#psychology

Her parents, she said, has put a pinball machine inside her head when she was five years old. The red balls told her when she should laugh, the blue ones when she should be silent and keep away from other people; the green balls told her that she should start multiplying by three. Every few days a silver ball would make its way through the pins of the machine. At this point her head turned and she stared at me; I assumed she was checking to see if I was still listening. I was, of course. How could one not? The whole thing was bizarre but riveting. I asked her, What does the silver ball mean? She looked at me intently, and then everything went dead in her eyes. She stared off into space, caught up in some internal world. I never found out what the silver ball meant. ↗

— Kay Redfield Jamison

#bipolar-disorder #depression #mania #manic #manic-depression

A psychiatrist is the God of our age. But they cost money. ↗

— Sylvia Plath

#psychiatry #psychology #spirituality #age

Whenever I think of something but can't think of what it was I was thinking of, I can't stop thinking until I think I'm thinking of it again. I think I think too much. ↗

— Criss Jami

#challenge #clever #cognition #cognitive #cognitive-psychology

Besides,love is only a feeling. ↗

— Christina Westover

#literary-quote #love #mainstream-fiction #poisoning-sylvie #psychology

Considering that we live in an era of evolutionary everything---evolutionary biology, evolutionary medicine, evolutionary ecology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary economics, evolutionary computing---it was surprising how rarely people thought in evolutionary terms. It was a human blind spot. We look at the world around us as a snapshot when it was really a movie, constantly changing. ↗

— Michael Crichton

#change

The Army might screw you and your girlfriend might dump you and the enemy might kill you, but the shared commitment to safeguard one another’s lives is unnegotiable and only deepens with time. The willingness to die for another person is a form of love that even religions fail to inspire, and the experience of it changes a person profoundly. ↗

— Sebastian Junger

#combat #psychology #change

Obviously, there must be some connection between the subordination of actual individuals and the grotesque exaltation of symbolic ones like Kim Il Sung. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#dictatorship #kim-il-sung #north-korea #psychology #subordination

The Element is about discovering your self, and you can't do this if you're trapped in a compulsion to conform. You can't be yourself in a swarm. ↗

— Ken Robinson

#life #passion #psychology #success #change

Those who speak of progression but are afraid of change are self-repressed and therefore unable to reach any further than their eyes can already see. ↗

— Criss Jami

#afraid #change #cognition #experimentation #eyes

Psychology either tends to glorify human beings or trivialize them, leaving out the complexity of the human soul and the demands of God. ↗

— Gene Edward Veith Jr.

#psychology #sociology #love