Self Protection Quotes

“The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“No boundary or barrier surrounds the heart of a person that loves their self and others.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“The guarantee of safety in a battering relationship can never be based upon a promise from the perpetrator, no matter how heartfelt. Rather, it must be based upon the self-protective capability of the victim. Until the victim has developed a detailed and realistic contingency plan and has demonstrated her ability to carry it out, she remains in danger of repeated abuse.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

“Lovers are not snails; they don't have to protrude from their shells and meet each other halfway. Meet me within your own self.”
― Jerzy Kosiński, Steps

“We use our minds not to discover facts but to hide them. One of things the screen hides most effectively is the body, our own body, by which I mean, the ins and outs of it, its interiors. Like a veil thrown over the skin to secure its modesty, the screen partially removes from the mind the inner states of the body, those that constitute the flow of life as it wanders in the journey of each day. (p.28)”
― Antonio R. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness

“Talent is useful, but always keep your dagger sharp.”
― Amanda Quick, Quicksilver

“My only defense is the acquisition of vocabulary.”
― Margaret Edson, Wit

“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

“These times are hard, but I won't walk away jaded, darker, different. I feel. I cry to heal. If you saw me in those moments, maybe you'd think I was a mess. But I don't call it a mess. I call it strength.

Real strength isn't about building walls. Real strength is about staying open, no matter what. It's about taking life—with all the pleasures that fade and all the pain that sticks around for too long—and not shutting down, not closing down, not building up those walls.

Resilience isn't hard, impenetrable, iron. Resilience is flexible, soft, warm.

Stay strong. The real kind of strong. Don't let your automatic mind reflexes make you jump away from pain and towards pleasure. Make choices. See clearly. And never, ever, stop feeling.

Don't go numb. The world, even with all its horror, is too beautiful to miss.”
― Vironika Tugaleva

“I found myself in a pattern of being attracted to people who were somehow unavailable, and what I realized was that I was protecting myself because I equate the idea of connection and love with trauma and death.”
― Zachary Quinto

“I know a little something about fear, honey. I know what a relief it feels like to give into it at first. It’s not hard to persuade yourself that you’re doing the right thing—that you’re making the smart, safe decision. But fear is insidious. It takes anything you’re willing to give it, the parts of your life you don’t mind cutting out, but when you’re not looking, it takes anything else it damn well pleases, too.”
― Andrea Lochen, Imaginary Things

“...in my own perilous position, and above all, in the remarkable game that I saw Silver now engaged upon-keeping the mutineers together with one hand, and grasping, with the other, after every means, possible and impossible, to make his peace and save his miserable life.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island

“The truth is, I was never a nihilist at all. I just wore nihilism like a shield to protect my unrelenting tragic optimism.”
― Sean Norris, Heaven and Hurricanes

“How in the world are we supposed to engage life when we spend all of our life building walls to protect ourselves from the very thing that we say we want to engage? The answer is, I think, understanding that God doesn’t need walls but we need Him.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“The architect of the walls around me is the fear within me. And if I have foolishly granted this architect full license to build whatever it pleases in whatever manner it pleases, I will find that I have confused safety with imprisonment.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“When we give away our boundaries, we give away our life.”
― W. Allen Morris, All In: How to Risk Everything for Everything that Matters

“If a child doesn't have a secure and stable relationship after a parent leaves, she keeps her feelings inside because it's not safe to put them out there. Later on the child thinks, 'I'm not going to trust you.' Her future attachments get compromised, because she never worked through the attachments she did have. All she had to do was protect herself, and part of that protection was not to attach to anyone.”
― Therese A. Rando, Treatment of Complicated Mourning

“I am thinking of getting a conceal carry permit for my ‘Risky’ neighborhood walks. I was attacked by an aggressive dog in the street that bit my ankle. I was getting ready to give it a big kick to its head when it ran off. If I had a gun, I would have shot it. Now that dogs are killing people, it has elevated the need for self-protection.”
― Steven Magee

“...a life laid down is better than the one picked up.

--MacTHOMAS POCKETS”
― Charles Martin, The Last Exchange

“Pessimism ain't the fucking antidote, don't get me wrong. But a healthy dose of it does a lot of good.”
― Duncan Ralston, Dead Men Walking: a Novelette

“...to love is to be vulnerable. To risk. When in pain, we adopt the lie that to protect our hearts, we must put them away. Lock them in a vault. Suck the air out. The problem we encounter is that when we open that chamber and try to use this once-fleshy thing we call a heart, we find it hard. Impenetrable. Icy. Unbreakable. Unfeeling.

[Murphy Shepherd]”
― Charles Martin, The Keeper

“Light filtered down through the water to the bed where the frilly pearl oysters lay fastened to the rub-bly bottom, a bottom strewn with shells of broken. opened oysters. This was the bed that had raised the

King of Spain to be a great power in Europe in past years, had helped to pay for his wars, and had deco-rated the churches for his soul's sake. The gray oysters with ruffles like skirts on the shells, the barnacle. crusted oysters with little bits of weed clinging to the skirts and small crabs climbing over them. An acci dent could happen to these oysters, a grain of sand could lie in the folds of muscle and irritate the flesh until in self-protection the flesh coated the grain with a layer of smooth cement. But once started, the flesh continued to coat the foreign body until it fell free in some tidal flurry or until the oyster was destroyed. For centuries men had dived down and torn the oys-ters from the beds and ripped them open, looking for the coated grains of sand. Swarms of fish lived near the bed to live near the oysters thrown back by the searching men and to nibble at the shining inner shells. But the pearls were accidents, and the finding of one was luck, a little pat on the back by God or the gods or both.”
― John Steinbeck, The Pearl

“The love that’s right for you won’t confuse your mind or bruise your heart.”
― Ayoub Imilouane

“The truth is, these parts of you are trying to help. They developed to protect you from pain, rejection, or uncertainty. But over time, their strategies may become outdated—like using dial-up internet in a fiber-optic world.”
― Ronen Dancziger, The Therapist's Handbook for Healing Your Simpsons Syndrome: Unhook from Your Inner Chaos Characters with CBT, ACT, and a Little Humor

“Other people’s reactions usually say more about their own inner weather report than they do about the magnificent (albeit occasionally messy) renovations happening in your Inner Springfield.”
― Ronen Dancziger, The Therapist's Handbook for Healing Your Simpsons Syndrome: Unhook from Your Inner Chaos Characters with CBT, ACT, and a Little Humor

“I think for most of my life I’ve been so scared of hurting the people I love that I’ve kept them at a distance. I told myself it was because I was being protective. That I was doing right by them.” It was hard to get the next words out, hoarse as my voice was. “But I think that’s just a lie I said so that I could hide behind my choices.” Ben’s eyes were fathomless, the warmth in them never fading. “The person I was actually protecting…this whole time…was me.”
I’d never admitted that to anyone, not even myself.
“Because I thought—if one more person—” My voice broke. “If one more person lets me down, I don’t think I’ll make it.”
― Fae Quin, If Only In Our Dreams

“Forgiveness doesn’t mean opening the door again — it means sealing it with wisdom”
― Latora Crawford, Let It Go, Keep It Out: How to Forgive Without Letting People Walk All Over You

“Boundaries define where ‘we’ end and ‘they’ begin, protecting our identity and preventing us from being overwhelmed by the imperatives of others. Properly utilized, silence can be an extraordinarily effective method for establishing and maintaining such boundaries.”
― Sol Luckman, Get Out of Here Alive: Inner Alchemy & Immortality

“People's emotions are not for profits.”
― Mitta Xinindlu

“Distance becomes a gift when closeness becomes a wound.”
― Katerina Markadakis, Legacy of Letting Go: A Journal for Those Healing from Love That Could Not Stay