The neurotic doesn’t know how to cope with his emotional bills; some he keeps paying over and over, others he never pays at all.
Others settle for small rewards; the neurotic must always go for broke.
The neurotic has perfect vision in one eye, but he cannot remember which.
The neurotic’s strongest fantasy is that he has no fantasies. The real is very real to him, the unreal even more so.
A doctor recently described to me “benign positional vertigo”: it means you get dizzy in certain positions, but you can get over it without necessarily changing the position. Change “vertigo” to “anxiety,” and you’ve summed up the neurotic’s plight.
Neurotics always feel as though they were going way up or way down, which is odd in people going sideways.
The neurotic is always half-drowning in anxiety, and always being half-rescued.
Neurotic: someone who can go from the bottom to the top, and back again, without ever once touching the middle.
The three horrors of modern life – talk without meaning, desire without love, work without satisfaction.
We are irritated by rascals, intolerant of fools, and prepared to love the rest. But where are they?
The neurotic circles ceaselessly above a fogged-in airport.
If you are brave too often, people will come to expect it of you.
There’s an awful lot of blood around that water is thicker than.
Women are afraid of mice and of murder, and of very little in between.
Every now and then you run across radiantly attractive people and you’re delighted to find they adore you, till you realize that they adore just about everybody- and that’s what’s made them radiantly attractive.
Hot dogs always seem better out than at home; so do French-fried potatoes; so do your children.
Women gather together to wear silly hats, eat dainty food, and forget how unresponsive their husbands are. Men gather to talk sports, eat heavy food, and forget how demanding their wives are. Only where children gather is there any real chance of fun.
A woman’s mink coat represents the sacrifice of a lot of little animals, including her husband.
Self-confidence grows on trees, in other people’s orchards.
There are three iron links in the neurotic’s chain: unloving, unlovable, unloved.