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I Quotes

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All I Quotes

“It was early in my career, and I had been seeing Mary, a shy, lonely, and physically collapsed young woman, for about three months in weekly psychotherapy, dealing with the ravages of her terrible history of early abuse. One day I opened the door to my waiting room and saw her standing there provocatively, dressed in a miniskirt, her hair dyed flaming red, with a cup of coffee in one hand and a snarl on her face. “You must be Dr. van der Kolk,” she said. “My name is Jane, and I came to warn you not to believe any the lies that Mary has been telling you. Can I come in and tell you about her?” I was stunned but fortunately kept myself from confronting “Jane” and instead heard her out. Over the course of our session I met not only Jane but also a hurt little girl and an angry male adolescent. That was the beginning of a long and productive treatment.”

“It was easier to be the headstrong monk, a boy on a long-shot mission, before he actually won anything. With the prize in hand, he realized his single-minded drive came across as aloof cockiness; his painful martyrdom certainly looked like self-nomination for sainthood. He's not sure he can keep up this exhausting, aw-shucks façade for much longer.”

“It was easier to cry alone. No people or mirrors to bear witness. Ethan sobbed into his fist, the swell of pointlessness and frustration bursting a dam in his throat. The exhaust fan drowned out the sound. Ethan wanted to scream, to manifest some tangible evidence of the shredding hurt. He managed a few croaky gasps, the sound withering like rot. Even encased in solitude and steam, it felt performative.”

“It was easier to mourn the cathedral than imagine the dead: women who spent their final seconds hunting for children still playing in the yard, to herd them into Anderson shelters so carefully dug in beneath the cabbage patches; the elderly, who almost made it down the road to the shelter before death swooped down on them; the deaf, reaching for a cup of tea, unaware of the hell unfolding around them; the hopeless, who sat back in their chairs and simply waited. Death would come from the sky one day. Why not tonight?”

“It was easier to trust Siddhartha when he was a stranger. It was easier to trust him when he didn’t talk to me. It was easier with the distance. On this trip, when things will be real, and he’ll be in close proximity, I will not be able to make him the dream angel of my life. On this trip, I’ll have to see the real him, whoever he is, maybe just the opposite of what I imagined, maybe abusive, or a fraud, or a pervert. I don’t know, but now I’m afraid maybe after this trip, when I’ll see the real him, maybe he’ll take away from me the whole idea of Siddhartha I have in my mind.”

“It was easily one of the best sermons she had heard and delivered with a confidence she had not thought her cousin capable of possessing. She turned to Charlotte, saw her friend’s eyes bright with pride and affection and realized, for the first time, that perhaps Charlotte’s marriage to Mr Collins was not merely an agreement of convenience.”

“It was easy for complacent centuries like the Nineteenth, which knew no overwhelming disasters, to say that the Great Fire was a blessing because it swept out of existence a vast conglomeration of insanitary streets and made way for the cleaner brick-and-stone London of Stuart and later times; but we of to-day, who have seen so much that we loved go up in flames, are probably in a better position to feel sympathy for those of our forebears who suffered the tragedy of the Great Fire.”

“It was easy for me to start good habits like taking advanced classes and doing more sports, but weeding out the bad habits was not as simple. I still went to class high sometimes, but at least I wasn’t doing it every day. Before, I could not function without drugs, could not live a single day. Now, very gradually, I was changing the purpose for which I lived. Before, I was a druggie. Now I was a super studious, highly advanced student who was only on drugs sometimes.”

“It was easy not to like the other foreigners. I wondered how I'd fallen in with such a band of freaks. There were so many odd, wandering types--a host of bent Australians, warped British, tainted Canadians, tormented runaway Americans. (I considered myself fairly well balanced among this cast, but then look what became of me.) I'd expected it to a certain degree, but I was still surprised. Most of them seemed like misfits. Only a few content. But all of us found teaching work with astounding ease. It didn't matter that, on the whole, we were ragged and suspect because the demand for English in Korea was so great that almost anyone was accepted.”