Chogyam Trungpa Quotes

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.

I spent much of my life hiding.

I started to wear the sunglasses all the time at school, hiding behind them... I'd walk down the hallways, practically hugging the wall, dragging my head against it like I was crazy.

I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided.

I was not allowed to think of him. That was something I tried to be very strict about. Of course I slipped; I was only human. But I was getting better, and so the pain was something I could avoid for days at a time now. The trade-off was the never-ending numbness. Between pain and nothing, I'd chosen nothing.

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.

I quickly laugh at everything for fear of having to cry.

When something's painful, you just avoid it. Why bother dredging up the past if it's nothing but bad stuff?

I have a very ostrich mentality. I feel like I have my head in the sand so no one can see me.

After I lost my fiance, it seemed like it would be better to always be alone than to risk being hurt again.

I'm a sponge. I sometimes don't want to go out of my house because it's like, 'Who's going to make me cry today?'

My day is spent hiding from people.

Maybe by nature and because of my past I protect myself. The minute I feel any tension I take myself away.

Me and my needs were driving my mother away. Me and my needs retreated to my closet, disappeared into fairy tales. I started making up a world where my needs wouldn´t exist at all.

All I can do is stand still- I feel like if I just stand still, I can stop it from being true, I can pretend that everything is all right.

I am a grenade," I said again. "I just want to stay away from people and read books and think and be with you guys because there's nothing I can do about hurting you: You're too invested, so just please let me do that, okay? "I'm going to go to my room and read for awhile, okay? I'm fine. I really am fine: I just want to go read for a while.

Humor is an escape, because you cannot think about your problems when you are trying to be funny; so, in essence, "being a humorist" gives you a valid excuse to hide from your pain.

"Most of us tend to belittle all suffering except our own," said Mary. "I think it's fear. We don't want to come too near in case we're sucked in and have to share it".

Oh, no, I was afraid of that! I'd better go and hide.

Fear is like a little garden spider that makes us jump back or the poor lost bee on the steering wheel that we blame for our automobile wreck. The problem in fear is our response - the way we treat animals or insects that frighten us. . . . Fear is also the universal scapegoat we blame when we take flight from intimacy or shrink up inside ourselves in a thousand little ways.

I just don't like to go out and deal with the real world. It's scary.

I didn't want to talk about what happened, so it seemed safest not to talk at all.

Some things, it was better not to think about. It just made you mad and angry.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing. At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.

I'm still prone to periods of isolation, still more fearful of the world out there and more averse to pleasure and risk than I'd like to be; I still direct more energy toward controlling and minimizing appetites than toward indulging them.