Anthony Storr Quotes

Sometimes when things are way too big and I can't control it, I do sort of a weird thing where I kind of check out a little bit. It's all about self-preservation for me.

He has no right to threaten my boyfriends. I'm eighteen. An adult. I don't need his help. I can threaten my boyfriends myself.

I avoid people who I actually like. I suppose that’s a phobia but also a habit.

Never did he once consider directing his hatred toward the hunters. Such an emotion would have destroyed him ... His subconscious knew what his min did not guess-that hating them would have consumed him, burned him up like a piece of soft coal, leaving only flakes of ash and a question mark of smoke.

We build a shell around it, like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function , day in, day out. Immune to others’ pain and loss.

Why is it so much easier to talk to a stranger? why do we feel we need to disconnect in order to connect? If I wrote "Dear Sofia" or "Dear Boomer" or "Dear Lily's Great-Aunt" at the top of this postcard, wouldn't that change the words that followed? Of course it would. But the question is: When I wrote "Dear Lily," was that just a version of "Dear Myself"? I know it was more than that. But it was also less than that, too

Human beings need to watch out for reasonless niceness too. It's never reasonless and its reason's not usually nice.

The leftist is anti-individualistic... He is not the sort of person who has an inner sense of confidence in his own ability to solve his own problems and satisfy his own needs.

The solution is to gradually become free of societal rewards and learn how to substitute for them rewards that are under one's own powers. This is not to say that we should abandon every goal endorsed by society; rather, it means that, in addition to or instead of the goals others use to bribe us with, we develop a set of our own.

Nearly all men are slaves for the same reason that the Spartans assigned for the servitude of the Persians -- lack of power to pronounce the syllable, "No." To be able to utter that word and live alone, are the only means to preserve one's freedom and one's character.

I always say neediness is the cause of suffering. I'm not the only one who says it. It's something I adopted and I believe.

You have to make an effort to be in an unprotected environment because everyone thinks you're a completely incapable idiot who couldn't possibly brush his teeth without an assistant. You have to make an effort in order to be able to actually experience the country that you're in.

I guess when I'm frightened or in pain or maybe very bored I've tried to hold myself together by imposing a narrative order on the experience as it happens.

Self-deception is sometimes as necessary a tool as a crowbar.

Everything has changed. I cannot be used anymore. Those days are over. I know too much. What I do now, I do for me.

It is sad and wrong to be so dependent for the life of my life on any human being as I am on you; but I cannot by any force of logic cure myself at this date, when it has become second nature.

Whatever I thought might hold me back, I avoided. I crossed girls off my list, except as tools for my sexual needs.

I don't need marriage. I don't need anyone to take care of all my needs and desires. I can take care of them myself now.

I decided early in graduate school that I needed to do something about my moods. It quickly came down to a choice between seeing a psychiatrist or buying a horse. Since almost everyone I knew was seeing a psychiatrist, and since I had an absolute belief that I should be able to handle my own problems, I naturally bought a horse.

What interests me, ... is why people are so repelled when, after all, everyone started life attached. In a sense, the twins have never been born because they are still tied by an umbilical cord. Relationships between women - daughters, mothers, friends - are one of my strong interests.

She thought of what it would be like to grow up without the one certainty that every baby deseved - when I'm hurt or cold or scared, someone will come and care for me - and how that absence could warp you so that you'd lash out at the people you loved, driving them away when all you wanted to do was pull them closer.

Every now and then we discover in the seething mass of humanity round us a person who does not seem to need anybody else, and the contrast with ourselves is stinging.

Pretend hard enough and maybe it will go away.

Perhaps what I am about to say will appear strange to you gentlemen, socialists, progressives, humanitarians as you are, but I never worry about my neighbor, I never try to protect society which does not protect me -- indeed, I might add, which generally takes no heed of me except to do me harm -- and, since I hold them low in my esteem and remain neutral towards them, I believe that society and my neighbor are in my debt.

Only when he has ceased to need things can a man truly be his own master and so really exist.