Bill McKibben Quotes

I actually believe in denial.

To tell you the truth, I've just been avoiding everything.

Denial is a very powerful thing.

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.

The evasions of her little novel were exactly those of her life. Everything she did not wish to confront was also missing from her novella--and was necessary to it.

Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead.

We will often do anything to pretend that nothing is on our minds.

It's always been hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be known as hope.

I consider myself to be a relatively helpful person, and there's an interesting line when hope starts to become the way you actually mask or hide from what's really happening.

It doesn't matter if the truth is right there out in front of your eyes. You will find a way, a mechanism, in order to keep your own system of denial. So as I always say it, denial is a river that runs in the - in Egypt. So we became very good in that.

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.

Denial is much more then an Egyptian River.

People would rather be deceived than have the truth cause them anxiety

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

A drinking man's someone who wants to forget he isn't still young an' believing.

That's maybe the reason he does so many things so that he will not have to think .

You may be sure that when a man begins to call himself a realist he is preparing to do something that he is secretly ashamed of doing.

[P]erhaps you notice how the denial is so often the preface to the justification.

We have to have a version of our own story that we keep telling ourselves that allows us to get up in the morning. This version of yourself is what you sell to yourself. I think it necessarily includes ... not looking at certain things. Everybody's got some blind spot.

There are lots of things that you can brush under the carpet about yourself until you're faced with somebody whose needs won't be put off.

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

I'd chosen instead to just change my route, go miles out of the way, as if avoiding it would make it go away once and for all.

Denial can be a pathology or a survival mechanism - and sometimes it's both.

People have a habit of inventing fictions they will believe wholeheartedly in order to ignore the truth they cannot accept.