Denial Quotes

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

She's terrified that all these sensations and images are coming out of her — but I think she's even more terrified to find out why. Carla's description was typical of survivors of chronic childhood abuse. Almost always, they deny or minimize the abusive memories. They have to: it's too painful to believe that their parents would do such a thing.

~ David L. Calof

Men who believe that the way to the mind is not by way of ice picks through the brain or large dosages of dangerous medicine but through an honest reckoning of the self.

~ Dennis Lehane

...some patients resist the diagnosis of a post-traumatic disorder. They may feel stigmatized by any psychiatric diagnosis or wish to deny their condition out of a sense of pride. Some people feel that acknowledging psychological harm grants a moral victory to the perpetrator, in a way that acknowledging physical harm does not.

~ Judith Lewis Herman

Fear of breaking family loyalty is one of the greatest stumbling blockages to recovery. Yet, until we admit certain things we would rather excuse or deny, we cannot truly begin to put the past in the past, and leave it there once and for all. Unless we do that, we cannot even begin to think of having a future that is fully ours, untethered to the past, and we will be destined to repeat it.

~ Ronald Allen Schulz

what you knowand don’t deny thatyou don’t knowand knowing thisyou knowwhat and whyyou don’t know.Right?

~ Jennifer Hillman

The dark might be dark, but at least we don’t have to look at ourselves when we’re standing in it.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

You must always focus on and pursue the good, but when that darkness surges up from within, you need to know how to handle it, use it, and release it wisely, not just deny its presence or acceptability as you suppress it within you.

~ A.j. Darkholme

There's nothing we fear more than our own Reflection. We scream at the monsters within us, hidden deep within our hearts. We run and hide from the terrors all around us- the different mirrors that we see.

~ Solange Nicole

Why can’t she see it? Why can’t she see the hidden monster which lives inside of him? He’s standing there, his back still away from my mum, but he’s showing me that evil. He’s showing me the monster that is just itching to get out. I know what he would do without Mum being there, so I’m so glad that she is, but what I can’t understand is how blind she and my sister are to him. It’s almost as if he can walk on water as far as they’re concerned.

~ Jaimie Roberts

I see how you look at me,” spits the hateful man. He thinks we look upon him with the evil eye when we are not looking at him that way at all. We are just looking at him. It’s because he can’t accept the hate inside of himself that he projects it onto us.

~ Kate Mcgahan

Evil originates not in the absence of guilt, but in our effort to escape it.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Denial and rejection is one of the most powerful weapons that can turn a man into an evil.

~ M.f. Moonzajer

For its survival, the satanic cult demanded secrecy and obedience while it made brutality, even killing, appropriate. Denial and disavowal were inevitable responses to required behaviors so bizarre as to seem unreal, even to those who enacted them. What they could not deny or disavow, they could distort. They could blame the victims, who deserved to die for fighting or crying or for failing to fight or cry. They found encouragement for such a stance in a general culture accustomed to blaming victims for their misfortunes, and in specific contact with child victims eager to blame themselves. By believing that victims had a choice when there was none, they could see victims as culpable. They could even see the deaths as right and purposeful in the nobility of sacrifice.

~ Judith Spencer

Denial returned, like a nagging cough you can never quite shake. Actually, it was always close at hand, and even though satanic ritual abuse did describe what had happened to me when I was a child. the concept was so foreign and so horrific that some part of me still wanted to stay in denial.Devil worship dominated my childhood. That was undeniable, even if it was still nearly impossible to contemplate. Both of my parents and any number of their friends, as well as respected members of our community, had worshipped Satan.I pushed the notion aside with all the power I could muster. I kept thinking to myself that it was ridiculous and impossible.p157

~ Suzie Burke

Our conscious self is what we admit to being. Our unconscious shadow is the part of us that we attempt to suppress, the part of us that our family, friends, employers, coworkers, associates, clients, neighbors, and society tells us to discard. Our shadow emerges from the unspeakable things that we discover about the world and ourselves. Both the magnificent as well as the bizarre residue of prior experiences lies buried and unconfessed in the fissures of our unconscious mind. The less a person’s shadow is embodied in a person’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Shall we not recover ourselves? Shall we not redeem ourselves to one another? Shall we not restore this world?Could we not be the generation who did what always should have been done? Who took the hard path so that humanity could be returned to the right path? Shall we not reexamine all that we choose to pursue and reconsider what will actually fulfill us?The past has been defined by what we have done, while the present and future are decided by what we choose to do.Shall we believe in what should be and go in search of it? Shall we believe in what needs to be and build it together?We become more by believing that we can be more. Life becomes better when we are willing to act on the belief that it can be better.To believe is to reach and reach is what we all must do.

~ L.m. Browning

I am not sure if we are numbed to the reality of rape, but here's the sad irony. While the word rape can add an edginess to your language, talking about actual rape is taboo. I didn't know this until one of my friends was raped. Then I knew this, because I didn't want to tell anyone. If she were mugged, I would have told everyone and raged.

~ Christine Stockton

I should have seen it coming.” The words don’t surprise me, but they piss me off. I pull away and glare down at her. “Don’t you fucking dare, Nell Hawthorne. Don’t you dare put this on yourself. You should never have to see shit like this coming.” She backs away, stunned and afraid by the intensity I know is radiating off me. “Colton, I just meant he’s always shown—” “Stop. Just stop right there. Granted, you should’ve never gotten involved with a douchetard like him, but that’s no excuse for what he did.

~ Jasinda Wilder

you can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.

~ Ernest Hemingway

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

Everyone loses their class when they travel through hell, but only a few will regain it if they remain humble and accept the part they played in their own misery.

~ Shannon L. Alder

What was the payoff? It obviously kept me in my cozy zone of being in control, being a good mother, with a good daughter. Most of all, I realize, is that it allowed me to maintain the lie that she was healed, that Nick hadn't permanently damaged her, that I'd truly saved her. Because if I did, if there was no lasting residue of him, it meant that the denial that kept me in the marriage long enough for him to hurt her didn't help create the situation she's in now. The person who I worked hardest to keep safe seems to have been me.

~ Claire Fontaine

The five stages of bureaucratic grieving are: denial, anger, committee meetings, scapegoating, and cover-up.

~ Charles Stross

Anyone can possess, anyone can profess, but it is an altogether different thing to confess.

~ Shannon L. Alder

What man ever openly apologizes for slander? It is not so much a feeling of slander as it is that of a massive lie, a misdeed not only to the slandered but also to those manipulated in the process. He has made them all, every one, his enemies, thereupon he is so overwhelmed with guilt that he will deny it until his grave.

~ Criss Jami

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

Unlike my mother, my father does not cry quietly. His wails roll out like a wave of pain, and I scramble to roll up my window. My mother cannot hear that. I cannot bear to hear it myself. I am not used to my father's crying. I've had no time to harden my heart against him.

~ Margaret Peterson Haddix

I’ve suppressed my aspirations to forget all rationality and let the moment explain everything, for nothing to be said and everything understood. If only I knew how to let these feelings out.

~ Saim .A. Cheeda

No one answer is ever the answer.

~ Ahmed Mostafa

While the differences between love and hate can be blurred and difficult to decipher at times, the dichotomy of denial and acceptance are much more distinct. One is halting and aggressively rejects all truth, while the other is more passive and at peace – welcoming whatever truth is in waiting, whether fortunate or tragic.

~ Kenn Bivins

It's fallacious reasoning for the atheist to hate all religion due to men who manipulate religion to fit their own agendas. They are counterparts, therefore, if Truth is true, partners in crime. To believers, the atheist and the religiously corrupt boil down to the same person, the self-righteous: one denies Truth to fit his own agenda; the other manipulates Truth to fit his own agenda.

~ Criss Jami

Being the soothsayer of the tribe is a dirty job, but someone has to do it.

~ Anthon St. Maarten

To recklessly excuse a failure is to believe that I’ve effectively erased it from the story of my life, when I’ve actually imprinted it in indelible ink.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

If one is sick, one is usually the last person to know.

~ Ahmed Mostafa

Most people, including Ma, preferred to brush unpleasantness away, as if, by sweeping it outside with the dust, it could be forgotten. As if, by acknowledging the existence of something unsavory in their community, they might be tainted by it themselves.

~ Shilpi Somaya Gowda

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

On top of the abuse and neglect, denial heaps more hurt upon the child by requiring the child to alienate herself from reality and her own experience. In troubled families, abuse and neglect are permitted; it's the talking about them that is forbidden.

~ Marcia Sirota

[P]erhaps you notice how the denial is so often the preface to the justification.

~ Christopher Hitchens

Privilege is when you contribute to the oppression of others and then claim that you are the one being discriminated against.

~ Dashanne Stokes