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81 " She was going to be my downfall. She was going to be my corruption and my vice. She was going to be my addiction and my compulsion and I was still going to fall headlong into her knowing the landing was going to be rough for both of us. "
― Jay Crownover , Better When He's Brave (Welcome to the Point, #3)
82 " It is so unkind--' 'Perhaps. But sometimes a compulsion comes over one to speak the truth! "
― Agatha Christie , Hercule Poirot's Christmas (Hercule Poirot, #18)
83 " Every American autobiography, someone once said, is about one thing—escape. Look into the frightened heart of an American life, and you’ll find a compulsion to flee—a seed planted in the national character at the start by those ships sailing out of Europe and landing on our shores. — Teller: A Novel "
― Frederick Weisel
84 " Very frequently feminine activity also expresses itself in what is largely a retrospectively oriented pondering over what we ought to have done differently in life and how we ought to have done it or as if under compulsion we make up strings of causal connections. We like to call this thinking though on the contrary it is a form of mental activity that is strangely pointless and unproductive a form that really leads only to self-torture. "
85 " To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out – since our self-image is untenable – their false notion of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course I will play Francesca to your Paolo, Helen Keller to anyone’s Annie Sullivan; no expectation is too misplaced, no role too ludicrous. At the mercy of those we cannot but hold in contempt, we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the urgency of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us. "
― Joan Didion