Narcissism Quotes - Page 7

• What I'm primarily saying,' he says, 'is that this is a time for knowledge assimilation, not backstabbing. We learned a lesson, you and I. We personally grew. Gratitude for this growth is an appropriate response. Gratitude, and being careful never to make the same mistake twice.

  George Saunders

  Gratitude, Mistake, Growth

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• I write with a sort of grim determination to deal with things that are hidden and difficult and this means, I think, that pleasure is out of the question. I would associate this with narcissism anyway and I would disapprove of it.

  Colm Toibin

  Determination, Writing, Mean

  "Writing is 'no fun', says Toíbín" by Alison Flood, www.theguardian.com. March 2, 2009.

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• It would have been convenient to be gay. Just because of the grooming, the narcissism, stuff like that. But I have this kind of roaring heterosexuality. Traditional, uncomplicated heterosexuality, an almost cliched Robin Askwith thing.

  Russell Brand

  Gay, Heterosexuality Is, Robins

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• I had written a lot about my dog dying before. I wrote a newspaper column about it and it turned out to be the most popular column I'd ever written. That and the lame Joni Mitchell column I did. But the dog column, my god! People love dogs. Anybody who writes regularly should know, when in doubt: dogs! If you're a columnist, when in doubt, write a column about the culture of narcissism - like a scolding column about the culture of narcissism - or write something about dogs. That's the homerun in my take.

  Meghan Daum

  Dog, Writing, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I tend to approach giving interviews with the same sense of circumspection and restraint as I approach my writing. That is to say, virtually none. When asked what I made of blogs like my own, blogs written by parents about their children, I said, 'A blog like this is narcissism in its most obscene flowering.'

  Ayelet Waldman

  Children, Writing, Giving

  "Living Out Loud — Online". The Salon column, www.salon.com. March 14, 2005.

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• Trump is the living embodiment of the main character in the film American Psycho, a symbol of corporate domination on steroids, an out-of- control authoritarian parading and performing unknowingly as a clown, and as a symbol of unchecked narcissism and a bearer of a suffocating culture of fear. He is the symbol of a failed sociality and a declining social order.

  Henry Giroux

  Character, Culture, Psycho

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• We come from a proud tradition of people who have insisted that none of us can be truly successful until at least the barriers to such success and thriving are completely removed. I think the black narcissism that prevails, along with the stylish materialism and self-satisfied, smug attitudes among many of our upwardly mobile brothers and sisters should be identified and criticized.

  Michael Eric Dyson

  Brother, Attitude, Successful

  Source: www.washingtonpost.com

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• I'm not the guy in the dress with the blood and the unrequited gay whatever - which, according to my psychiatrist, my gayness is a form of narcissism but you'll have to ask him about that.

  Bradford Cox

  Gay, Guy, Psychiatrist

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• Beauty is a dangerous word. Beauty becomes slightly indulgent for me. It's a snatched kind of moment for me because I'm entitled to a nice day in my life but beauty creeps close to narcissism, which I really dislike, particularly in human beings who were born with good looks, who cash in on it. It's a bit of a dodgy word for me. I look at it with caution. It can be a bit like walking into quicksand; it can get you in to all kinds of trouble.

  Don McCullin

  Nice, Kind, Trouble

  Source: www.harpersbazaar.com

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• The thing that scares me most is the shift from serving the people to exercising power and with it, this attendant narcissism. Sarah Palin is a great example of someone that just stirs the pot for the sake of the attention.

  Rosanne Cash

  Exercise, People, Scare

  Interview with Antonino D'Ambrosio, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. September 21, 2010.

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• This is hardly a South African problem, of course. We are confronting nothing less than a global system of brutal misogyny. Too many men across the world see too many women as repositories of their rage, frustration, narcissism or simply their will to enact violence.

  Dave Zirin

  Frustration, Men, World

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• There's something really fun and spooky about that teenage feeling of narcissism or indestructibility, like the idea that every night might be the night before the world ends.

  Alan Palomo

  Fun, Teenage, Night

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• I think stand-up comedy is this - it's this kind of indulgence and narcissism.

  Jim Gaffigan

  Thinking, Comedy, Kind

  "Comic Jim Gaffigan On Stand-Up, Faith And Opening For The Pope". "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, www.npr.org. September 24, 2015.

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• Narcissism and the Confederate dead cannot be connected logically, or even historically; even were the connection an historical fact, they would not stand connected as art, for no one experiences raw history.

  Allen Tate

  Art, Historical, Connections

  Allen Tate (1999). “Essays of Four Decades”, Isi Books

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• Selfishness, narcissism, being uncomfortable in your own skin, not feeling connected to the world around you, feeling dislocated from family and youth, having a strange relationship with your childhood - all those things feel really true to me.

  Jason Reitman

  Childhood, Feelings, Skins

  "Jason Reitman: 'Growing up sucks, doesn't it?'" by Catherine Shoard, www.theguardian.com. January 19, 2012.

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• We spoke of ourselves as "emancipated" when we got the vote. Yet we are still slaves to the superficial and the superfluous. We are concerned with the length of our skirts, with the latest lipstick, with the newest thrill in hats. We are impressed by advertisements that insist we must be alluring; we must adopt a time-consuming coiffure, we must spend hours with the "beautician," we must attend fashion shows. As long as women are preoccupied with nonessentials we shall be afflicted with infantilism, passivity, and the eventual disillusionment that results from trivial, unproductive lives.

  Mary Barnett Gilson

  Fashion, Long, Thrill

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• I love Twitter! At first I made fun of it, because it is very narcissistic, and there's already so much narcissism flowing in this industry, I was like, 'Really, one more?' So I was against it at first. But I really love the idea of the direct connection - there's no middle man muddling it up.

  Kelly Clarkson

  Fun, Men, Ideas

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• In early psychoanalytic thought, narcissism was - and still, of course, is - self-love. The early psychoanalysts used to talk of libido directed at the self. That now feels a little quaint, that kind of language. But it does include the most fierce and self-displaying form of one's individual self. And in this way, it can be dangerous. When you look at Donald Trump, you can really see someone who's destructive to any form of life enhancement in virtually every area. And if that's what Fromm means by malignant narcissism, then it definitely applies.

  Robert Jay Lifton

  Mean, Language, Fierce

  Source: www.salon.com

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• Flawless . . . Tightly choreographed . . . Shipstead gains entry into exclusive worlds and trains her opera glasses on private social rituals, as well as behind-the-scenes hanky panky . . . Similar to classic ballet, the power of Astonish Me arises out of the pairing of a melodramatic storyline with scrupulously executed range of movement . . . Shipstead sweeps you into this insider world of sweat, narcissism, and short-lived magic . . . Transcendent.

  Maureen Corrigan

  Glasses, Sweat, Ballet

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• Removed from its more restrictive sense, masturbation has become an expression for everything that has proved, for lack of human contact, to be void of meaning. We have communication problems, suffer from egocentrism and narcissism, are frustrated by information glut and loss of environment; we stagnate despite the rising GNP.

  Gunter Grass

  Communication, Loss, Expression

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• I have always been suspicious of romantic love. It looks too much like a narcissism shared by two.

  Rita Mae Brown

  Romantic Love, Two, Looks

  Rita Mae Brown (2009). “Venus Envy”, p.174, Bantam

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• Our ego ideal is precious to us because it repairs a loss of our earlier childhood, the loss of our image of self as perfect and whole, the loss of a major portion of our infantile, limitless, ain't-I-wonderful narcissism which we had to give up in the face of compelling reality. Modified and reshaped into ethical goals and moral standards and a vision of what at our finest we might be, our dream of perfection lives on--our lost narcissism lives on--in our ego ideal.

  Judith Viorst

  Dream, Giving Up, Growing Up

  Judith Viorst (2010). “Necessary Losses: The Loves Illusions Dependencies and Impossible Ex”, p.140, Simon and Schuster

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• Children will, in my dream, be taught that laziness and narcissism are at the very root of human evil, and why this is so. . . . They will come to know that the natural tendency of the individual in a group is to forfeit his or her ethical judgment to the leader, and that this tendency should be resisted. And they will finally see it as each individual's responsibility to continually examine himself or herself for laziness and narcissism and then to purify themselves accordingly.

  M. Scott Peck

  Dream, Children, Responsibility

  M. Scott Peck (2015). “The People Of The Lie”, p.291, Random House

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• If the denial of death is self-hatred, as it is to deny our freedom and live in fear of death (which is to say, to live in a form of bondage), then the acceptance and affirmation of death is indeed a form of self-love. But I'd want to make a distinction between a form of self-love which is essential to what it means to be human, and a narcissism of self-regard, like Rousseau's distinction between amour de soi and amour propre, self-love and pride.

  Simon Critchley

  Mean, Pride, Acceptance

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• If you're going to play what-if --which, by the way, is a huge waste of time and energy, not to mention an act of supreme, center-of-the-universe narcissism-- you have to play it both ways. If you're going to imagine yourself as an accidental villain, you have to give yourself equal time as an unwitting hero. As somebody who prevented God-knows-what dire disaster simply by doing exactly the things you did.

  Jefferson Bass

  Hero, Play, Giving

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