A broken leg can be remembered and located: "It hurt right below my knee, it throbbed, I felt sick at my stomach." But mental pain is remembered the way dreams are remembered—in fragments, unbidden realizations, like looking into a well and seeing the dim reflection of your face in that instant before the water shatters.

—Tracy Thompson

memory pain psychology

More quotations tagged with “psychology”

You never get over it. But you get to where it doesn’t bother you so much.

—Jeffrey Eugenides in The Virgin Suicides

memory moving on psychology

A sense of reverence is necessary for psychological health. If a person has no sense of reverence, no feeling that there is anyone or anything that inspires awe, it cuts the personality off completely from the nourishing springs of the unconscious.

—Robert Johnson

wonder awe personality psychology revernce unconscious

Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.

—David Sedaris

writing control psychology illusion

Hollywood is a place where they place you under contract instead of under observation.

—Walter Winchell

Hollywood psychology contracts

Neurotics build castles in the air, psychotics live in them. My mother cleans them.

humor psychology

History

23 Nov 2014 Added
26 Oct 2026 Wording changed

Previous wording

A broken leg can be remembered and located: "It hurt right below my knee, it throbbed, I felt sick at my stomach." But mental pain is remembered the way dreams are remembered — in fragments, unbidden realizations, like looking into a well and seeing the dim reflection of your face in that instant before the water shatters.