Mickey Rourke Quotes

I think it comes from far away inside me, to be strong to survive everything that comes my way. I think, going back to the beginning, feeling like an alien in an English school when I was eight, that set up my pride very early on. I think I'm very defensive, but I'm trying not to be like that anymore.

When people are very damaged, they can often meet the world with a kind of defiance.

As a kid, I would push my shoulders forward in order to hide my heart from being hurt.

If someone has gone through a lot of emotional pain, including the loss of loved ones, that person may try to build a shell around his or her feelings to protect him- or herself from the pain.

Luckily, I's learned at an early age that self-preservation was the only way to survive with your soul intact.

I still have in me the same awareness when I was 12 and chubby and a girl was spitting in my face. I'm the same person.

I started to build barriers between myself and others to protect myself.

I laugh when I see people in pain. Sometimes I think it is a defense mechanism from childhood, where you're in so much pain you have to laugh. It is a survival mechanism.

In Ronald Reagan's chaotic childhood, the imagination was armor. There is nothing unusual about that; transcending the doubts, hesitations, and fears swirling around you by casting yourself internally as the hero of your own adventure story is a characteristic psychic defense mechanism of the Boy Who Disappears.

I'd like to see much more understanding of emotional issues around hurt, abandonment, disappointment, longing, failure and shame, where they stem from and how they drive people and policies brought into public discourse.

I was drawn to boxing because I got beat up as a kid. I was the kid with the piano books in a New York neighbourhood.

It has been said that time heals all wounds. I don't agree. The wounds remain. Time - the mind, protecting its sanity - covers them with some scar tissue and the pain lessens, but it is never gone.

I stay standoffish in a sense, in my own personal space, to be able to cope with whatever it is you've got to cope with.

If we didn't desensitize ourselves in some way, every day would feel like its own tragedy.

I had to grow a very thick skin very fast. I think that's where the GC came about.

It took me years on top of years to grow thick skin and it took me many hurtful days.

I had kind of a rough childhood, so I created my own reality.

There was a point that I stopped crying. It's not just because I didn't feel pain anymore, not because I didn't feel sorrow. It was just to keep going. I mean, it just was to survive, to live.

Blessed be shock. Blessed be the part of us that protects us from too much pain and sorrow. At the heart of life is a fusebox.

The body shuts down when it has too much to bear; goes its own way quietly inside, waiting for a better time, leaving you numb and half alive.

I shake my head, but I can’t change this. I can only bear the scars, as I have always done, as I ever do.

It was Adam, but he was too late. He couldn’t love me anymore. He would be so angry with me. I had to hide. He didn’t love me so he might hurt me when he was angry. When he calmed down, that would hurt him. I didn’t want him hurting because of me. There was nowhere for a person to hide. So I wouldn’t be a person. My eyes fell on the shelves that lined the far back corner. A coyote could hide there.

The art we need is the art of bearing the unbearable.

I breathe in slowly. Food is life. I exhale, take another breath. Food is life. And that's the problem. When you're alive, people can hurt you. It's easier to crawl into a bone cage or a snowdrift of confusion. It's easier to lock everybody out. But it's a lie.

I talk openly about my past and what I've gone through - abuse being something that was very real in my household, and a lot of chaos growing up as a child. I think that I naturally just gravitated towards music that I could really feel on a deep level - and that meant sadness. I was able to connect with that at a really young age.