Amelia Atwater-Rhodes Quotes

Humor is just another defense against the universe.

Sadness is also a kind of defence.

I'd always used humour as a weapon, as a protection. But being able to make people laugh is a way of not getting in too deep; it's a quick, transient fix.

I kept a steel wall around my moral and sexual instincts - protecting them, I thought, from the threats of the real world. This gave me a tremendous advantage in politics, if not in my soul. The true me, my spiritual core, slipped further and further from reach.

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.

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.

I feared vulnerability more than my actual emotional pain itself!

Humor is a way of holding off how awful life can be, to protect yourself.

Blaming is a way to protect your heart, trying to protect what is soft and open and tender in yourself.

The best way to prevent a heartache was to cushion the coming blow.

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 arrows of malevolence ... however barbed and well pointed, never can reach the most vulnerable part of me; though, whilst I am up as a mark, they will be continually aimed.

I'll tell you that for me, one when someone used to say something that was true, one way I knew it was true was that I immediately felt defensive. I blocked it off, and I went to war with them in my mind and suffered all that goes with it. And they were only saying what was true.

Anger is a passion, so it makes people feel alive and makes them feel they matter and are in charge of their lives. So people often need to renew their anger a long time after the cause of it has died, because it is a protection against helplessness and emptiness just like howling in the night. And it makes them feel less vulnerable for a little while.

From this haunting feeling of being not wanted, which remained a recurrent haunt through life, I found two ways of escape, both of which in changing form also persisted. One was the invention of gods, the other was personal efficiency in work.

Guilt soon learns to lie.

Music was my way of keeping people from looking through and around me. I wanted the heavies to know I was around.

On my way out I was even going to shake his hand, but I remembered just in time that I'd killed a man.

Passion persuades me one way, reason another. I see the better and approve it, but I follow the worse.

Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past—the past of others, loaded onto their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace.

Many years later, a psychiatrist friend of mine said something to us. He said, "Respect denial." It's a powerful force.

Whether a man lives or dies in vain can be measured only by the way he faces his own problems, by the success or failure of the inner conflict within his own soul. And of this no one may know save God.

A war was coming either way. Now all I had to do was choose my opponent

He found that it was easy to make a heroic gesture, but hard to abide by its results.