Shrinks Quotes

I think shrinks are interesting to write about because you get to see what the character chooses to reveal, and what behaviors or stances the character tries out on the shrink that might not be part of the character's make-up outside of that room. It's an emotional test-kitchen. ~ Jill Davis

My life seems to be an increasing revelation of the intimate face of universal struggle. You begin with your family and the kids on the block, and next you open your eyes to what you call your people and that leads you into land reform into Black English into Angola leads you back into your own bed where you lie by yourself, wondering if you deserve to be peaceful, or trusted or desired or left to the freedom of your own unfaltering heart. And the scale shrinks to the size of a skull: your own interior cage. ~ June Jordan

I left home and tried to live the life of a hermit, but I was still fighting myself. I went to England and worked as a chainman on the road. It was better therapy than the shrinks. Building a two-mile road gave me internal peace. ~ Brian Strang

Hiding your hurt only intensifies it. Problems grow in the dark and become bigger and bigger, but when exposed to the light of truth, they shrink. You are only as sick as your secrets. So take off your mask, stop pretending you're perfect, and walk into freedom. ~ Rick Warren

Speak you too,
speak as the last,
say out your say.

Speak-
But don't split off No from Yes.
Give your say this meaning too:
Give it the shadow.

Give it shadow enough,
Give it as much
As you know is spread round you from
Midnight to midday and midnight.

Look around:
See how things all come alive-
By death! Alive!
Speaks true who speaks shadow.

But now the place shrinks, where you stand:
Where now, shadow-stripped, where?
Climb. Grope upwards.
Thinner you grow, less knowable, finer!
Finer: a thread
The star wants to descend on:
So as to swim down beliow, down here
Where it sees itself shimmer:in the swell
Of wandering words. ~ Paul Celan

Sadly, if President Obama is willing to ignore the pain of race-based discrimination and injustice so as to make whites comfortable - and this, after he has already been elected and the campaign is long over - then the likelihood he will ever speak the truth about these matters, let alone address them, shrinks to nearly zero. ~ Tim Wise

In every life there is a moment. A crisis. One that says: what I believe is wrong. It happens to everyone, the only difference is how that knowledge changes them. In most cases, it is simply a case of burying that knowledge and pretending it isn't there. That is how humans grow old. That is ultimately what creases their faces and curves their backs and shrinks their mouths and ambitions. The weight of that denial. The stress of it. This is not unique to humans. The single biggest act of bravery or madness anyone can do is the act of change. ~ Matt Haig

The words spoken by the leader of the free world can expand the frontiers of freedom or shrink them. When Ronald Reagan called on Gorbachev to 'tear down this wall', a surge of confidence rose that would ultimately breach the bounds of the evil empire. ~ Mitt Romney

When you begin to care too much about what everyone else says, your confidence shrinks and you start to feel like insignificant, little Jack in a strange land of intimidating giants. But when you come to realize that opinions are as diverse and plentiful as dried beans, you might reach the conclusion that your own is of the greatest worth. That's when your confidence grows, and soon you find yourself striding like Gandalf the wondrous wizard among common hobbits in the shire. Respecting your own opinion is the magic that transforms both you and your world. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Don't shrink to meet the expectations of others, grow to become the person you want to be. ~ Kris Carr

The sand should be neither coarse nor fine but of a middling quality or about the size of the common pop(p)y seed. If the sand is too coarse the mortar will be short or brittle ... If the sand is too fine the cement will shrink and crack after it has been used. ~ Canvass White

God did not create evolution
evolution created God. The evolution of religion is as follows: animism
polytheism
monotheism
agnosticism
atheism. As history progresses, people worship fewer and fewer gods, and the one God becomes the incredible shrinking god. He shrinks and shrinks until he becomes insignificant. More and more theists go about their business as if God isn't there. Some even become agnostics or atheists. ~ G.M. Jackson

His soul was sensitive without being enthusiastic: it was too languid to thrill out of self-consciousness into passionate delight; it went on fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking of its wings and never flying. His experience was of that pitiable kind which shrinks from pity, and fears most of all that is should be known: it was that proud narrow sensitiveness which has not mass enough to spare for transformation into sympathy, and quivers threadlike in small currents of self-preoccupation or at best of an egoistic scrupulosity. ~ George Eliot

I try to believe in as many as six impossible things before breakfast. Count them, Alice. One, there are drinks that make you shrink. Two, there are foods that make you grow. Three, animals can talk. Four, cats can disappear. Five, there is a place called Underland. Six, I can slay the Jabberwocky. ~ Lewis Carroll

An executive cannot gradually dismiss details. Business is made up of details and I notice that the chief executive who dismisses them is quite likely to dismiss his business. Success is the sum of detail. It might perhaps be pleasing to imagine oneself beyond detail and engaged only in great things, but as I have often observed, if one attends only to great things and lets the little things pass the great things become little; that is, the business shrinks. ~ Harvey S. Firestone

And for that second, the world shrinks to just us. Just his face and mine. Every smell seems to evaporate. Every color ceases to exist. And there's a silence. I silence so laden with fear and mistrust that it turns everything else abstract and us both to stone. ~ Caz Frear

What, are you like Buffy or something? A vampire slayer?"
I wish. "No, but my sister is. And my boyfriend's a vampire so I know a lot about their kind."
Jayden shrinks back from me, wide-eyed.
"No, no. He's one of the good ones. Not all vampires are evil," I assure him.
"So ... you're dating ... Edward Cullen."
"Sure, if you have to relate it all to a Stephenie Meyer book," I grudgingly agree. "But don't say that to Magnus's face. He's a card-carrying member of Team Jacob. Even has the T-shirt. ~ Mari Mancusi

Really, according to the shrinks, I am angry at everyone ever. Especially them.
I am all anger and resentment all the time.
Not one of them has ever suggested that maybe I lie because the world is better the way I tell it. ~ Justine Larbalestier

I joke around sometimes and say that the DP [director of photography] is like a shrink for the director, but there's some truth in there. ~ Reed Morano

Eric approached the octagonal nurses' station, and a blonde nurse
looked up from her computer monitor, smiled, and pointed to
examining room D. Everybody recognized the hospital shrinks
from the bright red W on their lanyard IDs. The W stood for
Wright, the wing that contained the locked psych unit, but the
staff teased that W stood for Wackos. He'd heard all the jokes
How do you tell the psychiatrists from the patients in the hospital?
The patients get better and leave. Eric told the best psychiatrist
jokes, though he never told the ones about psychiatrist's kids. He
didn't think those were funny. He lived those. ~ Lisa Scottoline

He that shrinks from the grave with too great a dread, has an invisible fear behind him pushing him into it. ~ Christian Nestell Bovee

Like all shrinks she was a deeply troubled person.

From "Fat Jimmy And The Blind Ballerina" due out early 2017. ~ Eddie Owens

I was also skeptical about what all the grunge bands would do on their second albums. There were a lot of great first albums, but what would they do once they were platinum acts instead of kids living in roach-infested garages? I mean, if they were so miserable, once they had money, they could all go see shrinks. ~ Paul Stanley

You intellectuals are always so surprised to discover how fragile your body is. The mind is so robust, so remote. But muscles and bones are as simple as tied-up straw. They unravel and snap. And the more they break, the more the mind shrinks. In the moments before the cascade into death, the great intellect is reduced to a silent kernel. The mind is nothing more than a door into the dark. ~ Josiah Bancroft

We try, we fail, we posture, we aspire, we pontificate - and then we age, shrink, die, and vanish. ~ George Saunders

So when that Angel of the darker Drink, at last shall find you by the river-brink,
And, offering his Cup, invite your Soul forth to your Lips to quaff-you shall not shrink. ~ Omar Khayyam

They are surely to be esteemed the bravest spirits who, having the clearest sense of both the pains and pleasures of life, do not on that account shrink from danger. ~ Thucydides

We are three quarters of a mile in the depths of the earth, and the great river shrinks into insignificance, as it dashes its angry waves against the walls and cliffs, that rise to the world above; they are but puny ripples, and we but pigmies, running up and down the sands, or lost among the boulders. We have an unknown distance yet to run; an unknown river yet to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not. Powell wasn't overstating their ignorance. At this point, they had no clear idea how far they had come or how much canyon lay ahead of them. They did not know how many turns the river would make, how many rapids there might be, or whether their supplies would sustain them through the time it would take to negotiate these obstacles. And they had no way of knowing that their most serious challenges lay ahead. Just ~ Kevin Fedarko

In myth, women's boundaries are pliant, porous, mutable. Her power to control them is inadequate, her concern for them unreliable. Deformation attends her. She swells, she shrinks, she leaks, she is penetrated, she suffers metamorphoses. The women of mythology regularly lose their form in monstrosity. ~ Anne Carson

Who shrinks from knowledge of his calamities but aggravates his fear; troubles half seen, shall torture all the more. ~ Seneca The Younger

I want to get more comfortable being uncomfortable. I want to get more confident being uncertain. I don't want to shrink back just because something isn't easy. I want to push back, and make more room in the area between I can't and I can. ~ Kristin Armstrong

Ah! mon Dieu! how the mind shrinks by loving! it is true that the soul does not, but what can one do with a soul? ~ Jeanne Julie Eleonore De Lespinasse

Dancers dance through their pain I shrink from mine. ~ Mason Cooley

Remember that hate is not the opposite of love as people think. Hate is love standing upside down; it is not the opposite of love. The real opposite of love is fear. In love one expands, in fear one shrinks. In fear one becomes closed, in love one opens. In fear one doubts, in love one trusts. In fear one is left lonely. In love one disappears; hence there is no question of loneliness at all. Love is when you have known your inner sky. There is no higher religion than love ~ Rajneesh

We are not here just to survive and live long ... We are here to live and know life in it's multi-dimensions, to know life in its richness, in all it's variety. And when a man lives multi-dimensionally, explores all possibilities available, never shrinks back from a challenge, goes, rushes to it, welcomes it, rises to the occasion then life becomes a flame, life blooms. ~ Rajneesh

No matter what the shrinks, or the pundits, or the self-help books tell you, when it comes to love, it's luck. ~ Woody Allen

If you can stare hard at your problems, they almost always shrink or disappear, because you almost always find a better way of dealing with them than if you don't face them head on. The more difficult the problem, the more important it is that you stare at it and deal with it. ~ Ray Dalio

Men who shrink from penetration of the female body are paralyzed by justifiable apprehension, since they are returning to our uncanny site of origin. ~ Camille Paglia

Without the support of American Jews, Israel would shrink to its normal size. ~ Israel Shamir

All the systems which explain so precisely why the world is as it is and why it can never be otherwise, have always called forth in me the same kind of uneasiness one has when face to face with the regulations displayed under the glaring lights of a prison cell. Even if one had been born in prison and had never seen the stars or seas or woods, one would instinctively know of timeless freedom in unlimited space.

My evil star, however, had fated me to be born in times when only the sharply demarcated and precisely calculable where in fashion.... "Of course, I am on the Right, on the Left, in the Centre; I descend from the monkey; I believe only what I see; the universe is going to explode at this or that speed" - we hear such remarks after the first words we exchange, from people whom we would not have expected to introduce themselves as idiots. If one is unfortunate enough to meet them again in five years, everything is different except their authoritative and mostly brutal assuredness. Now they wear a different badge in their buttonhole; and the universe now shrinks at such a speed that your hair stands on end. ~ Ernst Junger

I'm always giving myself the Alzheimer's test. My shrink told me to do this. It takes one minute. You name every word that comes to mind that begins with the letter F. ~ Ray Romano

It's ironic to think that behaviors we consider neurotic are actually holding the word in place - but sooner or later whatever protection they offer decays.And it's so much work.So damn much work. ~ Stephen King

When the Sun shrinks to a dull red dwarf, it will not be dying. It will just be starting to live and everything that has gone before will merely be a prelude to its real history. ~ Arthur C. Clarke

A liar would be brave toward God, while he is a coward toward men; for a lie faces God, and shrinks from man. ~ Michel De Montaigne

We waited and waited. All of us. Didn't the shrink know that waiting was one of the things that drove people crazy? People waited all their lives. They waited to live, they waited to die. They waited in line to buy toilet paper. They waited in line for money. And if they didn't have any money they waited in longer lines. You waited to go to sleep and then you waited to awaken. You waited to get married and you waited to get divorced. You waited for it to rain, you waited for it to stop. You waited to eat and then you waited to eat again. You waited in a shrink's office with a bunch of psychos and you wondered if you were one. ~ Charles Bukowski

Fear narrows the little entrance of our heart. It shrinks up our capacity to love. It freezes up our power to give ourselves. ~ Thomas Merton

If we conceive that anyone loves, desires, or hates anything which we ourselves love, desire, or hate, we shall thereupon regard the thing in question with more steadfast love, etc. On the contrary, if we think that anyone shrinks from something that we love, we shall undergo vacillation of the soul. ~ Baruch Spinoza

My DVD cellophane was put on by a psychiatrist. It was shrink-wrapped. ~ Tim Vine

Any one of my many shrinks could tell you that I was looking for my father. Wasn't everyone? The explanation didn't quite content me. Not that it seemed wrong: it just seemed too simple. Perhaps the search was really a kind of ritual in which the process was more important than the end. Perhaps it was a kind of quest. Perhaps there was no man at all, but just a mirage conjured by our longing and emptiness. When you go to sleep hungry you dream of eating. When you go to sleep with a full bladder you dream of getting up to pee. When you go to sleep horny you dream of getting laid. Maybe the impossible man was nothing more than a specter made of our own yearning. Maybe he was like the fearless intruder, the phantom rapist women expect to find under their bed or in their closets. Or maybe he was really death, the last lover. ~ Erica Jong

The United States plays, for the most part, a constructive global role, and to the extent that that role shrinks, other countries, even those most critical of what America does abroad, will suffer. ~ Michael Mandelbaum

How do I ask my shrink to stop responding to everything I say with, Too much information! and then giggling behind a pillow? ~ Dana Gould

Fate has carried me 'Mid the thick arrows: I will keep my stand Not shrink and let the shaft pass by my breast To pierce another. ~ George Eliot

Grief even in a child hates the light and shrinks from human eyes. ~ Thomas De Quincey

Don't worry. We do not have to talk about. We are Russian. We do not talk about feelings all the time and no one has shrink."
"I think you all have a shrink. And I think the shrink's name is vodka."
This gets a smile out of both of them. ~ Andrea Portes

Effective people stay out of Quadrants III and IV because, urgent or not, they aren't important. They also shrink Quadrant I down to size by spending more time in Quadrant II ... Quadrant II is the heart of effective personal management. ~ Stephen Covey

Knowledge is hot water on wool. It shrinks time and space. ~ Mark Z. Danielewski

Theres something incredible about putting a helmet on just before a game; its a feeling only a football player knows. Your vision narrows, and the whole world shrinks. You cant hear much of what goes on outside you, but you can hear yourself breathe and you can feel yourself sweat. ~ Carl Deuker

She was not granted the luxury of forgetting her lower middle-class existence where life hangs by an unseen thread to every hope and where every slash of disappointment shrinks the life further. ~ Madhu Vajpayee

When all has been considered, it seems to me to be the irresistible intuition that infinite punishment for finite sin would be unjust, and therefore wrong. We feel that even weak and erring Man would shrink from such an act. And we cannot conceive of God as acting on a lower standard of right and wrong. ~ Lewis Carroll

And just like that, the universe goes wrong. Just like that, all the enormity seems to shrink into a ball and float away from my reach. I feel it, and she doesn't. Or I feel it, and she won't. ~ David Levithan

[On Jane Austen:] To believe her limited in range because she was harmonious in method is as sensible as to imagine that when the Atlantic Ocean is as smooth as a mill-pond it shrinks to the size of a mill-pond. ~ Rebecca West

We shrink from the contemplation of our dead bodies, forgetting that when dead they are no longer ours, and concern us as little as the hairs that have fallen from our heads. ~ John Lancaster Spalding

Shields Green was not one to shrink from hardships or dangers. He was a man of few words, and his speech was singularly broken; but his courage and self-respect made him quite a dignified character. ~ Frederick Douglass

May I share with you my earliest memory of a political row? It was with my mother, about the Queen - classic Freudian stuff, shrinks would say. I was eight, and refusing to watch the Queen's Christmas Day broadcast. ~ Alastair Campbell

Without their money, the Jews will shrink into mere shadows of themselves, and the nightmare will be over. ~ Israel Shamir

A well-constituted human being, a 'happy one', must perform certain actions and instinctively shrinks from other actions, he transports the order of which he is the physiological representative into his relations with other human beings and with things. In a formula: his virtue is the consequence of his happiness…Everything good is instinct - and consequently easy, necessary, free. Effort is an objection. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Camera phones threaten to turn everyone into amateur paparazzi. We are witnessing our personal space shrink because of the way technology is being used. ~ Daniel J. Solove

You cannot persist in wanting what you already have. If you assume you are what you desire to be to the point of ecstasy, you no longer want it. Your imaginal act is as much a creative act as a physical one wherein man halts, shrinks and is blessed, for as man creates his own likeness, so does your imaginal act transform itself into the likeness of your assumption. If, however, you do not reach the point of satisfaction, repeat the action over and over again until you feel as though you touched it and virtue went out of you. ~ Neville Goddard

I hate not understanding the words, because it kind of squashes the song. It shrinks the visual landscape that you've made for the sounds. And, all of a sudden, the content eclipses things. ~ Ariel Pink

In my judgment, excellence and wealth are direct opposites, since when the one shrinks, the other grows, and when one grows, the other shrinks. ~ Apollonius Of Tyana

Why do we shrink from change? What can come into being save by change? ~ Marcus Aurelius

Growing numbers of people, in their work, come into contact with a diminishing fragment of reality; as their world shrinks, so does their language. ~ Ivan Klima

When I'm walking with my father through the woods, and we reach a place where you see so far that your ego suddenly shrinks because you are so touched by the dimension of your surroundings. ~ Volker Bertelmann

(Adron leveled a scowl that made him shrink back.)
Jeeze, you ought to bottle that look. I know armies that would pay a fortune to have something that toxic in their arsenal. (Tiernan) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

The bud, though plucked, would not be withered, only transplanted to a fitter soil to ripen and blow beneath a brighter sun; and though I might not cherish and watch my child's unfolding intellect, he would be snatched away from all the suffering and sins of earth; and my understanding tells me this would be no great evil; but my heart shrinks from the contemplation of such a possibility, and whispers I could not bear to see him die. ~ Anne Bronte

It's one thing to protect yourself," Dad yelled at me during our very next lunch. "That I get. Have I ever told you not to defend yourself? No. But did you have to permanently maim him? I spent all that money on that on that fancy school for girls-not to mention all that money for the shrinks-and what did that get me?"
I shrugged. "A seven-figure civil suit? ~ Meg Cabot

Political stress is always apt to shrink the private arena and attach it on to the public ~ Robert Hughes

Who feels injustice, who shrinks before a slight, who has a sense of wrong so acute, and so glowing a gratitude for kindness, as a generous boy? ~ William Makepeace Thackeray

More and more money is being extracted from of the production and consumption economy to pay the FIRE sector. That's what causes debt deflation and shrinks markets. If you pay the banks, you have less to spend on goods and services. ~ Michael Hudson

Ah, but depression - that is what we all hate. We the afflicted. Whereas the relatives and shrinks, the tribal ring, they rather welcome it: you are quiet and you suffer. ~ Kate Millett

When an answer I did not expect comes to a prayer which I believed I truly meant, I shrink back from it; if the burden my Lord asks me to bear be not the burden of my heart's choice, and I fret inwardly and do not welcome His will, then I know nothing of Calvary love. ~ Amy Carmichael

When we're constantly thinking about ourselves, our world shrinks. ~ Seth Adam Smith

If I do not keep on testing my limits, my comfort-zone shrinks back. Challenges that had seemed comfortable one year took courage to achieve the next. I do not want to get into that position again, so onwards and outwards. ~ Philippa Perry

That space. It begins in the middle of my forehead and ends in the middle of my groin. It is, variously, as wide as my body, as narrow as a slit in a fortress wall. On days when thought flows freely or better yet clarifies with effort, it expands gloriously. On days when anxiety and self-pity crowd in, it shrinks, how fast it shrinks! When the space is wide and I occupy it fully, I taste the air, feel the light. I breathe evenly and slowly. I am peaceful and excited, beyond influence or threat. Nothing can touch me. I'm safe. I'm free. I'm thinking. When I lose the battle to think, the boundaries narrow, the air is polluted, the light clouds over. All is vapor and fog, and I have trouble breathing. ~ Vivian Gornick

Authorities say brain cells may shrink, but they don't necessarily die. Frankly, I am cheered by the fact that something is shrinking. I'd be even more thrilled if what was shrinking affected my dress size, but you can't have everything. ~ Erma Bombeck

A minute analysis of life at once destroys that splendor which dazzles the imagination. Whatsoever grandeur can display, or luxury enjoy, is procured by offices of which the mind shrinks from the contemplation. All the delicacies of the table may be traced back to the shambles and the dunghill; all magnificence of building was hewn from the quarry, and all the pomp of ornament dug from among the damps and darkness of the mine. ~ Samuel Johnson

Every shrink knows that it's not the event itself but how you respond to it that tells the story. Take ten assorted individuals, expose them all to the same life trial, and they will each suffuse it with exquisite personal detail and meaning. ~ A.S.A Harrison

Life expands when you dare and share. Life shrinks when you seek consistency and fear. ~ Debasish Mridha

To the extent that the judicial profession becomes the daily routine of deciding cases on the most secure precedents and the narrowest grounds available, the judicial mind atrophies and its perspective shrinks. ~ Irving R. Kaufman

His life had already touched upon the age when everything that breathes of impulse shrinks in a man, when a powerful bow has a fainter effect on his soul and no longer twines piercing music around his heart, when the touch of beauty no longer transforms virginal powers into fire and flame, but all the burnt-out feelings become more accessible to the sound of gold, listen more attentively to its alluring music, and little by little allow it imperceptibly to lull them completely. Fame cannot give pleasure to one who did not merit it but stole it; it produces a constant tremor only in one who is worthy of it. And therefore all his feelings and longings turn toward gold. ~ Nikolai Gogol

May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun. ~ Arundhati Roy

When modernist poetry, or what not so long ago passed for modernist poetry, can reach the stage where the following piece by Mr. Ezra Pound is seriously offered as a poem, there is some justification for the plain reader and orthodox critic who shrinks from anything that may be labelled 'modernist' either in terms of condemnation or approbation ... Better he thinks, that ten authentic poets should be left for posterity to discover than one charlatan should be allowed to steal into the Temple of Fame. ~ Laura Riding

I'm going through a stage where the dumbest things make me bawl. I feel like I need to see a shrink. ~ Taye Diggs

Don't analyze me. We've got a whole department of shrinks on the payroll for that. ~ J.D. Robb

Surely if we knew what bitterness fate held in store, we would shrink back in fear and let the cup of life pass us by untasted. ~ Jacqueline Carey

Philosophy, that leaned on Heaven before,
Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more. ~ Alexander Pope

Even the stout of heart shrink when they see the approach of death. ~ Sophocles

As a child, I was constantly being sent on playdates with other kids - the shrinks insisted I interact with cohorts. That's what my meeting with Lyle was like: those first loose, horrible ten minutes, when the grown-ups have left, and neither kid knows what the other one wants, so you stand there, near the TV they've told you to keep off, fiddling with the antenna. ~ Gillian Flynn

Ignorance shrinks minds; perception is the compass to knowledge. ~ Vasilios Karpos

Water shrinks wool, urgency shrinks time.
Shrinkage may be an advantage or the reverse, according to expectation. ~ Idries Shah