R. D. Laing Quotes

Yet I will make you all love me and I will punish myself to spite your love.

You can compel fear. You can even make someone feel they're in love if they're isolated and dependent for long enough. But laughter is free.

The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love, and then we torture them. The more we love them, and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story.

I opened myself to you only to be skinned alive. The more vulnerable I became, the faster and more deft your knife. Knowing what was happening, still I stayed and let you carve more. That's how much I loved you. That's how much.

Dreams can twist your emotions like no reality can.

Tempt not a desperate man

On those occasions when he had killed in the dark, he later needed to see his victims' faces because, in some unlit corner of his heart, he half expected to find his own face looking up at him, ice-white and dead-eyed. "Deep down," the dream-victim had said, "You know that you're already dead yourself, burnt out inside. You realize that you have far more in common with your victims after you've killed them than before.

Long since, the desert wind wiped away our footprints in the sand. But at every second of my existence, I remember what happened, and you still walk in my dreams and in my reality. Thank you for having crossed my path.

I had been struck by the analogy between neurosis and romanticism. Romanticism was truly a parallel to neurosis. It demanded of reality an illusory world, love, an absolute which it could never obtain, and thus destroyed itself by the dream.

I am accused. I dream of massacres. I am a garden of black and red agonies. I drink them, Hating myself, hating and fearing. And now the world conceives Its end and runs toward it, arms held out in love.

But I still did not realize how mad she was, and how accustomed to dreaming; and that she would not cry out for reality, rather would feed reality to her dreams, a demon elf feeding her spinning wheel with the reeds of the world so she might make her own weblike universe.

My head was spinning, I had never seen blood. Four years old, this don't feel like love.

Heroic dreams are the consolation of the unhappy. After all, when people like us say we're being heroic, it usually means we're about to kill each other--or kill ourselves.

Waking up from a dream of violence is much the same as waking up from a dream of love. You must go on living your life.

Other arms reach out to me, Other eyes smile tenderly, Still in peaceful dreams I see, The road leads back to you.

Admixing the inner space of dream, trance, and myth with the events of everyday existence characterized every belief system worldwide before the Greeks.....time meandered back and forth between reality and myth.

My inner chemistry had been hijacked by a mad scientist, who poured the fizzy, volatile contents of my heart from a test tube marked SOBER REALITY into another labeled SUNNY DELUSION, and back again, faster and faster, until the floor of my life was slick with spillage.

Turning away, I stared at the long road winding off ahead of me. I sighed. This trip might take awhile. "Then start walking, Rose," I muttered to myself. I set off, off to kill the man I loved.

Once you start losing reality, when you start losing reality with yourself, sometimes people just get dizzy.

I've always believed that you shouldn't want to mend a broken heart, because that's someone you don't want to forget. Scars can be good.

Work on psychological blocks like shame and guilt - they falsely color your reality.

In reality of everyday occurrences I've had to submit to people in order not to lose them. It's less the submission that bothers me, I guess, than how it makes my life miserable. And what happens if I can't forgive myself for making that choice? And what if, in order to keep on living, I have to continue to accept myself? What am I supposed to do? Conclusion: It'd be best if I'm destroyed. The best thing is for me just to vanish.

Keep some souvenirs of your past, or how will you ever prove it wasn't all a dream?

Non- Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension. (Dreams In The Witch-House)

The dream of life is really an illusion, and everybody lives in the reality he or she creates - a virtual reality that is only true for the one who creates it.