A.S.A Harrison Quotes & Sayings

We live alone in our cluttered psyches, possessed by our entrenched beliefs, our fatuous desires, our endless contradictions - and like it or not we have to put up with this in one another. — A.S.A Harrison

The woman who refuses to object, who doesn't yell and scream - there's strength in that, and power. The way she overrides sentiment, won't enter into blaming or bickering, never gives him an opening, doesn't allow him to turn it back on her. She knows that her refusal leaves him alone with his choices. — A.S.A Harrison

We are all mediums for our own basic truths. All we really have in life is the primal force that moves us through our days
our unvarnished, untutored, ever-present, inborn agency. — A.S.A Harrison

She never saw the point in fighting with a man who was not going to reform. Acceptance is supposed to be a good thing - Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. Also compromise, as every couples therapist will tell you. But the cost was high - the damping of expectation, the dwindling of spirit, the resignation that comes to replace enthusiasm, the cynicism that supplants hope. The moldering that goes unnoticed and unchecked. There — A.S.A Harrison

Men are a race of suckers who don't realize that having sex is the biggest risk they'll ever take. — A.S.A Harrison

Life has a way of taking its toll on the person you thought you were. — A.S.A Harrison

Daily routine is the great balm that keeps her spirits up and holds her life together, warding off the existential fright that can take you by ambush anytime you're dithering or at a loss, reminding you of the magnitude of the void you are sitting on. Keeping busy is the middle-class way - a practical way and a good way. — A.S.A Harrison

The memory had borne its burial well, had returned to her intact, untarnished, fully dimensional, part of her living history, complete with visceral analogues - tastes, smells, sensations - actual voltage. It was a sightless memory, however, clothed in darkness, which she took to mean that the remembered events had taken place at night. Either that or the girl she had been was resolutely shut-eyed, had decided from the outset to curtail the offensive sensory input. Initially, the explosion within had been all pain and alarm, but later on she learned the trick of surrender, came to understand that... — A.S.A Harrison

It's money not education that's the holy grail in America. — A.S.A Harrison

You will not be the same person coming out of a relationship as you were going into it. — A.S.A Harrison

As for herself, every morning on waking she gives thanks to the God she doesn't disbelieve in. Although she can't credit him with saving her, she needs this outlet for her gratitude. — A.S.A Harrison

A revolution is taking place within her, as though a lifetime's experience could be outdistanced in the span of a conversation. — A.S.A Harrison

Basic personality traits develop early in life and over time become inviolable, hardwired. Most people learn little from experience, rarely thinking of adjusting their behavior, see problems as emanating from those around them, and keep on doing what they do in spite of everything, for better or worse. — A.S.A Harrison

She likes things orderly and predictable and feels secure when her time is mapped out well in advance. — A.S.A Harrison

Acceptance is supposed to be a good thing - Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. Also compromise, as every couples therapist will tell you. But the cost was high - the damping of expectation, the dwindling of spirit, the resignation that comes to replace enthusiasm, the cynicism that supplants hope. The mouldering that goes unnoticed and unchecked. — A.S.A Harrison

He's a man whose touch is always warm, a matter of animal significance for someone who is nearly always cold. — A.S.A Harrison

laughing when they gave him the finger. She — A.S.A Harrison

She didn't know then that life has a way of backing you into a corner. You make your choices when you're far too young to understand their implications, and with each choice you make the field of possibility narrows. You choose a career and other careers are lost to you. You choose a mate and commit to loving no other. — A.S.A Harrison

It's a known fact that in certain contexts people's great strengths become their epic failings. — A.S.A Harrison

She's aware of her fondness for ledger keeping, a term that marriage counselors use to castigate their clients for keeping a running tally of who did what to whom, which is not in the spirit of generosity that supposedly nurtures a healthy relationship. The way she sees it, generosity is admirable but not always practical. Without some discreet retaliation to balance things out, a little surreptitious tit for tat to keep the grievances at bay, most relationships - hers included - would surely combust in a blaze of resentment. — A.S.A Harrison

Back then they had the freedom of barely knowing each other at all; the were in gleeful possession of a leisurely future with all the doors still open and all promises still redeemable. — A.S.A Harrison

Cheating with the bottle is not a mere distraction, not an evening's entertainment, but an out-and-out commitment, a contract, a pledge, and it led him to turn away from his wife utterly and with finality. Todd's mother was a forsaken woman, her loneliness a mist that enveloped him throughout his childhood. — A.S.A Harrison

Though sometimes when he wakes in the night all he can think about is death. His own death, of course, but also the death of those around him,the fact that one day in the not-too-distant future every person he knows, every single one, will be dead and gone, along with all the people he doesn't know,to be replaced by a crop of strangers who will take over the structures left behind. — A.S.A Harrison

Time hangs suspended, and yet it's about to end. Death should be a seduction, not a rape. Given one more minute he could do so much. Even the guilty are allowed to make a phone call, send a message. How alive he feels, how brightly he shines, like a lit fuse, a firecracker about to go off. What he wouldn't give for a minute more, just one ordinary minute tacked cudely onto the end of his life. — A.S.A Harrison

In your car you're in your own private world and in the world at large, both at the same time. — A.S.A Harrison

Other people are not here to fulfill our needs or meet our expectations, nor will they always treat us well. Failure to accept this will generate feelings of anger and resentment. Peace of mind comes with taking people as they are and emphasizing the positive. — A.S.A Harrison

In spite of what anyone says it's women who make the rules. — A.S.A Harrison

Death should be a seduction, not a rape. — A.S.A Harrison

During his depression he lost that forward momentum. In fact, the loss of it was the very thing that was wrong with him. It was time without nuance or modulation, always the same, minute by minute, day by day. He knew nothing of the defeat or futility that people assumed he was feeling. He was simply not there, an absence, an empty space. — A.S.A Harrison

Of everything, for better or worse. A cheater remains a cheater in the same way that an optimist remains an optimist. An optimist is a person who says, after being run over by a drunk driver and having both legs mangled and mortgaging the house to pay the hospital bills: "I was lucky. I could have been killed." To an optimist that kind of statement makes sense. To a cheater it makes sense to be living a double life and talking out of both sides of your mouth at the same time. — A.S.A Harrison

The experience you've had may be unwanted, may amount to nothing but damage and waste, but experience has substance, is factual, authoritative, lives on in your past and affects your present, whatever you attempt to do about it. — A.S.A Harrison

What's knocking around in her head is that people act on impulse, make mistakes, and regret them later. — A.S.A Harrison

In biology, fungus is a kingdom unto itself, a documented land of rot and decay, a place for yeasts and molds and spores and every manner of thing that grows in the dark, a fairy tale gone wrong. — A.S.A Harrison

There are lots of reasons why a woman stays with a man, even when she's given up on changing him and can predict with certainty the shape that the rest of her life with him is going to take. — A.S.A Harrison

That to judge others was to willfully do them harm. Respecting differences, she gathered, went beyond simply making allowances; it meant giving up your blinkered perspective, your assumption that you are necessarily right and others necessarily wrong, that the world would be a better place if everyone thought as you did. — A.S.A Harrison

If your clients know that you care about them, that's half the battle. Emotional support in itself can do wonders. After that you rely on your training and your wits. — A.S.A Harrison

love after all is indivisible. Loving one more doesn't mean loving another less. — A.S.A Harrison

like planks but narrow. Eyebrows unplucked. In the hours he's spent here fewer than a dozen words have passed between them. She has a Mediterranean look but speaks — A.S.A Harrison

At times he swears that he's going to go straight, but mostly he feels like a drowning man in love with the surf. — A.S.A Harrison

Peace of mind comes with taking people as they are and emphasising the positive. — A.S.A Harrison

Tolerance, beyond a point, is not widely preached, even though, inevitably, when two people rub shoulders on a daily basis, when they inhale each other's way of being as a life premise, there is going to be a sacrifice of sorts. You will not be the same person coming out of a relationship as you were going into it. Not that she understood this then, in the beginning. When she confronted him, when he apologized, when they shed tears, when they reaffirmed their love, when they did this time after time, she didn't sense the renunciation that was going on within her, because after all he was Todd, and he was precious to — A.S.A Harrison

Women like to believe that their men are nicer than they actually are," Jodi adds. "They make excuses for them. They don't see the whole picture, — A.S.A Harrison

Autumn can be glorious but menacing too - the long shadows, brisk winds, scurrying leaves, impending frost. — A.S.A Harrison

Every shrink knows that it's not the event itself but how you respond to it that tells the story. Take ten assorted individuals, expose them all to the same life trial, and they will each suffuse it with exquisite personal detail and meaning. — A.S.A Harrison

In asserting that people don't change, what she means is that they don't change for the better. Whereas changing for the worse, that goes without saying. — A.S.A Harrison

Whoever you are and wherever you come from, you grew into your present shape and form in the garden of your early childhood. — A.S.A Harrison

What he understands is that life has suffering in it, can't not have suffering in it, because in life there is everything. Life is a mosaic of everything, — A.S.A Harrison

You make your choices when you're far too young to understand their implications, and with each choice you make the field of possibility narrows. — A.S.A Harrison