Alice Miller 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.

What you fear your whole life comes to pass. You end up living toward it, you spend your life running from it but your foot is nailed to the sidewalk. You circle around it until you wear yourself own.

And during the campaign of 1936, she writes that she and her brother would always rather be out doing things when they're sick, rather than take to their beds. And I think Eleanor Roosevelt always responded to pain by doing more, by doing something, by being active. And I think she just couldn't bear to look at her childhood grief. And she didn't.

These problems have been here so long that the only way I’ve been able to function at all is by learning to ignore them. Else I would be in a constant state of panic, unable to think or act constructively.

I was poisoning myself with alcohol and medicating myself. I was trying to numb things. I was trying not to feel things, and that's ridiculous. It's one of the dumbest things you can do, because all you're doing is postponing the inevitable. Someday you'll have to look all those things in the eye rather than try to numb the pain.

Folks working late, I had a babysitter. I ain't about to sit here and name her. I was almost 8 when she came in late, woke me up with a game to play. Did a few things that it's hard to say. Told me to keep that secret safe. I'm trying to act like it ain't real. Had my innocence just stripped from me, and I still don't know how to feel.

There's a resistance for people to talk about things that make them feel guilty. When natural disasters happen, it's easier not to feel guilty about it.

In real life, when you have an emotional experience, it's never just because of the thing that's been said. There's the backstory. It's like [Ernest] Hemingway's iceberg theory - the current emotional moment is the tip of the iceberg and all of the past is the seven-eighths of the iceberg that's underwater.

After a long moment I closed the freezer door. I wanted to lie down and press my cheek against the cool linoleum. Instead I reached out with my little finger and flipped the Barbie's head. It went thack thack against the door. I flipped it again. Thack thack. Whee. I had a new hobby.

But... what about us? What about the past?" she asks blankly. "The past isn't real. it's just a dream," I say. "Don't mention the past.

The unconscious - that is to say, the 'repressed' - offers no resistance whatever to the efforts of the treatment. Indeed, it itself has no other endeavour than to break through the pressure weighing down on it and force its way either to consciousness or to a discharge through some real action.

The real trick is to stay alive as long as you live.

I had the idea that there were two worlds. There was a real world as I called it, a world of wars and boxing clubs and children'shomes on back streets, and this real world was a world where orphans burned orphans.... I liked the other world in which almost everyone lived. The imaginary world.

An animal’s memory is not in words, they’ve got to be in pictures – it’s very detailed so let’s say the animal gets afraid of something. Like, for example you beat the dog up and they're looking at you and your Nike shoes or any sneaker or anything like a Nike, he's likely to be afraid of that - so anything without that Nike wingtip, he's likely to be fine. If you think about it, that's a different picture, than a Nike type shoe. Its specific because its sensory based.

This is the real and the only reason for friendship: to provide a mirror so the other person can contemplate his image from the past, which, without the eternal blah-blah of memories between pals, would long ago have disappeared.

The reverberation often exceeds through silence the sound that sets it off; the reaction occasionally outdoes by way of repose the event that stimulated it; and the past not uncommonly takes a while to happen, and some long time to figure out.

As soon as an actress is past 40, they call her a grande dame. As long as I'm here in good health, I'm stable.

Papa Hegel he say that all we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. I knew people who can't even learn from what happened this morning. Hegel must have been taking the long view.

I long for the days of disorder. I want them back, the days when I was alive on the earth, rippling in the quick of my skin, heedless and real. I was dumb-muscled and angry and real. This is what I long for, the breach of peace, the days of disarray when I walked real streets and did things slap-bang and felt angry and ready all the time, a danger to others and a distant mystery to myself.

Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.

He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging... This confers the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil.

Appeals to the past are among the commonest of strategies in interpretations of the present.

We should always look back on our own past with a sort of contempt, as long as the tenderness is there - but please let some of the contempt be there.

When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning.

As long as there are kids who are pissed off and have no real way in venting out that anger, heavy metal will live on.