Harper Lee Quotes

I don't think my work is so much about opening up wounds. I think it's about understanding the nature of the wound. I'm not bleeding on the canvas. I, like most people, have suffered traumatic events. The character of a person's life is determined by the way they deal with those events. I am a creative person and I deal with it creatively.

In treatment, all of the negative things I did were stripped away and I had to start processing my feelings.

Turning feelings into words can help us process and overcome adversity.

The past does not haunt us. We haunt the past. We allow our minds to focus in that direction. We open memories and examine them. We reexperience emotions we felt during the painful events we experienced because we are recalling them in as much detail as we can.

...he who remains passive when over-whelmed with grief loses his best chance of recovering his elasticity of mind.

Sometimes it's not like I write very specific, it's more like I add an atmosphere almost to something that might have been quite awkward in my mind from the beginning. Something has happened and I want to force myself to think of it in a more positive way. And then I force myself to write something that convinces me that this is actually something pretty good or something that I learned something valuable from.

Sorrow has the fortunate peculiarity that it preys upon itself. It dies of starvation. Since it is essentially an interruption of habits, it can be replaced by new habits. Constituting, as it does, a void, it is soon filled up by a real horror vacuum.

I handle emotional pain by trying to understand that it's going to be painful and to allow for it instead of fighting it. Doesn't make it any easier, though.

What it boils down to is that each person has his own ways of coping with trauma and grief, with the pain of life, and astrology was one of mine. Don't criticize me, I wanted to say, until you have stood in my place. This helped me. Nobody was hurt by it.

I'm lucky to be alive. It took three years of therapy to recover but I did it.

I think it's almost necessary for most people to have the freedom to pull back, and then re-enter at an adult level, where they are neither playing the victim nor creating victims, but just participating in calm, adult behavior. Because an awful lot of churches just aren't there at adult Christianity, this seems to be the norm anymore.

If you are willing to change your thinking, you can change your feelings. If you change your feelings, you can change your actions. And changing your actions - based on good thinking - can change your life.

When I wake up, I'll read something and I'll feel angry. And then I'll calm down a little bit. I'll think about it. And then I'll tweet something that talks about the issue, and if I can inject some satire and humor, I'll try to do that.

I learned from my parents to do my best to not react to negative emotions. I try to think about what has happened and find the lessons that can be learned from these difficult experiences. I try to deal with these negative emotions right away because, if they stay inside, they can hurt and do a lot of damage. I release them as soon as possible so I can be free.

You have had many sadnesses, large ones, which passed. ... But please, ask yourself whether these large sadnesses haven't rather gone right through you [that is, passed through you]. Perhaps many things inside you have been transformed; perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad.

I guess when I'm frightened or in pain or maybe very bored I've tried to hold myself together by imposing a narrative order on the experience as it happens.

I believe, when in my behavior or in relationships or in the way I react to something, that I'm still dealing with some leftover stuff from my childhood, but the good thing is now, because I have learned so much from the Bible, I can tell when I'm behaving wrong and when I'm not, and it doesn't take me very long to realize that's out of fear, or that's because I was controlled as a child, and I can make a conscious decision to behave the way I know I should behave.

I think thoughts in my head bounce around in my skull and, if they keep bouncing around in my skull, they get worse and worse. When they come out of my mouth, they make people happy.

The first lesson of life is to burn our own smoke; that is, not to inflict on outsiders our personal sorrows and petty morbidness, not to keep thinking of ourselves as exceptional cases.

Whatever the emotion is, I have learned over the years to give it space, which is also why I love acting.

Usually right when I'm feeling it, right when it's happening, I always find I need to be in some sort of survival mode or mature mom mode, so it always seems to come later that I have the breakdown.

I think the pressure has also helped me want to rise above that pressure, and it has helped in accelerating the healing process. It's helped give me a drive. I have a definite survival drive, and the pressure gave me a drive to get on top of it.

I think the cynicism that you have when you've just gone through a break-up is a luxury that you allow yourself for a while.

Until we question our stressful thoughts, we remain victims of the images in our head.

You never get over it, but you get to where it doesn't bother you so much.