emotional entrapment Quotes

A boy is not free to find a partner of his own as long as he must be the partner to his mother.

Many a marriage hardly differs from prostitution, except being harder to escape from.

She felt a cage coming down around her; too late she realized that he had her trapped by the heart. And like any unwilling animal that was well and truly caught, she could escape only by leaving a piece of herself behind.

My heart's in my hand, and my hand is pierced, and my hand's in the bag, and the bag is shut, and my heart is caught.

Like a bird, when his cage is opened, stays on his perch, dazzled by freedom, the postponed traveler does not see that his cage, with its bars of anxiety, it is open.

We take refuge in illness and then are trapped there.

Quite often, as life goes on, when we feel completely secure as we go on our way, we suddenly notice that we are trapped in error, that we have allowed ourselves to be taken in by individuals, by objects, have dreamt up an affinity with them which immediately vanishes before our waking eye; and yet we cannot tear ourselves away, held fast by some power that seems incomprehensible to us. Sometimes, however, we become fully aware and realize that error as well as truth can move and spur us on to action.

Once you create a self-justifying storyline, your emotional entrapment within it quadruples.

No grand inquisitor has in readiness such terrible tortures as has anxiety and no spy knows how to attack more artfully the man he suspects, choosing the instant when he is weakest; nor knows how to lay traps where he will be caught and ensnared as anxiety knows how, and no sharp-witted judge knows how to interrogate, to examine the accused, as anxiety does, which never lets him escape.

The danger with hatred is, once you start in on it, you get a hundred times more than you bargained for. Once you start, you can't stop.

Her absence had felt like torture--almost a form of personal punishment. He had nobody to discuss his feelings with, and for the first time he realised with appalling clarity what a destructive hold she had over him.

The paradox of vengefulness is that it makes men dependent upon those who have harmed them, believing that their release from pain will come only when they make their tormentors suffer. In seeking the Bird's death to free himself, Louie had chained himself, once again, to his tyrant. During the war, the Bird had been unwilling to let go of Louie; after the war, Louie was unable to let go of the Bird.

Yet there were times when he did love her with all the kindness she demanded, and how was she to know what were those times? Alone she raged against his cheerfulness and put herself at the mercy of her own love and longed to be free of it because it made her less than he and dependent on him. But how could she be free of chains she had put upon herself? Her soul was all tempest. The dreams she had once had of her life were dead. She was in prison in the house. And yet who was her jailer except herself?

Because I understand all the ways of trying to escape, how sometimes you escape one prison only to find you've built yourself a different one.

We are captives of what we love, what we desire, and what we are.

She doesn't give you time for questions as she locks up your arms in hers. And you follow till your sense of direction completely disappears.

Maybe it was a Patty Hearst thing. Stockholm syndrome or whatever it's called when you're being held against your will but then you become sucked in and fall in love. Or if not exactly love, you fall into something you can't see out of. 'I can't shoot a machine gun' becomes 'Hey, this hardly has any kick-back!

I am not in love with him, I am in love with ghosts. So is he, he's in love with ghosts.

Love, sought as an escape from the burden of the self, turns rapidly into a captivity.

Acrid bitterness inevitably seeps into the lives of people who harbor grudges and suppress anger, and bitterness is always a poison. It keeps your pain alive instead of letting you deal with it and get beyond it. Bitterness sentences you to relive the hurt over and over.

I am reading Henry James...and feel myself as one entombed in a block of smooth amber.

Bitterness is the trap that snares the hunter

Trauma is nothing more than being stuck in what you believe.