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I Quotes

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All I Quotes

“I used the role of fight-or-flight in human survival as an excuse to justify my addiction to depression and anxiety; I saw them as survival traits, believing that I would perish without them. However, the key here is that fight-or-flight is an automatic physiological reaction, making it often more dependent on instinct, not initiative. When a person starts getting stressed, or when their fight-or-flight response is activated, they don’t carefully evaluate whether or not this is something worth getting anxious about; they just get anxious automatically. Having their brains become numb, their hearts palpitate, and their adrenaline course their veins just happens automatically; you don’t intentionally control that. That is what makes the woman so blank and emotionless—it is her, or my, strict and rigid dependency on fight-or-flight! By being so deeply contingent on an automatic instinct, I had little time for true introspection. It is like the instinct controlled me, instead of the other way around.”

“I used to always throw in random questions. I'd have to ask about artist's single and their writing process, which I know is every artist's most-hated question, like, "Well what was ,your process?" And it's. like, "Well, I wrote this album." And then at the end I would throw in, like, "So, Seinfeld or Simpsons?" and they'd be so thrown, because everything else could be autopilot. All my greatest moments were from the most sporadic questions.”

“I used to analyze myself down to the last thread, used to compare myself with others, recalled all the smallest glances, smiles and words of those to whom I’d tried to be frank, interpreted everything in a bad light, laughed viciously at my attempts ‘to be like the rest’ –and suddenly, in the midst of my laughing, I’d give way to sadness, fall into ludicrous despondency and once again start the whole process all over again – in short, I went round and round like a squirrel on a wheel.”

“I used to ask myself why American universities are financed through endowments. Now I know: During the early days of America, the state was poor and when citizens wanted to set something up, they needed to collect money themselves. Historically, this was different in Europe. There used to be a strong state, a monarch or a king. He provided money.”