Coping Mechanisms Quotes

I'm completely out of control, and I can hear the beginnings of the chant, get/out/, but now that I'm not being touched maybe I can master it and I shut the world out: separating an orange into skinless sections. Peel it, but not with your fingers. Level off the top and bottom. Set it on the board. Remove the peel in strips with a paring knife, pushing down from the top to bottom with slow, curved strokes. Nick off all the white parts. Cup the cool, wet skinless fruit in your hand. Take care. Don't rush. Press the blade into the flesh of the orange, sink it down, a segment at a time, along the left side of the skin and then the right. Left and right. Left and right. As close as you can to the membrane. Press to the center with your knife, level and easy. If you cut right, the segment will fall out onto the board, triangular, gleaming. Left and right. Left and right. If you rush you'll cut yourself. Take care with it. Cut right along the seam, right where the sweet fruit meets the tough membrane. Let and right. Left and right. As close as you can.

~ Jael Mchenry

I slammed out of the Priest Hole and started walking, heading nowhere in particular. Sometimes you just need to go through a door.

~ Ransom Riggs

Jim looks out the car window with his nose pressed to the glass. Sometimes he pretends to be asleep. Not because he is tired, but because he needs to be quiet.

~ Rachel Joyce

Many of us learned that keeping busy…kept us at a distance from our feelings...Some of us took the ways we busied ourselves—becoming overachievers & workaholics—as self esteem…But whenever our inner feeling did not match our outer surface, we were doing ourselves a disservice…If stopping to rest meant being barraged with this discrepancy, no wonder we were reluctant to cease our obsessive activity.

~ Maureen Brady

She wished she had cancer instead. She'd trade Alzheimer's for cancer in a heartbeat. She felt ashamed for wishing this, and it was certainly a pointless bargaining, but she permitted herself the fantasy anyway. With cancer, she'd have something to fight. There was surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. There was the chance that she could win. Her family and the community at Harvard would rally behind her battle and consider it noble. And even if it defeated her in the end, she'd be able to look them knowingly in the eye and say good-bye before she left.

~ Lisa Genova