Dustin Lance Black Quotes

I'm pretty good at remaining calm during an emergency. My house burned down when I was 12, which made me really pragmatic about what needed to be done. But I can be bad in that I compartmentalize a lot of emotions and push them away to deal with them at a later date.

Emotionality is really easy for me. My father always said that Fondas can cry at a good steak.

My natural response to a stressful situation is to shut down. I do weird things, like, I don't cry, I get really cold.

Under so much pressure and the situation that I was in, that was the personality that came across with me.

Sometimes when things are way too big and I can't control it, I do sort of a weird thing where I kind of check out a little bit. It's all about self-preservation for me.

So I don't cry anymore, I just beat people up. It's a lot more fun.

'Johnny' was a coping mechanism who could take those things which could have ordinarily destroyed me, by tweaking my past and throwing it back out there, getting laughs from things that would have otherwise upset me.

When I'm photographing, I think - like any rescue worker who deals with tragedy - you have to have some protective barrier around your heart so you can do your job. You tend to have a delayed reaction to things. I feel things more deeply after I put the camera down.

In real life, I don't cry too easily. I go numb.

More than any other personality trait, my mother seemed to be ruled by anger and sadness. She seemed to hate being a mother. Watching her unhappiness as I grew up made me conclude that the answer was to try and be as unemotional as I could, which many therapists have taught me is a bad idea. It also made me want to avoid marriage and having children.

She used to cry roughly three times a year. Now she seemed to cry three times before breakfast. Could that be considered progress?

If I had a nervous breakdown every time something awful happened in the world, I'd be crazier than a shithouse rat.

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.

An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.

The fact is when I get pissed off about something or something awful has happened, I just say, 'You know what? Thank you very much. Thank you for the lyrics. Because that is exactly what you just gave me.' There's no real negative then. So if something happens, I don't cry about it. I just find myself a pen and I figure it out.

My ability to turn good news into anxiety is rivaled only by my ability to turn anxiety into chin acne.

I give myself a good cry if I need it. But then I concentrate on the good things still in my life. I don't allow myself any more self-pity than that. A little each every morning, a few tears, and that's all.

The more we ignore our emotions, the more likely they are to wield a powerful influence over us.

Anger is a choice, as well as a habit. It is a learned reaction to frustration, in which you behave in ways that you would rather not. In fact, severe anger is a form of insanity. You are insane whenever you are not in control of your behavior. Therefore, when you are angry and out of control, you are temporarily insane.

We all build internal sea walls to keep at bay the sadnesses of life and the often overwhelming forces within our minds. In whatever way we do this--through love, work, family, faith, friends, denial, alcohol, drugs, or medication, we build these walls, stone by stone, over a lifetime.

Resilience is not what happens to you. It’s how you react to, respond to, and recover from what happens to you.

Because I know that hope and fear are connected, I put my mask of hope on.

Whenever she felt like crying, she would instead become angry—at someone else or at herself—which meant that it was rare for her to shed tears.

I learned how to stop crying. I learned how to hide inside of myself. I learned how to be somebody else. I learned how to be cold and numb.

... every time I got disappointed I'd remember the Roseannadanna philosophy that says that you shouldn't cry over split milk 'cause if you spill some milk and instead of cleaning it up you just walk over it and start crying, they're gonna put you on lithium.