Patty Duke Quotes

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.

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

I have a very highly developed sense of denial.

When I'm photographing, I think - like any rescue worker who deals with tragedy - you have to have some protective barrier around your heart so you can do your job. You tend to have a delayed reaction to things. I feel things more deeply after I put the camera down.

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

In Ronald Reagan's chaotic childhood, the imagination was armor. There is nothing unusual about that; transcending the doubts, hesitations, and fears swirling around you by casting yourself internally as the hero of your own adventure story is a characteristic psychic defense mechanism of the Boy Who Disappears.

I would make people who bullied me laugh, so that's my defense mechanism.

Narcissism and self-deception are survival mechanisms without which many of us might just jump off a bridge.

I think denial's fascinating. It's a jokey word, but it really happens, and sometimes in enormous ways.

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

Denial is a very powerful thing.

Hillbillies learn from an early age to deal with uncomfortable truths by avoiding them or by pretending better truths exist. This tendency might make for psychological resilience, but it also makes it hard for Appalachians to look at themselves honestly.

Denial is not always a bad thing. Without it, you couldn't function. For instance, if you were hyperaware and hypervigilant regarding all the dangers in the world - from driving your car to crossing the street to eating food that might have contaminants in it to taking medications that have many side effects, etc. - you would become frozen.

Blessed be shock. Blessed be the part of us that protects us from too much pain and sorrow. At the heart of life is a fusebox.

The denial of suffering is, in fact a better definition of illness than its acceptance.

Can you suppose there's any harm in looking as cheerful and being as cheerful as our poor circumstances will permit?

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

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

I cover my face with my arms because this isn't happening. It isn't possible. For someone to make Peeta forget he loves me . . . no one can do that.

Sorrow comes with so many defense mechanisms. You have your shock, your denial, your getting wasted, your cracking jokes, and your religion. You also have the old standby catchall—the blind belief in fate, the whole "things happening for a reason" drill.

I have a hot memory, but I know I've forgotten many things, too, just squashed things in favor of survival.

As a journalist, it is so easy to get hardened when you see so many stories that are disturbing. Sometimes it's just your survival mechanism that makes you hardened to some of it.

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've been living with the minor second all my life and I finally found a way to handle it.

Where belief is painful we are slow to believe.