Denial Quotes

“[P]erhaps you notice how the denial is so often the preface to the justification.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.”
― Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

“I felt I was drawing close to that age, that place in life, where you realize one day what you'd told yourself was a Zen detachment turns out to be naked fear. You'd had one serious love relationship in your life and it had ended in tragedy, and the tragedy had broken something inside you. But instead of trying to repair the broken place, or at least really stop and look at it, you skated and joked. You had friends, you were a decent citizen. You hurt no one. And your life was somehow just about half of what it could be.”
― Roland Merullo, A Little Love Story

“There is a moment in our healing journey when our denial crumbles; we realize our experience and it's continued effects on us won't "just go away". That's our breakthrough moment. It's the sun coming out to warm the seeds of hope so they can grow our personal garden of empowerment.”
― Jeanne McElvaney, Healing Insights: Effects of Abuse for Adults Abused as Children

“Have we ever thought that being lost is our destination?”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“I hope someday she meets just the right man and has babies - a whole passel of babies, more than I could have - so she understands how it kills me now that she won't let me hug her when she's in obvious distress. (The Life You've Imagined)”
― Kristina Riggle

“Denial. It’s the only thing that keeps most of us from losing our sanity.”
― Heena Rathore P., Deceived

“The thing about denial is that it doesn't feel like denial when it's going on.”
― Georgina Kleege, Sight Unseen

“The manic relief that comes from the fantasy that we can with one savage slash cut the chains of the past and rise like a phoenix, free of all history, is generally a tipping point into insanity, akin to believing that we can escape the endless constraints of gravity, and fly off a tall building. “I’m freeeee… SPLAT!”.”
― Stefan Molyneux

“He wanted to live in a house built on delusion, would rather believe in a million lies than face one truth.
—Seven Circles Around the Sea, by Mordove Senia”
― Marie Lu, The Rose Society

“Conformity begins the moment you ignore how you feel for acceptance.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Evil originates not in the absence of guilt; but in our effort to escape it.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“It is so much more threatening to have something out of hand than to believe that at any moment I can stop (I started to say "This foolishness") any time I need to. When I wrote the previous letter, I had made up my mind I would show you how I could be very composed and cool and not need to ask you to listen to me nor to explain anything to me nor need any help. By telling you that all this about the multiple personalities was not really true but just put on, I could show, or so I thought, that I did not need you. Well, it would have been easier if it were put on. But the only ruse of which I'm guilty is to have pretended for so long before coming to you that nothing was wrong. Pretending that the personalities did not exist has now caused me to lose about two days.
Three weeks later Sybil reaffirmed her belief in the existence of her other selves in a letter to Miss Updyke, the school nurse of undergraduate days.”
― Flora Rheta Schreiber, Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“The darkness makes everything disappear but it makes nothing go away.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“The mind can forget what the body, defined by each breath, subject to the heart beating, does not.”
― Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War

“Ain't that a sight? With all the things we know and learn, we still ain't touched the big mysteries -- where we come from, where we go next, why we even her. And when something truly miraculous happens, we run and hide in our caves. We deny.”
― Libba Bray, Going Bovine

“Being in a state of denial is a
universally human response to
situations which threaten to
overwhelm. People who were abused
as children sometimes carry their
denial like precious cargo without a
port of destination. It enabled us to
survive our childhood experiences, and often we still live in survival mode decades beyond the actual abuse. We protect ourselves to excess because we learned abruptly and painfully that no one else would.”
― Sarah E. Olson, Becoming One: A Story of Triumph Over Dissociative Identity Disorder

“Actually, nothing hurts like hearing the word slut, unless it is hearing the word rape dropped about carelessly. Again, a word I wouldn't have thought much about, except that when I was in high school a girl gave her senior speech on her best friend's rape. She ended not with an appear for women's rights or self defense, but by begging us to consider our language. We use the word 'rape' so casually, for sports, for a failed test, to spice up jokes. 'The test raped me.' 'His smile went up to justifiable rape.' These references confer casualness upon the word, embedding it into our culture, stripping it of shock value, and ultimately numb us to the reality of rape.”
― Christine Stockton, Sluts

“The sudden silence is horrifying, and it seems to catch my mother off guard. A tiny whimper escapes her, the sound amplified in the stillness. Surely, my father hears her now; surely he and I can't go on pretending she isn't crying.”
― Margaret Peterson Haddix, Double Identity

“I can't stop shaking. I need you. I want you. I can't let myself have you.”
― Kelli Maine, Taken

“When faced with choosing between attributing their pain to “being crazy” and having had abusive parents, clients will choose “crazy” most of the time. Dora, a 38-year-old, was profoundly abused by multiple family perpetrators and has grappled with cutting and eating disordered behaviors for most of her life. She poignantly echoed this dilemma in her therapy:
I hate it when we talk about my family as “dysfunctional” or “abusive.” Think about what you are asking me to accept—that my parents didn't love me, care about me, or protect me. If I have to choose between "being abused" or "being sick and crazy," it's less painful to see myself as nuts than to imagine my parents as evil.”
― Lisa Ferentz, Treating Self-Destructive Behaviors in Trauma Survivors: A Clinician's Guide

“For nothing is so hard to hear as that which is half known, and evaded. One never denies so hotly as in denying to one's self what one fears is true, and one never resents so bitterly as in resenting that which one cannot say one has the right to resent.”
― Susan Glaspell

“Those who deny guilt and sin are like the Pharisees of old who thought our Saviour had a “guilt complex” because He accused them of being whited sepulchers—outside clean, inside full of dead men’s bones. Those who admit that they are guilty are like the public sinners and the publicans of whom Our Lord said, “Amen, I say to you, that the publicans and the harlots shall go into the Kingdom of God before you” (Matt. 21:31). Those who think they are healthy but have a hidden moral cancer are incurable; the sick who want to be healed have a chance. All denial of guilt keeps people out of the area of love and, by inducing self-righteousness, prevents a cure. The two facts of healing in the physical order are these: A physician cannot heal us unless we put ourselves into his hands, and we will not put ourselves into his hands unless we know that we are sick. In like manner, a sinner’s awareness of sin is one requisite for his recovery; the other is his longing for God. When we long for God, we do so not as sinners, but as lovers.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Peace of Soul: Timeless Wisdom on Finding Serenity and Joy by the Century's Most Acclaimed Catholic Bishop

“Denial of one's need for others is the most common type of defense against bonding. If people come from a situation, whether growing up or later in life, where good, safe relationships were not available to them, they learn to deny that they even want them. Why want what you can't have? They slowly get rid of their awareness of the need.”
― Henry Cloud, Changes That Heal: How to Understand the Past to Ensure a Healthier Future

“Very often history is a means of denying the past. Denying the past is to refuse to recognise its integrity. To fit it, force it, function it, to suck out the spirit until it looks the way you think it should. We are all historians in our small way.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“A denial heralded the thrice crowing of a cock, and an insincerity was like the kiss of Judas.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“If you been feeling or acting crazy, think about it perhaps you are.”
― Victoria Addino

“Our world is suffering from metastatic cancer. Stage 4. Racism has spread to nearly every part of the body politic, intersecting with bigotry of all kinds, justifying all kinds of inequities by victim blaming; heightening exploitation and misplaced hate; spurring mass shootings, arms races, and demagogues who polarize nations, shutting down essential organs of democracy; and threatening the life of human society with nuclear war and climate change. In the United States, the metastatic cancer has been spreading, contracting, and threatening to kill the American body as it nearly did before its birth, as it nearly did during its Civil War. But how many people stare inside the body of their nations' racial inequities, their neighborhoods' racial inequities, their occupations' racial inequities, their institutions' racial inequities, and flatly deny that their policies are racist? They flatly deny that racial inequity is a signpost of racist policy. They flatly deny the racist policy as they use racist ideas to justify the racial inequity. They flatly deny the cancer of racism as the cancer cells spread and literally threaten their own lives and the lives of the people and spaces and places they hold dear. The popular conception of denial--like the popular strategy of suasion--is suicidal.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“A cancer growing in someone's body will go on growing in spite of denial. And a complex combination of genes that work together to make you intelligent as well as hierarchical will still handicap you whether you acknowledge it or not.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Dawn