Viktor E. Frankl Quotes

Just like my mom, when things get bad, I get quiet. The worse they get, the more silent I become.

Laughing doesn't make bad things worse any more than crying makes them better. It doesn't mean you don't care, or that you've forgotten. It just means you're human.

My natural response to a stressful situation is to shut down. I do weird things, like, I don't cry, I get really cold.

Its not stress that kills us, it is our reaction to it.

Without comedy as a defense mechanism I wouldn't be able to survive.

When things have gone really wrong in my life, I've cried like a child. I have really, really cried. I cry it out. Two-three days I cry, and then I'm like, enough, time to deal with reality and figure a way out. This is the way I have dealt with everything.

Under so much pressure and the situation that I was in, that was the personality that came across with me.

It's not psychopathology that counts. It's what you do with it.

I think if you come from a history of persecution you have to develop a sense of humour.

When you get told that you have a disease, it's like: 'Really? Nah, it's all right. I don't believe that. It must be something else, I'm just making an excuse, let me push harder.'

In 'The Darkest Minds,' Zu's trauma manifests in her choosing to remain silent. It's her one small way she can feel in control of her otherwise uncontrollable situation.

Criticism comes with Celtic. If you take it on board, it can make you ill, but if you think: 'No problem', it makes you really thick-skinned.

My mom's coping mechanism was to be strong and resilient. She is very compassionate and nonjudgmental.

A sense of humor is the main measure of sanity.

I think when tragedy occurs, it presents a choice. You can give in to the void, the emptiness that fills your heart, your lungs, constricts your ability to think or even breathe. Or you can try to find meaning. These past thirty days, I have spent many of my moments lost in that void. And I know that many future moments will be consumed by the vast emptiness as well. But when I can, I want to choose life and meaning.

The only way of enduring one disaster after the next is to love the very idea of disaster: if we succeed, there are no further surprises, we are superior to whatever occurs, we are invincible victims.

If I had a nervous breakdown every time something awful happened in the world, I'd be crazier than a shithouse rat.

The loss of memory isn't always the problem; sometimes--maybe even often--it's the solution.

I maintain that inversion is the effect of neither a prenatal choice nor an endocrinal malformation nor even the passive and determined result of complexes. It is an outlet that a child discovers when he is suffocating.

Repression is an evolutionary adaptation permitting us to function under the burden of our expanded consciousness. For what we are conscious of could drive us mad.

When it's too difficult to keep swimming, float.

The ability to fantasize is the ability to survive, and the ability to fantasize is the ability to grow

Life's managed, not cured.

No one is depressed when they're being chased by a bear.

I was a little excited but mostly blorft. "Blorft" is an adjective I just made up that means 'Completely overwhelmed but proceeding as if everything is fine and reacting to the stress with the torpor of a possum.' I have been blorft every day for the past seven years.