Avoidance Mechanism Quotes

At bottom the world isn't a joke. We only joke about it to avoid an issue with someone, to let someone know that we know he's there with his questions; to disarm him by seeming to have heard and done justice to his side of the standing argument.

At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.

We tend to dismiss things we don't particularly like, or that we find disturbing, as aberrations.

The states of birth, suffering, love, and death, are extreme states: extreme, universal, and inescapable. We all know this, but we would rather not know it. The artist is present to correct the delusions to which we are all prey in our attempts to avoid this knowledge." - James Baldwin, "The Creative Process

I bury things in the back of my mind I don't really want to deal with.

When I'm scared, my natural state is to hide and run for cover.

Waking up was a daily cruelty, an affront, and she avoided it by not sleeping.

I used to think that humor was the only way to appreciate how wonderful and terrible the world is, to celebrate how big life is. But now I think the opposite. Humor is a way of shrinking from that wonderful and terrible world.

My daddy's response [to fear of being poor] was to never talk about money or what might happen if it ran out.

I focused my mind and energies on short-term Trump problems, which allowed me to avoid thinking about my own long-term Trump problem of having given him the benefit of the doubt for more than a decade, despite having many reasons not to.

Want to play some Battleship?” I wasn’t leaving him alone with that thing in there. Chad armed himself with a notebook, and we went to war. Historically, war has often been used as a distraction for problems at home.

Gods you avoid won't hurt you.