Laura van den Berg Quotes

I tend to take things personally. But I can only take so much, and then I jump back. I have strong survival skills.

Life unravels the way it does, and it has an effect on you, but you have to take responsibility for dealing with it.

I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

Novelists are in the business of constructing consciousness out of words, and that's what we all do, cradle to grave. The self is a story we tell.

A protective self-narrative during conflict and duress sometimes obscures us from seeing the worst in ourselves. When the self-sustaining haze lifts after that conflict has subsided, we may recognize in ourselves the flaws the other saw in us at the time that we didn't have the emotional bandwidth to examine in the moment.

You find it hard to deal with certain things and as you get older it becomes easier.

We're not really allowed to admit that, maybe as humans, sometimes we need to revise our own histories and frame things in a more positive light than is true.

How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but — mainly — to ourselves.

You may not be able to change a situation, but with humor you can change your attitude about it.

The past is not simply the past, but a prism through which the subject filters his own changing self-image.

I can see how, given a certain degree of sensitivities, proclivities and rage, I could have ended up differently.

When something really extreme happens, you have to find a way to embrace that and include it in how you think about the character. Sometimes it's not easy.

What I do is sometimes - at least in Germany - met with wounding campaigns. I always face the question: should I grow myself a thick skin and ignore it, or should I let myself be wounded? I've decided to be wounded, since, if I grew a thick skin, there are other things I wouldn't feel any more.

If people are telling you a story about themselves, they gradually map their own local territories and know themselves by them.

To deny that human beings are filled with anti-social passions betrays a denial of reality and a lack of self-awareness. One has to be taught nonsense for a great many formative years to believe it.

If you're being attacked by something on the outside, which I feel a lot being in show business, you just have to dial it back and breathe and know that you are protected.

The main thing I've learned is that we all have to learn to work with - and appreciate - the brain we've been given, and not waste time wishing things were easier.

The problem is when you are writing something in retrospective, it needs a lot of courage not to change, or you will forget a certain reality, and you will just take in consideration your view today.

What I have learned from my work up to now, is to try to be open, but also protect myself by not letting the good and the evil get too much importance.

As years passed away I have formed the habit of looking back upon that former self as upon another person, the remembrance of whose emotions has been a solace in adversity and added zest to the enjoyment of prosperity.

I'm surprised that I've survived my own dysfunction, really.

Life at any time can become difficult: life at any time can become easy. It all depends upon how one adjusts oneself to life.

Life itself still remains a very effective therapist.

What made me empathic was my depressions.

I learned there are ways to approach life. You can never change the events, but you can change the way you approach them.