Shame Movie Quotes

It really is a shame more movies aren’t like real life. Maybe then we wouldn’t have such high expectations and feel let down by our own existence so much.

The reader! You, dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bastard, it's you I'm addressing, who else, from inside this monstrous fiction. You've read me this far, then? Even this far? For what discreditable motive? How is it you don't go to a movie, watch TV, stare at a wall, play tennis with a friend, make amorous advances to the person who comes to your mind when I speak of amorous advances? Can nothing surfeit, saturate you, turn you off? Where's your shame?

Disney will never make a movie about my life story, and that's a shame--I'd make a really cute animated creature.

Because let's talk about power. In the domestic polity, myth dictates that parents are endowed with a disproportionate amount of it. I'm not so sure. Children? They can break our hearts, for a start. They can shame us, they can bankrupt us, and I can personally attest that they can make us wish we were never born. What can we do? Keep them from going to the movies. But how? With what do we back up our prohibitions if the kid heads belligerently for the door? The crude truth is that parents are like governments: We maintain our authority through the threat, overt or implicit, of physical force.

Have you ever seen The Goodbye Girl? Don’t watch it if you still want to enjoy romantic comedies. It makes every movie ever made starring Julia Roberts or Sandra Bullock lash itself in shame.

But when I was seven or eight years old, the film that changed my life was Titanic. It amazed me that it was a story that took place a hundred years ago. Those people living in 1912 had better technology than most North Koreans! But mostly I couldn’t believe how someone could make a movie out of such a shameful love story. In North Korea, the filmmakers would have been executed. No real human stories were allowed, nothing but propaganda about the Leader. But in Titanic, the characters talked about love and humanity. I was amazed that Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet were willing to die for love, not just for the regime, as we were. The idea that people could choose their own destinies fascinated me. This pirated Hollywood movie gave me my first small taste of freedom.

Don’t be afraid to do weird stuff, so long as you do it cheaply and cover everyone’s bets. Be bold. Be stupid, if you have to: so long as you don’t hurt anybody, what’s it matter how dopey your dream is? If I hadn’t made TUSK? If I’d let it die as a podcast? I wouldn’t have three other movies I’m now making within the span of a year. Some folks will try to shame you for trying something outside the norm; the only shame is in not trying to accomplish your dreams.

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy 2. Submissive to everything, open, listening 3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house 4. Be in love with yr life 5. Something that you feel will find its own form 6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind 7. Blow as deep as you want to blow 8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind 9. The unspeakable visions of the individual 10. No time for poetry but exactly what is 11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest 12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you 13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition 14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time 15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog 16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye 17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself 18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea 19. Accept loss forever 20. Believe in the holy contour of life 21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind 22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better 23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning 24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge 25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it 26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form 27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness 28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better 29. You're a Genius all the time 30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

...it was ludicrous to think that we could just talk our way out of shame, that shame was necessary, that it prevented us from repeating shameful actions and that it motivated us to say we were sorry and to seek forgiveness and to empathize with our fellow humans and to feel the pain of self-loathing which motivated some of us to write books as a futile attempt at atonement, and shame also helped, I told my friend, to fuck up relationships and fucked-up relationships are the life force of books and movies and theatre so sure, let's get rid of shame but then we can kiss art goodbye too.

Confession time: I doubt I would ever have picked up one of Marjorie’s books, had I not met her in person. The reason is they’re categorized as Romances, which is where they are shelved in bookstores. Though I have no justification for avoiding it, the romance section is an area in bookstores I seldom wander into. Her novels also have traditional-looking romance book covers, which are occasionally a bit off-putting to us mighty manly men. Then again, who knows? I don’t carry many biases where good storytelling is concerned. I’m willing to find it anywhere, as too many of my friends will attest, when I try to drag them to wonderful movies that they aren’t eager to go to, simply because they fall under the chick-flick rubric. So, in any case, I’m glad I did meet Marjorie Liu in person, because it would have been a shame to miss out on the work of an author this talented due to whatever degree of cultural prejudices I might still possess. I trust you who read this won’t make the same mistake.

She took no pleasure from the very things I loved, from her size, her amplitude, her luscious, zaftig heft. As many times as I told her she was beautiful, I know that she never believed me. As many times as I said it didn’t matter, I knew that to her it did. I was just one voice, and the world’s voice was louder. I could feel her shame like a palpable thing, walking beside us on the street, crouched down between us in a movie theater, coiled up and waiting for someone to say what to her was the dirtiest word in the world: fat.

All teenagers are drama queens inside their minds, even the mousiest of us. We load and reload movies of ourselves in heroic postures and outlandish triumphs, movies that if they were ever to be played in front of an audience of people we know and love, would cause us to shrivel in shame

Having DID is, for many people, a very lonely thing. If this book reaches some people whose experiences resonate with mine and gives them a sense that they aren't alone, that there is hope, then I will have achieved one of my goals. A sad fact is that people with DID spend an average of almost seven years in the mental health system before being properly diagnosed and receiving the specific help they need. During that repeatedly misdiagnosed and incorrectly treated, simply because clinicians fail to recognize the symptoms. If this book provides practicing and future clinicians certain insight into DID, then I will have accomplished another goal. Clinicians, and all others whose lives are touched by DID, need to grasp the fundamentally illusive nature of memory, because memory, or the lack of it, is an integral component of this condition. Our minds are stock pots which are continuously fed ingredients from many cooks: parents, siblings, relatives, neighbors, teachers, schoolmates, strangers, acquaintances, radio, television, movies, and books. These are the fixings of learning and memory, which are stirred with a spoon that changes form over time as it is shaped by our experiences. In this incredibly amorphous neurological stew, it is impossible for all memories to be exact. But even as we accept the complex of impressionistic nature of memory, it is equally essential to recognize that people who experience persistent and intrusive memories that disrupt their sense of well-being and ability to function, have some real basis distress, regardless of the degree of clarity or feasibility of their recollections. We must understand that those who experience abuse as children, and particularly those who experience incest, almost invariably suffer from a profound sense of guilt and shame that is not meliorated merely by unearthing memories or focusing on the content of traumatic material. It is not enough to just remember. Nor is achieving a sense of wholeness and peace necessarily accomplished by either placing blame on others or by forgiving those we perceive as having wronged us. It is achieved through understanding, acceptance, and reinvention of the self.

i wonder how many women are painting themselves into movie girls while they sleep angling their faces alien to themselves, an unnecessary surrender to things that kill them, to things that are not real I tell myself in the mirror, applying the second coat of mascara: these things are not real

It so happens I am sick of being a man. And it happens that I walk into tailorshops and movie houses dried up, waterproof, like a swan made of felt steering my way in a water of wombs and ashes. The smell of barbershops makes me break into hoarse sobs. The only thing I want is to lie still like stones or wool. The only thing I want is to see no more stores, no gardens, no more goods, no spectacles, no elevators. It so happens that I am sick of my feet and my nails and my hair and my shadow. It so happens I am sick of being a man. Still it would be marvelous to terrify a law clerk with a cut lily, or kill a nun with a blow on the ear. It would be great to go through the streets with a green knife letting out yells until I died of the cold. I don't want to go on being a root in the dark, insecure, stretched out, shivering with sleep, going on down, into the moist guts of the earth, taking in and thinking, eating every day. I don't want so much misery. I don't want to go on as a root and a tomb, alone under the ground, a warehouse with corpses, half frozen, dying of grief. That's why Monday, when it sees me coming with my convict face, blazes up like gasoline, and it howls on its way like a wounded wheel, and leaves tracks full of warm blood leading toward the night. And it pushes me into certain corners, into some moist houses, into hospitals where the bones fly out the window, into shoeshops that smell like vinegar, and certain streets hideous as cracks in the skin. There are sulphur-colored birds, and hideous intestines hanging over the doors of houses that I hate, and there are false teeth forgotten in a coffeepot, there are mirrors that ought to have wept from shame and terror, there are umbrellas everywhere, and venoms, and umbilical cords. I stroll along serenely, with my eyes, my shoes, my rage, forgetting everything, I walk by, going through office buildings and orthopedic shops, and courtyards with washing hanging from the line: underwear, towels and shirts from which slow dirty tears are falling

In major movies these days, the fine details of music, instrumentation and sound design are lost. This is a shame, and it is one of the various reasons that make me not want to be part of the entertainment business. Although I have done it in the past, finally I know that I'm not here to create industry products. Music is more than images, it's more than language... it's the medium that's capable of communicating the answers to the Big Questions.

I loved Cinderella, Snow White, and James Bond movies. But when I was seven or eight years old, the film that changed my life was Titanic. It amazed me that it was a story that took place a hundred years ago. Those people living in 1912 had better technology than most North Koreans! But mostly I couldn’t believe how someone could make a movie out of such a shameful love story. In North Korea, the filmmakers would have been executed. No real human stories were allowed, nothing but propaganda about the Leader. But in Titanic, the characters talked about love and humanity. I was amazed that Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet were willing to die for love, not just for the regime, as we were. The idea that people could choose their own destinies fascinated me. This pirated Hollywood movie gave me my first small taste of freedom.

But we also need to be careful about turning too easily and exclusively to our junk. To television, to the Internet. To movies, sports, and hobbies. To numbing wastes of time, if not to shameful lacks of self-control. Let’s be honest, sometimes it’s just easier to shop than to deal with our lives.

Make me breakfast in the morning?" "So long as you don't leave my sight until then." He grinned. I laughed. Sure, I was crazy about him, but spending the night with him? "Oh really?" "We'll rent a bunch of movies and fill up on popcorn. Maybe snuggle. If you're lucky." "I'm feeling very lucky right now.

Because while it surely felt cathartic to see it all laid bare, even briefly, the view did not undo the damage. We could not go back in time and have the story of Hillary Clinton be written by people who had not also pressed their erections into the shoulders of young women who’d worked for them. We could not retroactively resituate the women who’d left jobs and whole careers because the navigation of the risks, of the daily abuses, drove them out. We would not see the movies or the art that those women would have made, could not live by the laws that they might have enacted, could not read the news as they might have reported it, had they ever truly had a fair shake at getting to tell it their way. The tsunami of #metoo stories hadn’t just revealed the way that men had grabbed and rubbed and punished and shamed women; it had also shown us that they had done it all while building the very world in which we still were forced to live.

The best way to avoid being confused about Bruce Jenner is get your head out of his bedroom and closet, and then think about all of the things you've been hiding and been miserable about. So what he made his announcement via media. Books, music, movies, business launches are announced in the same manner. Just focus on the feeling of finally disclosing something that enables you to be free and to live as authentically as possible. And then imagine what it's like to own your truth, tell it your way, thus taking away anyone else's ability to spin it their way or use it against you. If you can do any of the above, you will no longer be confused.

By eroding their sense of shame we've made immorality normal, not only in the world but also in the forbidden squadron. ...their new Christian friends recommended some of the movies Fletcher had been wondering if he should now avoid. I was delighted one of them said, "This is a great movie--only one sex scene, and the f-word's only used a few times." 'Titanic' is one of my favorites. How many Christian young people have watched it in their own homes? Think of it, Squaltaint. Suppose someone in the youth group said to the boys, 'There's an attractive girl down the street. Let's get together and go look through her window and watch her undress and lay back on a couch and pose naked from the waist up. Then this girl and her boyfriend will get in a car and have sex--let's get as close as we can and listen to them and watch the windows steam up.' The strategy would never work. They'd know immediately it was wrong. But you can get them to do exactly the same thing by using a television instead of a window. That's all is takes! Think of it, Squaltaint. Every day Christians across the country, including many squadron leaders, watch women and men undress and commit acts of fornication and adultery the Enemy calls an abomination. We've made them a bunch of voyeurs! Churches full of peeping toms.

Because let’s talk about power. In the domestic polity, myth dictates that parents are endowed with a disproportionate amount of it. I’m not so sure. Children? They can break our hearts, for a start. They can shame us, they can bankrupt us, and I can personally attest that they can make us wish we were never born. What can we do? Keep them from going to the movies. But how? With what do we back up our prohibitions if the kid heads belligerently for the door? The crude truth is that parents are like governments: We maintain our authority through the threat, overt or implicit, of physical force. A kid does what we say—not to put too fine a point on it—because we can break his arm. Yet

It was nothing I hadn’t thought of, plenty, and in far less taxing circumstances; the urge shook me grandly and unpredictably, a poisonous whisper that never wholly left me, that on some days lingered just on the threshold of my hearing but on others roared up uncontrollably into a sort of lurid visionary frenzy, why I wasn’t sure, sometimes even a bad movie or a gruesome dinner party could trigger it, short term boredom and long term pain, temporary panic and permanent desperation striking all at once and flaring up in such an ashen desolate light that I saw, really saw, looking back down the years and with all clear-headed and articulate despair, that the world and everything in it was intolerably and permanently fucked and nothing had ever been good or okay, unbearable claustrophobia of the soul, the windowless room, no way out, waves of shame and horror, leave me alone, my mother dead on a marble floor, stop it stop it, muttering aloud to myself in elevators, in cabs, leave me alone, I want to die, a cold, intelligent, self-immolating fury

Some people find illeism annoying (although it doesn’t bother Daniel Pink). But its existence as a style of speech and narration exemplifies the final step in the regret-reckoning process. Talking about ourselves in the third person is one variety of what social psychologists call “self-distancing.” When we’re beset by negative emotions, including regret, one response is to immerse ourselves in them, to face the negativity by getting up close and personal. But immersion can catch us in an undertow of rumination. A better, more effective, and longer-lasting approach is to move in the opposite direction—not to plunge in, but to zoom out and gaze upon our situation as a detached observer, much as a movie director pulls back the camera. After self-disclosure relieves the burden of carrying a regret, and self-compassion reframes the regret as a human imperfection rather than an incapacitating flaw, self-distancing helps you analyze and strategize—to examine the regret dispassionately without shame or rancor and to extract from it a lesson that can guide your future behavior.

Later, in my adulthood, I will read the book again, even watch the movie, and understand that I wasn’t equipped, as a child, to make room for arguments that would undermine every single choice made for me, that would shatter the foundations of my very existence. I would see that I had to believe everything I was taught, if only to survive. For a long time I wouldn’t be ready to accept that my worldview could be wrong, but I do not look back with shame at my ignorance.

This book is dedicated to everyone who has ever loved a story so much they could quote it. There's nothing in the world quite like being part of a fandom. Never let anyone shame you for it. Read those books. Watch those movies. Binge those TV shows. Love those characters. Admire those celebrities. Write that fan-fiction. Draw that fan art. Go to those conventions. Sing that (on-hiatus, totally-not-broken-up) boy band at the top or your lungs. Do what makes you happy.

This was not a simple case of taking an otherwise normal, well-balanced, rational human being, putting him in a bad situation, and suddenly he turns bad,” he said. “I faked it.” He explained. The first night was boring. Everyone was just sitting around. “I thought, Someone is spending a lot of money to put this thing on and they’re not getting any results. So I thought I’d get some action going.” He had just seen the Paul Newman prison movie Cool Hand Luke, in which a sadistic southern prison warden played by Strother Martin persecutes the inmates. So Dave decided to channel him.

So in the long run, it didn't matter at all if you had bee good or not. The girls in high school who had "gone all the way" had not wound up living in back alleys in shame and disgrace, like she thought they would; they wound up happy or unhappily married, just like the rest of them. So all the struggle to stay pure, the fear of being touched, the fear of driving a boy mad with passion by any gesture, and the ultimate fear - getting pregnant - all that wasted energy was for nothing. Now, movie stars were having children out of wedlock by the dozen and naming them names like Moonbeam or Sunfeather.

She's right. They all are. I can feel it in my bones, that fear, like a sour taste on my tongue. I want nothing more than to stay here, to give in to their reason. I've seen the movies, too—I know what happens to the person who leaves safety to head out into the dark forest, the haunted psychiatric ward, the abandoned school. But what those movies don't show is the guilt surging like a current through my skin; how it feels to know someone you care about is already there, alone and vulnerable and terrified. What the moviegoers don't see is that the shame of staying can weigh heavier than the fear of going.

In the domestic polity, myth dictates that parents are endowed with a disproportionate amount of it. I’m not so sure. Children? They can break our hearts, for a start. They can shame us, they can bankrupt us, and I can personally attest that they can make us wish we were never born. What can we do? Keep them from going to the movies. But how? With what do we back up our prohibitions if the kid heads belligerently for the door? The crude truth is that parents are like governments: We maintain our authority through the threat, overt or implicit, of physical force. A kid does what we say—not to put too fine a point on it—because we can break his arm.

It was nothing I hadn't thought of, plenty, and in far less taxing circumstances; the urge shook me grandly and unpredictably, a poisonous whisper that never wholly left me, that on some days lingered just on the threshold of my hearing but on others roared up uncontrollably into a sort of lurid visionary frenzy, why I wasn't sure, sometimes even a bad movie or a gruesome dinner party could trigger it, short term boredom and long term pain, temporary panic and permanent desperation striking all at once and flaring up in such an ashen desolate light that I saw, really saw, looking back down the years and with all clear-headed and articulate despair, that the world and everything in it was intolerably and permanently fucked and nothing had ever been good or okay, unbearable claustrophobia of the soul, the windowless room, no way out, waves of shame and horror, leave me alone, my mother dead on a marble floor, stop it stop it, muttering aloud to myself in elevators, in cabs, leave me alone, I want to die, a cold, intelligent, self-immolating fury that had-- more than once-- driven me upstairs in a resolute fog to swallow indiscriminate combos of whatever booze and pills I happened to have on hand: only tolerance and ineptitude that I'd botched it, unpleasantly surprised when I woke up though relieved for Hobie that he hadn't had to find me.

If you took all the killing in Star Wars and replaced it with fucking, you'd have an R-rated movie instead of PG. You ask me what's wrong with society? That's what's fucking wrong with society, that's everything that's wrong with society. From the age we're old enough to watch Star Wars we're told that sexuality is something we should be shy and timid about, while violence makes us heroes. Something we were designed to do is secret and shameful. Something we should never do is how we get things done. Star Wars is a great movie, don't get me wrong, but if you think its more acceptable for children than Looking For Alaska, because of the latter's sexual content, then your view of what it means to be human is seriously disturbed.

Wow. she is pretty,' Laila said. Her voice stuttered across the last word. The original thought had been, Wow she is hot, and the sentence had transformed on the way out. Laila couldn't talk about anybody like that. Not even her celebrity crushes, not even avatar of perfection Samuel Marquez. A barrier of shame as impermeable as plexiglas walled her off from everything sexual, every thought, every action, even something as small as the difference in connotation between 'pretty' and 'hot.' Hannah had teased her about this once and had stopped when Laila didn't come close to smiling. Her inexperience didn't feel charming or virtuous, like she was some good-girl persona from a movie. It felt furious and heated, humiliating and childish, as if physicality were a language she was supposed to have learned, and here she was in senior year, surrounded by a horde of native speakers, unable to translate the most basic concepts.

I had always thought that having a flashback meant fully hallucinating your past. In the movies, soldiers would be transported back to Afghanistan—they’d see desert sand and automatic rifles in a waking nightmare. But even when I remembered moments of abuse, I knew where I was. I knew I was on the couch. I knew I was not going to die. But I soon learned that in trauma lingo, people often aren’t talking about the movie version of flashbacks. They’re talking about emotional flashbacks. For example, before I quit my job, my boss often came into my office to tell me I’d made some minor mistake. If my body and brain were totally in the present, I would have felt embarrassed for messing up but would recognize that it wasn’t a huge deal, acknowledge my faults, and get back to it. Instead, after my boss left, I always felt guilt and anxiety and shame and terror. I’d run downstairs to have a cigarette, text a friend about how I was a moron, and spend half an hour freaking out about how nobody respected me and I’d probably end up fired. Even though consciously I was completely in the present, my emotions were back in 1997, back when I was a little kid and making a mistake on a spelling test could literally be a matter of life and death. This return was an emotional flashback.

I adjust the mirror so I can see reflections or reflections, miles and miles of me and my new jeans. I hook my hair behind my ears. I should have washed it. My face is dirty. I lean into the mirror. Eyes after eyes after eyes stare back at me. Am I in there somewhere? A thousand eyes blink. No makeup. Dark circles. I pull the side flaps of the mirror in closer, folding myself into the looking glass and blocking out the rest of the store. My face becomes a Picasso sketch, my body slicing into dissecting cubes. I saw a movie once where a woman was burned over eighty percent of her body and they had to wash all the dead skin off. They wrapped her in bandages, kept her drugged, and waited for skin grafts. They actually sewed her into a new skin. I push my ragged mouth against the mirror. A thousand bleeding, crusted lips push back. What does it feel like to walk in a new skin? Was she completely sensitive like a baby, or numb, without any nerve endings, just walking in a skin bag? I exhale and my mouth disappears in a fog. I feel like my skin has been burned off. I stumble from thornbush to thornbush - my mother and father who hate each other, Rachel who hates me, a school that gags on my like I'm a hairball. And Heather. I just need to hang on long enough for my new skin to graft. Mr. Freeman thinks I need to find my feelings. How can I not find them? They are chewing me alive like an infestation of thoughts, shame, mistakes. I squeeze my eyes shut. Jeans that fit, that's a good start. I have to stay away from the closet, go to all my classes. I will make myself normal. Forget the rest of it.

Many have observed that Hollywood has the unique talent to ‘weave magic spells’ in its movies. But that will come to an end, apparently, as Jeremiah tells us that “Her images will be put to shame and her idols filled with terror” (Jeremiah 50:2d). Price Waterhouse Coopers projects that Americans will spend $495 Billion on entertainment in 2013. No other nation on earth spends so much of its national treasure on entertaining itself.

Have you ever seen the Goodbye Girl? Don't watch it if you still want to enjoy romantic comedies. It makes every movie ever made starring Julia Roberts or Sandra Bullock lash itself in shame. Also, don't watch The Goodbye Girl if it would trouble you to find Richard Dreyfuss wildly attractive for the rest of your life, even when you see him in What About Bob? or Mr. Holland's Opus.

On a gray afternoon I sit in a silent room and contemplate din. In the street a single car passes - a rapid bass vowel - and then it is quiet again. So what is this uproar, this hubbub, this heaving rumble of zigzag static I keep hearing? This echo chamber spooling out spirals of chaos? An unmistakable noise as clearly mine as fingerprint or twist of DNA: the thrum of regret, of memory, of defeat, of mutability, of bitter fear, made up of shame and ambition and anger and vanity and wishing. The soundtrack of a movie of the future, an anticipatory ribbon of scenes long dreaded, of daydreams without a prayer of materializing. Or else: the replay of unforgotten conversations, humiliating, awkward, indelible. Mainly it is the buzz of the inescapably mundane, the little daily voice that insists and insists: right now, not now, too late, too soon, why not, better not, turn it on, turn it off, notice this, notice that, be sure to take care of, remember not to. The nonstop chatter that gossips, worries, envies, invokes, yearns, condemns, self-condemns.

Damn it, my language is most controlled, madam,” said Captain Gregg stiffly, “and as for my morals, I can assure you that no woman has ever been the worse in body or pocket for knowing me, and I’d like to know how many mealy-mouthed psalm-singers can say the same. I’ve lived a man’s life and I’m not ashamed of it, but I’ve always tried to tell the truth and shame the devil.

My advice is that, inna famous words of Abraham Lincoln unless maybe it was George Washington or from a movie I saw sometime, who knows, is that the truth is your friend, even when it sure as shit don’t look that way, and now that I think of it, it mighta been what’s-his-name, Clint Eastbrook, but where I’m goin’ wit’ this is that if you’re tryin’ to get somewhere, pretty much anywhere, the shortest route is by way of the truth, which, by the way, prob’ly also has the least traffic whereas Bullshit Boulevard is always jammed.

I felt haunted, and borderline’s spirit wasn’t benevolent. To be borderline meant one was unstable, obsessive, dysfunctional, overly attached, simultaneously avoidant, and prone to outbursts fueled by anger. My borderline ghost, it seemed, should have been named Crazy—and in ways, it was. The representations of borderline characters in the media were from shows with the word “crazy” or its synonyms in the title; programs such as Maniac, movies called Fatal Attraction, Mad Love, and Shame. Every story was one I didn’t, couldn’t, aspire to; a narrative that portrayed borderline as an unconquerable, maddening disease where the sufferer was undeniably a “maniac.

Young Hans Reiter also liked to walk, like a diver, but he didn’t like to sing, for divers never sing. Sometimes he would walk east out of town, along a dirt road through the forest, and he would come to the Village of Red Men, where all they did was sell peat. If he walked farther east, there was the Village of Blue Women, in the middle of a lake that dried up in the summer. Both places looked like ghost towns, inhabited by the dead. Beyond the Village of Blue Women was the Town of the Fat. It smelled bad there, like blood and rotting meat, a dense, heavy smell very different from the smell of his own town, which smelled of dirty clothes, sweat clinging to the skin, pissed-upon earth, which is a thin smell, a smell like Chorda filum. In the Town of the Fat, as was to be expected, there were many animals and several butcher shops. Sometimes, on his way home, moving like a diver, he watched the Town of the Fat citizens wander the streets of the Village of Blue Women or the Village of Red Men and he thought that maybe the villagers, those who were ghosts now, had died at the hands of the inhabitants of the Town of the Fat, who were surely fearsome and relentless practitioners of the art of killing, no matter that they never bothered him, among other reasons because he was a diver, which is to say he didn’t belong to their world, where he came only as an explorer or a visitor. On other occasions his steps took him west, and he walked down the main street of Egg Village, which each year was farther and farther from the rocks, as if the houses could move on their own and chose to seek a safer place near the dells and forests. It wasn’t far from Egg Village to Pig Village, a village he imagined his father never visited, where there were many pigstys and the happiest herds of pigs for miles around, pigs that seemed to greet the passerby regardless of his social standing or age or marital status, with friendly grunts, almost musical, or in fact entirely musical, while the villagers stood frozen with their hats in their hands or covering their faces, whether out of modesty or shame it wasn’t clear. And farther on was the Town of Chattering Girls, girls who went to parties and dances in even bigger towns whose names the young Hans Reiter heard and immediately forgot, girls who smoked in the streets and talked about sailors at a big port who served on this or that ship, the names of which the young Hans Reiter immediately forgot, girls who went to the movies and saw the most thrilling films, with actors who were the handsomest men on the planet and actresses who, if one wanted to be fashionable, one had to imitate, and whose names the young Hans Reiter immediately forgot. When he got home, like a night diver, his mother asked him where he’d spent the day and the young Hans Reiter told her the first thing that came to mind, anything but the truth. Then his mother stared at him with her blue eye and the boy held her gaze with his two blue eyes, and from the corner near the hearth, the one-legged man watched them both with his two blue eyes and for three or four seconds the island of Prussia seemed to rise from the depths.

necessary, that it prevented us from repeating shameful actions and that it motivated us to say we were sorry and to seek forgiveness and to empathize with our fellow humans and to feel the pain of self-loathing which motivated some of us to write books as a futile attempt at atonement, and shame also helped, I told my friend, to fuck up relationships and fucked-up relationships are the life force of books and movies and theater so sure, let’s get rid of shame but then we can kiss art goodbye too.

Consider taking a break for yourself. To rest and rejuvenate. Make your schedule slow and include some small breaks in it. Sit and enjoy your favorite music, go for a walk, or just watch your favorite movie. Address your inner critic or judgments who shame you for crying too much or not enough. Quit calling yourself names for not doing enough. You have these completely unrealistic expectations out of yourself that no sane man can match up to. Grieving takes up a lot of your energy so don’t burden yourself with expectations. You’re trying your best and that’s an achievement in itself. You’re not a wimp or a loser for not checking off everything on your to-do list. Pause and listen to these noises in your head. Drop constantly putting yourself down and just be and feel grief for as long as you can. Embracing vulnerability, anxiousness, and irritability is normal for someone who’s experiencing separation or loss. Be tender so you can understand your needs and requirements during this phase of hardships. It’s a part of you so there’s no need to hide or tuck it away.

I passed the donut shop from Tangerine that had been replaced by another donut shop. I remembered seeing the movie high on pills and falling asleep and lying to everyone afterward. “Wow, it was phenomenal. Game-changing, holy shit.” How shameful. But everyone’s secretly in a lot of pain, right? They are. They have to be. Existence is painful.

We’d had a bit of an argument then because I told him that it was ludicrous to think that we could just talk our way out of shame, that shame was necessary, that it prevented us from repeating shameful actions and that it motivated us to say we were sorry and to seek forgiveness and to empathize with our fellow humans and to feel the pain of self-loathing which motivated some of us to write books as a futile attempt at atonement, and shame also helped, I told my friend, to fuck up relationships and fucked-up relationships are the life force of books and movies and theater so sure, let’s get rid of shame but then we can kiss art goodbye too.

trying to remember what my friend in Toronto had told me recently: that in ten years time shame will be all the rage, talking about it, dissecting it, and banishing it. We’d had a bit of an argument then because I told him that it was ludicrous to think that we could just talk our way out of shame, that shame was necessary, that it prevented us from repeating shameful actions and that it motivated us to say we were sorry and to seek forgiveness and to empathize with our fellow humans and to feel the pain of self-loathing which motivated some of us to write books as a futile attempt at atonement, and shame also helped, I told my friend, to fuck up relationships and fucked-up relationships are the life force of books and movies and theater so sure, let’s get rid of shame but then we can kiss art goodbye too.

The Snake Pit, a 1948 movie starring Olivia de Havilland, portrayed the treatment of a young woman thrown into a cruel psych ward. The Shame of States, a book written by journalist Albert Deutsch, was an examination of the brutality of mental hospitals. Add to that Life magazine’s “Bedlam 1946,” a long, clearly told exposé that outlined the atrocities happening inside mental institutions.

Over the past decade, everything has become politicized. Churches, universities, sports, food selection, movie awards shows, late-night comedy—they have all turned into political arenas. Except this was not politics as it is normally understood. Healthy societies produce the politics of distribution. How should the resources of the society be allocated? Unhappy societies produce the politics of recognition. Political movements these days are fueled largely by resentment, by a person or a group’s feelings that society does not respect or recognize them. The goal of political and media personalities is to produce episodes in which their side is emotionally validated and the other side is emotionally shamed. The person practicing the politics of recognition is not trying to formulate domestic policies or to address this or that social ill; he is trying to affirm his identity, to gain status and visibility, to find a way to admire himself. But, of course, the politics of recognition doesn’t actually give you community and connection. People join partisan tribes, but they are not in fact meeting together, serving one another, befriending one another. Politics doesn’t make you a better person; it’s about outer agitation, not inner formation. Politics doesn’t humanize. If you attempt to assuage your sadness, loneliness, or anomie through politics, it will do nothing more than land you in a world marked by a sadistic striving for domination. You may try to escape a world of isolation and moral meaninglessness, only to find yourself in the pulverizing destructiveness of the culture wars.

The movie in our mind is wonderful, but no one else knows their parts, their lines, or what it means to us. When the picture or movie fails to play out in real life, we feel disappointed. And sometimes that disappointment is severe and brings shame and hurt and anger with it. It’s a setup for us and for the people involved. Disappointment takes a toll on us and our relationships.

If taking care of yourself involves crying, then you do that too.” His thumb runs along my jaw. “There’s no shame in tears, pet—you don’t need to earn them and there’s no limit on how many you’re allowed to cry. It so happens that I like a good cry myself. You put on a sappy movie, and I will wreck an entire box of tissues.

It was almost a shame, I thought, walking back to my post at the register, how you never got to appreciate the moments when your life was action-movie thrilling. Because you were too busy being terrified.

Despite what we learn daily about healthy exercise practices, healthy diets, and good medical care, the bottom line is that the most significant way of contributing to our own good health is through the quality of our thought processes. This power is a valuable gift, in light of the absolute lack of control we have over other aspects of life. Think about being on a turbulent flight in bad weather. You have no control over the winds, or the skills or the mental state of the pilot flying the plane. But you do have the power to minimize your discomfort. You can decide to read a book, strike up a conversation with the person next to you, take your antioxidants, wrap up in a warm blanket, sleep, listen to music, or watch the movie. Alternatively, you can listen to every engine noise and allow yourself to be debilitated by worry the entire flight. It’s your choice. Ultimately, you are the only one who can make significant deposits into your health bank account. This is not the job of your doctor, your nutritionist, your lover, or your parents. There is no supplement, no healthcare provider, and no exotic herb that can possibly do for you what you can do for yourself. The key is compassion for yourself. Dr. Hendricks has noted that any area of pain, blame, or shame in our lives is there because we have not loved that part of ourselves enough. No matter what you’re feeling, the only way to get a difficult feeling to go away is simply to love yourself for it. If you think you’re stupid, then love yourself for feeling that way. It’s a paradox, but it works. To heal, you must be the first one to shine the light of compassion on any areas within you that you feel are unacceptable (and we’ve all got them).

Grant me the following in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Like a leper rotting in flesh, let all avoid me. Like a cripple without limbs, let me not move freely. Remove my cheeks, the tears may not roll down them. Crush my lips and tongue, that I may not sin with them. Pull out my nails, that I may not grasp nothing. Let my shoulders and back be bent, that I may carry nothing. Like a man with tumor in the head let me lack judgment. Ravage my body sworn to chastity leave me with no pride, and have me live in shame. Let no one pray for me. But only the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me.

I put on his movie of choice, which was Frozen. I’d heard a few Dads talk about it during galas and networkers. They hated it, but it was a pretty cool movie. I’d have to ask Tessa what her thoughts on it were. Miles fell asleep before the girl with the brown hair got to the trolls, which was a shame since that song was the best one I’d heard thus far. I picked up his little body and took him to his bed, mimicking everything I’d seen Tessa do the other night. I switched off the television in the living room and went to Tessa’s bedroom, turning the movie back on there instead, not because I liked it but because I couldn’t start watching a movie and not finish it.

It is a shame when a Christian gives an unqualified approval to the positive messages in The 40-Year-Old Virgin or Little Miss Sunshine, but doesn’t even stop to wonder if the crassness in the storytelling method in both those films undermines them. It’s a bigger shame when Christians pan a movie like In the Bedroom because it is about a revenge murder, and miss the profound theme in the piece about the need to forgive.

the BBC were obliged to play short extracts of the song through gritted teeth. It’s a shame they weren’t paying more attention to Jimmy Savile instead of writhing on the hook of a tongue-in-cheek horror-movie soundtrack.

The artist child must begin by crawling. Baby steps will follow and there will be falls—yecchy first paintings, beginning films that look like unedited home movies, first poems that would shame a greeting card.

Sometimes an author is torn between the desire to present certain material and a guilty awareness that others will not approve. In an attempt to deflect criticism, he apologizes as he goes, pointing out that the minstrel show, strip club visit, or cheap, all-purpose servants in a Third World setting are terribly, terribly distasteful to him, and he disapproves as much as anyone—more! Meanwhile, he continues to wallow in these scenes, exposing what everyone instantly recognizes as the world of his fantasies. The result is often reminiscent of a sixties sexploitation movie on the dangers of promiscuity.

The first reason why peer-oriented children have to harden emotionally is that they have lost their natural source of power and self-confidence and, at the same time, their natural shield against intolerable hurt and pain. Apart from the steady onslaught of tragedies and traumas occurring everywhere, the child's personal world is one of intense interactions and events that can wound: being ignored, not being important, being excluded, not measuring up, experiencing disapproval, not being liked, not being preferred, being shamed and ridiculed. What protects the child from experiencing the brunt of all this stress is an attachment with a parent. It is attachment that matters: as long as the child is not attached to those who belittle him, there is relatively little damage done. The taunts can hurt and cause tears at the time, but the effect will not be long lasting. When the parent is the compass point, it is the messages he or she gives that are relevant. When tragedy and trauma happen, the child looks to the parent for clues whether or not to be concerned. As long as their attachments are safe, the sky could collapse and the world fall apart, but children would be relatively protected from feeling dangerously vulnerable. Roberto Benigni's movie, Life Is Beautiful, about a Jewish father's efforts to shield his son from the horrors of racism and genocide, illustrates that point most poignantly. Attachment protects the child from the outside world.

Adult Warning Signs Lack of peer relationships outside the family Feelings of guilt or shame Difficulty with social skills such as keeping a conversation going Difficulty with intimacy in relationships Sense of being different, alienated from others Drug or alcohol dependency Feelings of loneliness Depression Suicidal thoughts Quick temper Difficulty making or keeping friends Devastated reaction to rejection Fear of humiliation A sense of reality as black or white Distorted body image Anxiety attacks, especially in social situations Difficulty making decisions Anxiety reactions in restaurants, banks, movies Persistent difficulty with job, career Sexual-identity problems Physical complaints/hypochondria Self-destructive behavior Stress-related physical symptoms Fear of groups

Somewhere along the way, I picked up the unspoken belief that I was made for white people. That might sound weird, but it's true. Much of my teaching (and learning) managed to revolve around whiteness - white privilege, white ignorance, white shame, the things white folks "needed" in order to believe racial justice is a worthy cause. Movie discussions on Do the Right Thing or Crash often focused on the white characters, and "privilege walks" focused on making white people recognize the unearned advantages they'd gotten at birth. I worked as if white folks were at the center, the great hope, the linchpin, the key to racial justice and reconciliation - and so I contorted myself to be the voice white folks could hear. It's amazing how white supremacy even invades programs aimed at seeking racial reconciliation.

In books, movies, and just about everywhere else, girls get the message that the more selflessly and painfully a woman suffers, the more we love her, but no where is this message quite so clear as it is in religion.

MSN GROUP: Mystery’s Lounge SUBJECT: Field Report—Life at Project Hollywood AUTHOR: Sickboy For those who don’t know, I’ve been sleeping in Papa’s closet at Project Hollywood. Today was the best day I’ve ever had here, despite all the crazy drama that has been going on. I woke up earlier than usual and went surfing in Malibu with Style and his girlfriend, who is really an amazing person. Seeing how cool they get along is really inspiring. He’s one of the few people I’ve met in the game who has something great to show for all the effort he’s put into it. The surfing was amazing. I was so happy to go because I haven’t gone yet this summer. I recommend taking up the sport to anyone who’s never tried it. As soon as you hit the water, your mind clears and it’s almost impossible to think of anything else. It’s truly a relaxing experience. Afterward, we ate at a fish stand right at the edge of the Pacific Ocean and had a great conversation about music, friends, traveling, life, and careers. When I returned to the house, I did some work. Then I watched The Last Dragon with Playboy, whom I’ve become good friends with. During the movie, Herbal and Mystery talked outside and settled their differences. Though Mystery’s still upset at Katya, he said he wouldn’t hold it against Herbal for falling in love with her. And Herbal said that if Mystery paid for the damages to his room, he’d forgive Mystery for his behavior. Thank God. It’s good to see this thing ended in a sane way. Mystery will be moving out of the house tomorrow anyway, which I think is a shame. At about 2:00 A.M., Playboy, Mystery, and I sat in the main room smoking a hookah, listening to music, and talking about our goals in life. I didn’t have a single conversation today about sarging, pickup, or the community. My day was filled with real conversations with real friends. I didn’t need to fuck some L.A. bimbo from the Saddle Ranch for validation. In fact, I didn’t do a single set all day. These are the days that make life worth living. These are also the days that I will miss when I move out of Project Hollywood. —Sickboy

Silence replaces conversation. Turning away replaces turning towards. Dismissiveness replaces receptivity. And contempt replaces respect. Emotional withholding is, I believe, the toughest tactic to deal with when trying to create and maintain a healthy relationship, because it plays on our deepest fears—rejection, unworthiness, shame and guilt, the worry that we’ve done something wrong or failed or worse, that there’s something wrong with us. ♦◊♦ But Sara’s description is more accurate and compelling than mine. Her line, “quietly sucks out your integrity and self-respect” is still stuck in my head three days later. It makes me think of those films where an alien creature hooks up a human to some ghastly, contorted machine and drains him of his life force drop by drop, or those horrible “can’t watch” scenes where witches swoop down and inhale the breath of children to activate their evil spells of world domination. In the movies, the person in peril always gets saved. The thieves are vanquished. The deadly transfusion halted. And the heroic victim recovers. But in real life, in real dysfunctional relationships, there’s often no savior and definitely no guarantee of a happy ending. Your integrity and self-respect can indeed be hoovered out, turning you into an emotional zombie, leaving you like one of the husks in the video game Mass Effect, unable to feel pain or joy, a mindless, quivering animal, a soulless puppet readily bent to the Reapers’ will. Emotional withholding is so painful because it is the absence of love, the absence of caring, compassion, communication, and connection. You’re locked in the meat freezer with the upside-down carcasses of cows and pigs, shivering, as your partner casually walks away from the giant steel door. You’re desperately lonely, even though the person who could comfort you by sharing even one kind word is right there, across from you at the dinner table, seated next to you at the movie, or in the same bed with you, back turned, deaf to your words, blind to your agony, and if you dare to reach out, scornful of your touch. When you speak, you might as well be talking to the wall, because you’re not going to get an answer, except maybe, if you’re lucky, a dismissive shrug.

It would be a real shame if the Beatles ultimately proved to be the trigger for the demise of the human race.

Admit it. Thunder gets you hard. It’s okay, I won’t kink shame you. God, I bet the Thor movies really got you going, huh—” “Stop talking.” “Please. If you wanted a silent, compliant lay, you should’ve picked someone else.

I was aware that what he was doing wasn’t professional and possibly even illegal. I could stop him if I wanted to by opening my mouth and telling on him, but that was the source of my greatest shame. I didn’t want it to stop. I began to like the pain almost as much as the aftereffects. Sometimes it was my own guilt that wound me tight enough to land in his office. Like a fucked-up carnival ride in a horror movie, my negative emotions fed my need for pain, which created more negative emotions.