William Boyd Quotes

You might not be able to stomach it, but as long as you can mind it, your heart will be all right.

Man can only endure a certain degree of unhappiness; what is beyond that either annihilates him or passes by him and leaves him apathetic

My work was not embraced for many decades. I would have killed myself if getting embraced affected me so much.

I don't react to a tragic happening any more. I took so many bad things as a kid and some people think I don't care about anything. It's just too hard for me to get emotional. I can't cry no more.

I think there are spirits who are just too frail for the events life throws at them. Where do these people hide, and how do they survive?

Unhappiness is too common to call for special measures.

As the possibility of a relationship had faded, Emma had endeavored to harden herself to Dexter's indifference and these days a remark like this caused no more pain than, say, a tennis ball thrown sharply at the back of her head.

The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience.

Learn, he says, that there will be hours, days and months ahead of feeling absolutely terrible and nothing can change that; neither new girlfriends, health professionals, changes of diet, dope, humility, or God.

there are only so many ways to get rejected or ignored. It doesn't hurt at all anymore because why should someone who's a complete stranger have any control over your sense of selfworth?

If you have high self-esteem, you might still know times of emotional suffering, but less often and with faster recovery-your resilience is greater.

I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt- and there is the story of mankind.

Sometimes when we get our ass kicked and we're down, sometimes we stay down, and sometimes we get depressed and sometimes we don't know how to handle it, and sometimes we don't know what's going on, and sometimes we feel like it's not worth going on.

Just like ice, lives crack, too. Personalities. Identities.

A body seriously out of equilibrium, either with itself or with its environment, perishes outright. Not so a mind. Madness and suffering can set themselves no limit.

Action and care will in time wear down the strongest frame, but guilt and melancholy are poisons of quick dispatch.

There's no such thing as mental illness. We're all mentally ill and we're all haunted by something, and some people manage to find a way to ride it out so that they don't wind up needing extra help. So I think that "mental illness," as a term, is garbage. Everybody is in various states of needing to transcend something.

It’s called mind over matter. If we don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.” When a bit of me hurts, I always mind.

Pain fades,” I said slowly. “But being a nutcase seems to stick around. Guess who got the better deal here?” The last thing I remember is Mr. Chu’s face blazing with fury.

To suffer some anxiety, some depression, some disappointment, even some failure is normal.

It takes a very strong head to keep secrets for years and not go slightly mad. It isn't wise to be advised by anyone slightly mad.

There's nothing you could really avoid about giving yourself to somebody who ultimately rejects you. That's just life.

Rejection is inevitable. Let it hit you hard for a moment, feel the hurt, and then move on.

How to seperate the humiliation from the loss, that's the catch. You can never be sure if what tortures you is the pain of being without someone you love or the embarrassment of admitting that you have been rejected.

You know, the mind is a remarkable thing. Just because you can't see the wound doesn't mean it isn't hurting. It scars all the time, but it heals.