Dian Fossey Quotes

..but maybe this was a defense mechanism. Maybe my mind was making me see things I refused to accept were gone forever. It was filling the void, because that was easier than letting go.

You can see desperation in people who are too eager to laugh because they're in such a hurry not to look at what's confronting them in their lives and that's kind of sad because there's a kind of pornographic aspect to it, of making some sort of pain go away, of hovering around a pain, making yourself numb, not feel anything.

Where belief is painful we are slow to believe.

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

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

The only thing he could do to stay alive was not to allow himself the anguish of that memory. He erased it from his mind, although from time to time in the years that were left to him he would feel it revive, with no warning and for no reason, like the sudden pang of an old scar.

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.

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.

I will usually be in denial about that, too, because I really don't like that. Sometimes I will recognize it and sometimes someone will say, "are you okay?" And then you think, "Oh, maybe I'm not."

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

Denial, perhaps, is a necessary human mechanism to cope with the heartaches of life.

I laugh when I see people in pain. Sometimes I think it is a defense mechanism from childhood, where you're in so much pain you have to laugh. It is a survival mechanism.

I can't admit things; that's why I can't go to funerals and stuff like that. I find it very, very difficult to deal with that kind of reality. I shut myself off totally because it affects me so badly.

Even with my father and brother dying, I didn't quite process the grief.

Denial helps us to pace our feelings of grief. There is a grace in denial. It is nature's way of letting in only as much as we can handle.

We have developed this unbelievable ability to deny. We have to. If we didn't, we'd go crazy.

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

There are some things which are so horrific that some people feel they can't do anything about it: that the natural, understandable response is to tune it out.

I'm very good at denial.

Victims don't want to know they're victims. I guess that's just victim psychology: if you don't know about it, it's not really happening.

I pretended to be super-cool and not be bothered by things and play off any kind of heartache when I was younger, for sure.

Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.

Obviously I wasn't playing well at the time. But as a player, you lie to yourself. You say, "There's nothing wrong. I'm just not on time [at the plate]." You make something else up because pain is not an option.

As we do at such times I turned on my automatic pilot and went through the motions of normalcy on the outside, so that I could concentrate all my powers on surviving the near-mortal wound inside.

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