Robin McKinley Quotes

I do think, half of what we call madness is just some poor slob dealing with pain by a strategy that annoys the people around him.

I can't admit things; that's why I can't go to funerals and stuff like that. I find it very, very difficult to deal with that kind of reality. I shut myself off totally because it affects me so badly.

Grief is the agony of an instant; the indulgence of grief the blunder of a life.

I hit my head against the wall because I don't want to know all the terrible things that I know about. I don't want to feel all these wretched things, but they're in me already. If I don't get rid of them, I'm not ever going to feel anything else.

Losing hope is not so bad. There's something worse: losing hope and hiding it from yourself.

Thinking about suicide is a potent consolation: it helps us to get through many a bad night.

Very slowly he turned his head back to look at Shmuel, who wasn't crying anymore, merely staring at the floor and looking as if he was trying to convince his soul not to live inside his tiny body anymore, but to slip away and sail to the door and rise up into the sky, gliding through the clouds until it was very far away.'' -The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure and the memory so possessed him that for the moment there was nothing to do but to pretend.

In my dream, I was drowning my sorrows But my sorrows they learned to swim

I was not allowed to think of him. That was something I tried to be very strict about. Of course I slipped; I was only human. But I was getting better, and so the pain was something I could avoid for days at a time now. The trade-off was the never-ending numbness. Between pain and nothing, I'd chosen nothing.

After a while, though, even the deepest sorrow faltered, even the most penetrating despair lost its scalpel edge.

You might find it difficult to see anything but your own sadness, the way smoke can cover a landscape so that all anyone can see is black. You may find that if someone pours water all over you, you are damp and distracted, but not cured of your sadness, the way a fire department can douse a fire but never recover what has been burnt down.

By then Esthappen and Rahel had learned that the world had other ways of breaking men. They were already familiar with the smell. Sicksweet. Like old roses on a breeze.

I could tell you it's the heart, but what is really killing him is loneliness. Memories are worse than bullets.

The thought, when written down, becomes less oppressive, but some thoughts are like a cancerous tumor: you express is, you excise it, and it grows back worse than before.

You can't ever stop thinking something quick enough. Something that hurts always gets the knife in too fast for you to slam a lid on it and shove it away.

Grief does not expire like a candle or the beacon on a lighthouse. It simply changes temperature. It becomes a kind of personal weather system. Snow settles in the liver. The bowels grow thick with humidity. Ice congeals in the stomach. Frost spiderwebs in the lungs. The heart fills with warm rain that turns to mist and evaporates through a colder artery.

I remember the day my mother died, and it's still hard to talk about it. I just blocked it out.

Got an issue, get a tissue.

To be bowed by grief is folly; Naught is gained by melancholy; Better than the pain of thinking, Is to steep the sense in drinking.

I don't cry America. I do not cry. That was a once in a lifetime event. I do not cry, do you understand? I don't cry, okay?

To grieve is something extremely difficult, we don't even know how to begin to grieve, and I don't know how you can be taught to grieve.

Our culture has become increasingly intolerant of that acute sorrow, that intense mental anguish and deep remorse which may be defined as grief. We want to medicate such sorrow away.

There is a point in the grieving process when you can run away from memories or walk straight toward them.

My own approach has always been to push intense emotions down and attempt to deal with them later.