects; instead of nurturing life they kill life; instead of searching for life, they flee from it. And these are oppressor characteristics.

What seemed delicacy in him was usually a way of avoiding trouble; what seemed like sympathy was the instinct to prevent trouble before it started. It was hard to see what growing older would mean to such a person. His emotions, from lack of exercise, had disappeared almost altogether. Adaptability and curiosity, he had found, did just as well.

Look away, look away, look away …

person injures and exhausts himself in compulsive attempts to avoid a disavowed feeling, and actually becomes more stuck

The only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid unavoidable pain.

Sometimes when it looks like I'm deep in thought I'm just trying not to have a conversation with people.