emotional survival Quotes

I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child. . . that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination.

Humor was another of the soul's weapons in the fight for self-preservation.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

Neither love nor fire can subsist without perpetual motion; both cease to live so soon as they cease to hope, or to fear.

Yes, doing a work, telling a story very much represents a way to save my own life, and on so many levels.

I realized then that a man who had lived only one day could easily live for a hundred years in prison. He would have enough memories to keep him from being bored

My anger has meant pain to me but it has also meant survival, and before I give it up I'm going to be sure that there is something at least as powerful to replace it on the road to clarity.

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable.

I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.

It's very hard to keep your spirits up. You've got to keep selling yourself a bill of goods, and some people are better at lying to themselves than others. If you face reality too much, it kills you.... you've got to find an answer to the question: Why go on?

When you are alone - at sea, in the polar dark - an absence can keep you alive. The one you love maintains your mind. But when she's merely across the city, this is an absence that eats you to the bone.

I believe that having something to hope for - even if it's just a better tomorrow- is the most powerful drug on this planet.

Music feels like a six sense to me, and it's never been just a hobby. It's something that I have to do to breathe. It's an extension of who I am.

I need to write about love. I need to think and think and write about love-otherwise, my soul won’t survive.

Why one writes is a question I can answer easily, having so often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me - the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art.

I have a soft spot for musicians. If a man could ride this roller coaster with me and come out alive, then I guess we'd deserve each other's company.

I have never known a patient to portray his parents more negatively than he actually experienced them in childhood but always more positively--because idealization of his parents was essential for his survival.

People couldn't bear to go on living if they faced every cold truth about themselves.

Bad love is better than no love at all, at least you know you're alive.

The truth is the thing I invented so I could live.

Basically, that's why I wrote: to save my ass, to save my ass from the madhouse, from the streets, from myself.

Life's tallest order is to keep the feelings up, to make two dollars' worth of euphoria go the distance. And life can't do that. So fiction does.

I never would have made it if I could not have laughed. It lifted me momentarily out of this horrible situation, just enough to make it livable.

As much as I am a huge soccer fan, music just kills it when it comes to importance. I could go to a desert island without a football and survive happily, but if I had to go without music, I think I'd end up killing myself. It fuels my soul. It always has.

The great lesson that nature seems to teach us at all ages is self-dependence, self-protection, self-support. In the hours of our keenest sufferings all are thrown wholly on themselves for consolation.