John Verdon Quotes

The sun sets and we sleep. The sun rises and we wake. We wake and, ever so briefly, ever so blindly, we enjoy the fantasy of beginning anew. Then, without fail, reality reasserts its presence.

The personal collisions that upset us the most, the ones we seem powerless to let go of, are those in which we played a role that we are unwilling to acknowledge. That's why the pain lasts - because we refuse to look at its source. We cannot detach it, because we refuse to look at the point of attachment.

Hardwick was showing the frustration of a man trying to hold his groceries inside a ripped bag.

The mind is a mass of contradictions and conflicts. We lie to make others trust us. We hide our true selves in the pursuit of intimacy. We chase happiness in ways that drive happiness away. When we're wrong we fight the hardest to prove we're right. Caught

The person I think I am is terrified of the person I really am, terrified of what others would think of that person. What would they do to me if they knew the person I really was? Better to be safe! Better to hide the real person, starve the real person, bury the real person!

It was a curious thing about the past
how it lay in wait for you, quietly, invisibly, almost as though it weren't there. You might be tempted to think it was gone, no longer existed. Then, like a pheasant flushed from cover, it would roar up in an explosion of sound, color, motion
shockingly alive.

That boulder is your image of yourself, who you think you are. The person you think you are is keeping the person you really are locked up without light or food or friends. The person you think you are has been trying to murder the person you really are for as long as you both have lived.

The only time a man can do the right thing is right now.

But grief, he'd discovered, was not an experience you went through once and then 'moved on' (as the idiotic popular phrase would have it). The truth was that it came over you in successive waves - waves separated by periods of numbness, periods of forgetfulness, periods of ordinary living.

The fact that no one was dead persuaded him that he was on the right track

The worst pain in our lives comes from the mistakes we refuse to acknowledge
the things we've done that are so our of harmony with who we are that we can't bear to look at them.

A shrink once told me that an exception is a resentment waiting to be born.

He was actually quite fond of discrepancies because his experience told him that they eventually provided a window into the truth.

The stories people tell you about themselves seem to retain the possibility of being false. But what you discover about them by yourself seems to be the truth.

Few behaviors of other people are more irritating than those that display our own faults in an unattractive way.

This case is complex. It's got layers to it, Davey. It's a fucking onion ... You're a natural-born onion peeler
the best that ever was.

Nothing leaves you more vulnerable to your past than the illusion that you've dealt with it.

We each seem to be wired to believe my situation causes my problems but your personality causes yours. This creates trouble.

He knew how isolated he could become and hardly notice it was happening. How relationships could slip away like smoke in the breeze. How easily he could sink into himself. How natural and benign his isolating obsessions could seem.

The purpose of life is to get as close as we can to other people.

What he took he will give, when he gets what he gave.

How many bright angels can dance on a pin? How many hopes drown in a bottle of gin? Did the thought ever come that your glass was a gun and one day you'd wonder, God, what have I done?