Clancy Martin Quotes

Deception and self-deception are intimately intertwined. We fool ourselves in order to fool others, and we fool others in order to fool ourselves.

A suicide attempt can be very much like falling in love. You're not really sure, as you proceed, what is real and what you're making up as you go. You're genuinely uncertain how the whole thing's going to turn out. You want it, but you don't. It seems both inevitable and impossible.

we live now in circumstances that encourage rather than discourage lying; evidence and activity are more easily concealed, and the need to rely on demeanor as an indicator of a person’s truthfulness is greater. And our evolutionary history has not prepared us to be very sensitive to the behavioral clues relevant to lying.

Clever deceivers rarely tell outright falsehoods. It’s too risky. The art of deception is closely related to the magician’s craft: it involves knowing how to draw attention to a harmless place, to deflect it away from the action. Deeply entrenched patterns of perceptual, emotional, and cognitive dispositions serve as instruments of deception. A skilled deceiver is an illusionist who knows how to manipulate the normal patterns of what is salient to their audience. He places salient markers—something red, something anomalous, something desirable—in the visual field, to draw attention just where he wants it.

One night, on the phone with him, in the car on the way back from the grocery store, I broke down crying and said, “I’m a terrible wife. I’m not a good person. I’m as bad as everyone says.” He said, “Don’t flatter yourself. You’re no better and no worse than anyone else.

The modest thesis I’m developing here is that thinking about killing oneself and addictive thinking have a lot more in common than is normally recognized. They may even be different variations of the same fundamental kind of thinking. With this model—which, granted, may only characterize one kind of suicidal inclination—wanting to kill yourself is like an extreme version of the relief you find after drinking a few glasses of wine, and the pungent smell of yourself seems to drift off into the breeze. And in fact this theory is really just an elaboration of the Buddha’s idea that the desire for self-annihilation is among our most basic forms of suffering, or Freud’s idea that the desire for life and the desire for death are two sides of the same coin.

finish the Tom Clancy

I've lived nearly all my life with two incompatible ideas in my head: I wish I were dead and I'm gad by suicides failed. I've never once thought, If only I'd successfully killed myself, I would have been spared all this living I've done. And yet when I'm feeling like my life has been a complete waste, my first thought is Okay then, go kill yourself now. Or rather, I tend to think along very concrete lines, such as I'd better just hand myself, because I don't have any poison, and if I order some, I'll have lost my nerve by the time it gets here. And it's important that I do this right now, while my thinking is clear. (Which shows you how confused I actually am.)