Michael Reagan Quotes

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 think I can be closed in. I can close this outer shell, cut myself off and be quite cold. I can cut other people off if I need to. I don't think I'm angry, though... Maybe my wife would disagree.

People choose to shut themselves off and build a load of defense mechanisms and not let anybody in because it's easier that way. You don't get hurt, and there's less risk involved if you build this hard shell.

I feared vulnerability more than my actual emotional pain itself!

I build a wall around myself. I'm hard to get to know. Any trait you have, it gets worse as you go along.

It's a terrible thing to be alone - yes it is - it is - but don't lower your mask until you have another mask prepared beneath - as terrible as you like - but a mask.

After I lost my fiance, it seemed like it would be better to always be alone than to risk being hurt again.

I moved around so much when I was younger that I sort of had to have this type of exterior; you know, I was afraid of getting hurt.

There are people that have closed themselves off so much because they've been hurt so much in their lives.

Sometimes the funnier you are, the more vulnerable and scared you are underneath it all. So I think, for me, comedy was always a defense. It was a weapon so that you can't hurt me.

I've figured out over the years, you can only hurt me if I love you; if I don't know you, I really don't care.

There are those who never stretch out the hand for fear it will be bitten. But those who never stretch out the hand will never feel it clasped in friendship.

They can't hurt me. I'm not like the rest of you. There's no one left I love.

You loved people and you came to depend on their being there. but people died or changed or went away and it hurt too much. The only way to avoid that poin was not to love anyone, and not to let anyone get too close or too important. The secret of not being hurt like this again, I decided, was never depending on anyone, never needing, never loving.It is the last dream of children, to be forever untouched.

Kindness was the last thing she needed. She had to stay in the icy place, the numb place, and their warmth threatened to melt her just when she needed the cold.

In the past I was very open and very generous, and I found that it just exploded in my face. A lot of people weren't there for me when I needed them. So I have become a little shell shocked. Subsequently almost paranoid and frightened of people now. Maybe I'm losing out in meeting some marvelous people, but I am doing the only thing I can to save my spirit.

I want to undo this. To make it right. But I have no idea how. I don't seem to know how to open up to people without getting the door slammed in my face. So I do nothing.

I saw people who were hostile; they had felt so much hurt that hostility was their only defense against being crushed again.

Contempt is the weapon of the weak and a defense against one's own despised and unwanted feelings.

I'm more insecure than I ever let anyone know; sometimes you protect yourself with this kind of armor that people see more than they see you.

The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.

I come from a violent background. So I became hard. I realised that I had made myself that way to deal with a feeling of abandonment and shame.

I spent much of my life hiding.

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

If you are a card-carrying human being, chances are that you share the same fear as all other humans: the fear of losing love, respect and connection to others. And if you are human, in order to avoid or prevent the pain, trauma and perceived devastation of the loss, you will do anything to avoid your greatest fear from being visited on you.