Jessica Brown Findlay Quotes

I grew up in a family that despised displays of strong emotion, rage in particular. We stewed. We sulked. When arguments did occur, they were full-scale conniptions, and we regarded them as family failings.

So many women keep their anger inside and let it build until they explode and then people blow them off again.

In almost any situation, it is far more devastating to keep your icy cool while the other person gets herself in a flush-cheeked, teary-eyed hot mess yelling in your face.

I'm no longer bossy in the honest sense; I've mastered (mistressed) the art of passive-aggression.

When I'm angry on TV, I'm actually not. I'm manipulating you as an owner.

Criticising is a weapon of the weak.

Don't you find that in a weak physique it is difficult to control the sex - appetite or anger?

To avoid taking responsibility, I become unresponsive but hang on until the other person leaves me.

Beware the ire of the calm.

That's the thing about someone who rarely gets upset: when they do, you notice.

Can you let your son's body become the same temperature as your son's head before you turn this into a political campaign against the president? Could you do that?

It takes me a long time to lose my temper, but once lost I could not find it with a dog.

You're always feeling powerless in life. If you're in an abusive relationship or working for what we call a psychotic boss sometimes the only option is to leave because you're emotions get so entangled with these manipulative people that staying there you're just helpless because they're good at passive aggressive games and you're not, so you have to leave.

Are you angry? Punch a pillow. Was it satisfying? Not hardly. These days people are too angry for punching. What you might try is stabbing. Take an old pillow and lay it on the front lawn. Stab it with a big pointy knife. Again and again and again. Stab hard enough for the point of the knife to go into the ground. Stab until the pillow is gone and you are just stabbing the earth again and again, as if you want to kill it for continuing to spin, as if you are getting revenge for having to live on this planet day after day, alone.

Sometimes if you let people do things to you, you're really doing it to them.

THE SERUM WEARS off five hours later, when the sun is just beginning to set. Tobias shut me in my room for the rest of the day, checking on me every hour. This time when he comes in, I am sitting on the bed, glaring at the wall. “Thank God,” he says, pressing his forehead to the door. “I was beginning to think it would never wear off and I would have to leave you here to … smell flowers, or whatever you wanted to do while you were on that stuff.

Bad temper is its own safety valve. He who can bark does not bite.

My dislike has no consequences. It accrues only in my mind—like preserves on a shelf or guns zeroing in, and never firing.

Ooh, the silent treatment.

The cruelest lies are often told in silence. A man may have sat in a room for hours and not opened his teeth, and yet come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator. And how many loves have perished because, from pride, or spite, or diffidence, or that unmanly shame which withholds a man from daring to betray emotion, a lover, at the critical point of the relation, has but hung his head and held his tongue?

Avoid that romantic trap: saying more than you feel, forcing yourself to feel more than you've said!

I don't ask what Alex sees in him because I'm afraid my disapproval will make her latch on to him even more. That's how it works. I'll have to pretend he doesn't bother me and that I don't want to drown him in the bay.

She tried to get even with him through psychological warfare but couldn't, because he didn't care.

Like the greatest virtue and the worst dogs, the fiercest hatred is silent.

I feared Sarah was one of those women who instead of laughing said, "That's funny," or instead of smiling said, "That's interesting," or instead of saying, "You are a stupid blithering idiot," said, "Well I think it's a little more complicated than that.