Emotional Evasion Quotes

When we hide our failings from others, we seek to hide them from ourselves, and it is in the latter attempt that we are most successful.

There are some things we do because we convince ourselves it would be better for everyone involved. We tell ourselves that it's the right thing to do, the altruistic thing to do. It's far easier than telling ourselves the truth.

I seldom look at myself to avoid any self-criticism.

Such is our need to shower blame on some distant entity when it is we who lack the courage to face up to what is there before us.

When I'm facing an issue or a challenge sometimes, it's easier for me to avoid really facing that or dealing with it, and just go make films.

But when a man suspects any wrong it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself. And much this way it was with me. I said nothing and tried to think nothing.

I think humor is used a lot of the time to keep people from getting too close. Humor side-steps and shifts the meaning.

The "brightness" of the 15 percent might or might not indicate a profound feeling for the causes of things; it is largely verbal and symbol-manipulating, and is almost certainly partly an obsessional device not to know and touch risky matter, just as Freud long ago pointed out that the nagging questions of small children are a substitute for asking the forbidden questions.

Someone once said to me, 'Some of us choose to live with a lifeboat just a little bit out of our reach.' I'd like to reach a point where I no longer bullshit myself. I think that's the natural human condition - to lie to yourself. Because the truth is painful.

Divisions of the kind were fashionable at that time, and it was so easy to stifle one's need to help by deciding that help could neither be accepted nor understood.

Perhaps I became so vague, so exhilarated with vagueness, precisely in order to forestall a recognition of the final term of the syllogism that begins: If one man loves another he is a homosexual; I love a man.

We will often do anything to pretend that nothing is on our minds.

I speed up past mirrors.

I want you. I want you. I want you. Anything to avoid saying: I love you.

He stepped down, avoiding any long look at her as one avoids long looks at the sun, but seeing her as one sees the sun, without looking.

The whole idea of death is something that we tend to kind of really not deal with at all.

Acting is a marvelous profession ... If you can spend enough time playing other people, you don't have to think too much about your own character and motivations.

Honesty lies in understanding our close and necessary relationship with not wanting to hear the truth.

Spirituality: the last refuge of a failed human. Just another way of distracting yourself from who you really are.

You know when you get into that thing where people want to discuss the relationship? I'd rather discuss what was on telly, avoid the issue, discuss anything other than the relationship.

When I die, people will say it is the best thing for me. It is because they know it is the worst. They want to avoid the feeling of pity. As though they were the people most concerned!

I think we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communication is too alarming. To enter into someone else's life is too frightening. To disclose to others the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility.

I can intellectualize myself out of anything.

Do you know your particular fears? And what do you usually do with them? You run away from them, don't you, or invent ideas and images to cover them? But to run away from fear is only to increase it.

People do think that if they avoid the truth, it might change to something better before they have to hear it.