Anderson Cooper Quotes

All I can do is stand still- I feel like if I just stand still, I can stop it from being true, I can pretend that everything is all right.

I have almost forgotten the taste of fears: The time has been, my senses would have cool’d to hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir as life were in’t: I have supt full with horrors; Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts, cannot once start me.

I know from my own clinical work that when people are beaten and hurt, they numb out so that they can't feel anymore.

How could I stand by and watch my house on fire?

The idea of evil is always subject to denial as a coping mechanism.

So many people witness atrocities and can't take their eyes away from them, but that doesn't mean they're good.

I don't like denial. I don't like repression.

In order to endure death and horror one tends to kill ones own humanity, which is a much greater danger than not being able to bear it.

Images of dead children are so excruciating that we are now well trained to short-circuit our emotional responses to move from horror to suspicion to indifference.

With about a dozen assorted ongoing conflicts in the news every day, and with the stories becoming more horrific, the level of sadness becomes unbearable. And what becomes of our planet when that sadness becomes apathy? Because we feel helpless. And we turn our heads and turn the page.

The best narcissists can block things out and act like nothing ever happened to just keep going.

The body shuts down when it has too much to bear; goes its own way quietly inside, waiting for a better time, leaving you numb and half alive.

When the entire world is built on death and horror, when existence is a constant state of panic, it's hard to get worked up about any one thing. Specific fears have become irrelevant. We've replace them with a smothering blanket far worse.

But sometimes living in denial was the only way to keep a man from going on a killing spree.

There are stories that are true, in which each individual's tale is unique and tragic, and the worst of the tragedy is that we have heard it before, and we cannot allow ourselves to feel it to deeply. We build a shell around it like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function, day in, day out, immune to others' pain and loss. If it were to touch us it would cripple us or make saints of us; but, for the most part, it does not touch us. We cannot allow it to.

There are times when one cannot accept facts for fear of shattering one's being. As I listened to Ian's news, all of Digit's life, since my first meeting with him as a playful little ball of black fluff ten years earlier, passed through my mind. From that moment on, I came to live within an insulated part of myself.

I am always amazed by people who know something is wrong but still insist on ignoring it, as if that will somehow make it go away. They spare themselves the confrontation, but end up boiling in resentment anyway.

I've read that under trauma, that you have this ability to kind of disconnect from the experience.

I thought at the time that I couldn't be horrified anymore, or wounded. I suppose that's a common conceit, that you've already been so damaged that damage itself, in its totality, makes you safe.

All that is left is to us is our being horrified at the loss of our sense of horror.

Labels not only free us from the obligation to think creatively; they numb our sensibilities, our power to feel. During the Vietnam War, the phrase body count entered our vocabulary. It is an ambiguous phrase, inorganic, even faintly sporty. It distanced us from the painful reality of corpses, of dead, mutilated people.

I never said I do not remember, my grandmother corrects. I said I prefer to forget.

The older I get, the more I can't stand violence and have a hard time with seeing people die in horrific ways. It gets harder and harder to watch and deal with that stuff.

was it possible that i was, in the modern term, in denial?

My personal feeling is that human beings have this incredible capacity for denial.