Neuroses Quotes

“Fantasy, an unflagging optimism is necessary for a writer at all stages of this rough game. A kind of madness is therefore necessary, when there is every logical reason for a state of depression and discouragement. Perhaps the fact that I can react with utter gloom to this is what keeps me from being psychotic and keeps me merely neurotic. I am doing quite a good day's work today. But I am also aware of the madness that actually sustains me, and I am not made more comfortable or happy by it.”
― Patricia Highsmith

“I haven’t got time to be neurotic,” he had heard Helen say once; and the words had made him go weak with anger. He had thought it was the most stupid and reactionary remark he ever heard in his life; but was it any more stupid than the sneering thrust he had made in reply: “Time! You haven’t got the imagination!”
― Charles Jackson, The Lost Weekend

“And when all's said and done, the final comment will be (from me at least) so what? I'll live with my neuroses. I'll try to develop patience, with my handicapped personality. But I prefer to live with my neuroses and try to make the best of them.”
― Patricia Highsmith

“I always took to anything that required solitude...it kept me from having to deal with other humans who, for no explainable reason, I didn't like nor trust.”
― Woody Allen, Apropos of Nothing

“I've always maintained you can either cure your neuroses or you can just outwait them.”
― Michael Cunningham, Flesh and Blood

“And so his royal Duffleleupagus is seized with the megalomaniacal conceit that he is the contemporary Jesus, the man wandering through the lives of these forlorn people, beaten and broken down by the unbearable thirst of relative deprivation--unless it was all of capitalism, or terrorism, or loneliness, or time. Of course, to compare oneself to Jesus is at least ridiculous, and yet not uninspired extreme narcissism, and although he cannot remember reading it symptomatic of a particularly overt form of latent homosexuality, he could not say for sure he had not read that either. On a cereal box top or as fortune cookie filler? Svevo or Zizek? Soft-core porn spam or in freshman composition?”
― Alex Kudera, Fight for Your Long Day

“What amounts to a plague of mental illness is now addressed as ‘normal’ rather than as an indication that there is something terrifyingly wrong with our culture. The fact that we no longer understand mental illness as a message – that is, as a nondeclarative communication of an imbalance that requires rectification – not only demonstrates the degree of our emotional illiteracy, but our failure to understand the principle of balance as the axis of all existence.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

“Love me, love my neuroses.”
― Karen Salmansohn, Quickie Stickies: 100 Pick-Me-Ups for When You're Feeling Unglued