Anna > Anna's Quotes

“It is in the nature of political bodies always to see the evil in the opposite group, just as the individual has an ineradicable tendency to get rid of everything he does not know and does not want to know about himself by foisting it off on somebody else.”
― Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self

“People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living weren't already complicated enough.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but our fatally short-sighted age thinks only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations...”
― C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self

“Happiness and contentment, equability of mind and meaningfulness of life – these can be experienced only by the individual and not by a State, which, on the one hand, is nothing but a convention agreed to by independent individuals, and on the other, continually threatens to paralyse and suppress the individual.”
― C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self

“The mass State has no intention of promoting mutual understanding and the relationship of man to man; it strives, rather, for atomization, for the psychic isolation of the individual.”
― C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self

“Most people confuse “self-knowledge” with knowledge of their conscious ego personalities. Anyone”
― C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self

“It is not the universal and the regular that characterize the individual, but rather the unique. He is not to be understood as a recurrent unit but as something unique and singular which in the last analysis can be neither known nor compared with anything else.”
― C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self

“Where the many are, there is security; what the many believe must of course be true; what the many want must be worth striving for, and necessary, and therefore good.”
― Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self