Samuel Kinch > Samuel's Quotes

“Disappear Here.
The syringe fills with blood.
You're a beautiful boy and that's all that matters.
Wonder if he's for sale.
People are afraid to merge. To merge.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero

“You are not your job, you're not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. You are all singing, all dancing crap of the world.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“Even when I have been most psychotic, I have been aware of finding new corners in my mind and heart. Some of those corners were incredible and beautiful, and made me feel as if I could die right then and the images would sustain me. Some of them were grotesque and ugly, and I never wanted to see them again. But, always, there were those new corners, and when feeling my normal self, beholden for that self of medicine and love, I cannot imagine becoming jaded to life, because I know of those limitless corners, with their limitless views.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“I have decided to stick to love...Hate is too great a burden to bear.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

“It is not possible to eliminate suffering by eliminating pain. Human existence contains inevitable challenges. People we love will be injured, and people close to us will die—indeed, we are aware from an early age that in time we all will die. We will also be sick. Functions will diminish. Friends and lovers will betray us. Pain is unavoidable, and (owing to our symbolic inclinations) we readily remember this pain and can bring it into consciousness at any given moment. This progression means that human beings consciously expose themselves to inordinate amounts of pain—despite our considerable abilities to control its sources in the external environment. Even so, great pain is not in itself a sufficient cause for true human suffering. For that to occur, symbolic behavior needs to be taken a bit further.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: An Experiential Approach to Behavior Change

“Better to feel the pain of writing than the pain of not writing”
― Phoebe Waller-Bridge

“On the parable of the Good Samaritan: "I imagine that the first question the priest and Levite asked was: 'If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?' But by the very nature of his concern, the good Samaritan reversed the question: 'If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love

“The Smiths are singing and someone says "Turn that gay angst music off.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, The Rules of Attraction

“If we look again at these four patterns—alternation between victim and victimizer roles, identification with the aggressor and subsequent guilt, self-blame, and the seeking of object contact through perverse or violent means—we see that each is based on a psychological contradiction. It is intolerable to live life as a victim: one is weak and powerless. But it is equally intolerable to live life as the perpetrator, for then one deserves all manner of punishment. It is intolerable to be completely alone and unconnected. But it is equally intolerable to seek relationship through perversion or violence. It is intolerable to be a passive and helpless victim. But it is painful to escape from this helplessness by believing that you caused and deserved abuse. The escape from passivity is achieved by feeling inescapably bad inside. The abused child struggles, then, with what truly are dilemmas, both of logic and of life.”
― Stephen Prior, Object Relations in Severe Trauma: Psychotherapy of the Sexually Abused Child

“Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty and sadness and remains far behind yours. Were it otherwise he would never have been able to find those words.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“If we add up all those humans who are or have been depressed, addicted, anxious, angry, self-destructive, alienated, worried, compulsive, workaholic, insecure, painfully shy, divorced, avoidant of intimacy, and stressed, we are compelled to reach a startling conclusion, namely, that psychological suffering is a basic characteristic of human life.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: An Experiential Approach to Behavior Change by Steven C. Hayes Kirk D. Strosahl Kelly G. Wilson

“That question became even more salient to me as I began my clinical work with troubled children. I soon found that the vast majority of my patients had lives filled with chaos, neglect and/or violence. Clearly, these children weren’t “bouncing back”—otherwise they wouldn’t have been taken to a child psychiatry clinic! They’d suffered trauma—such as being raped or witnessing murder—that would have had most psychiatrists considering the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), had they been adults with psychiatric problems. And yet these children were being treated as though their histories of trauma were irrelevant, and they’d “coincidentally” developed symptoms, such as depression or attention problems, that often required medication.”
― Bruce D. Perry, The Boy Who Was Raised As a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook

“The bottom line is that if you are in hell, the only way out is to go through a period of sustained misery. Misery is, of course, much better than hell, but it is painful nonetheless. By refusing to accept the misery that it takes to climb out of hell, you end up falling back into hell repeatedly, only to have to start over and over again.”
― Marsha M. Linehan, DBT Skills Training: Manual

“The desire to commit suicide, however, has at its base a belief that life cannot or will not improve. Although that may be the case in some instances, it is not true in all instances. Death, however, rules out hope in all instances. We do not have any data indicating that people who are dead lead better lives.”
― Marsha M. Linehan, Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder

“ACT uses acceptance and mindfulness processes and commitment and behavioral activation processes to produce psychological flexibility. It seeks to bring human language and cognition under better contextual control so as to overcome the repertoire-narrowing effects of an excessive reliance on a problem-solving mode of mind as well as to promote a more open, centered, and engaged approach to living.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“I have no idea what's awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends. For the moment I know this: there are sick people and they need curing.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“The literal meaning of life is whatever you're doing that prevents you from killing yourself.”
― Albert Camus

“Suffering occurs when people so strongly believe the literal contents of their mind that they become fused with their cognitions. In this fused state, the person cannot distinguish awareness from cognitive narratives since each thought and its referents are so tightly bound together. This combination means that the person is more likely to follow blindly the instructions that are socially transmitted through language. In some circumstances, this result can be adaptive; but in other cases, people may engage repeatedly in ineffective sets of strategies because to them they appear to be “right” or “fair” despite negative real-world consequences.”
― Steven C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change

“I'm not a religious person but I do sometimes think God made you for me.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“The truth is, everyone is going to hurt you. You just got to find the ones worth suffering for.”
― Bob Marley