Unger Quotes & Sayings

I thought about my brother. I hated him. Hated him like a child hates a fallen hero. I hated him for his unlimited potential and his failure to realize it. I hated him because I could see everything that was wonderful about him, how brilliant, how beautiful he was, and how he had turned his back on everything he could have been, cast it off like a designer suit for which he'd paid an obscene sum and never wore. — Lisa Unger

When someone we love dies suddenly and tragically, it's like seeing the curvature of the earth. You always knew it was round, a contained sphere floating in space. But when you see the bend in the horizon line, it changes your perspective on everything else. — Lisa Unger

Didn't it seem like really thin, gorgeous people were always so mean? Where did they get that aura of entitlement? And didn't it seem like people always fawned over them even though they behaved badly? Why was that? — Lisa Unger

The power worship of the Promethean amounts to a travesty of the enhancement of life. — Roberto Mangabeira Unger

I should have been sending up flares, instead I was offering smiles. — Lisa Unger

Or she could listen to that other voice, the voice that wasn't a voice but something so deep, so indivisible from her own consciousness that it didn't have sound. — Lisa Unger

Everyone always talks about how well mothers know their children. No one ever seems to notice how well children know their mothers. — Lisa Unger

If the self remains in its citadel, anxious to control and heavily defended, it declines in the sources of vitality. To lay the citadel open, however, is to court danger: a danger inseparable from the enhancement of life. — Roberto Mangabeira Unger

There was something eternal about loss, something endless. You could always lose the things you had, but you couldn't always get back the things you lost. — Lisa Unger

Birdie wondered why that so often seemed to be the case - once you had what you wanted, it was a shadow of what you'd dreamed it to be. — Lisa Unger

I agree. I have a therapist now, one with whom I'm actually honest, and we've been over the events of my life again and again - rehashing without judgment the things I've done, the things that have been done to me, and how I ultimately saved myself. — Lisa Unger

Uselessness, she thought, was the permanent condition of parenthood. — Lisa Unger

You know," he said. He paused a minute, as though picking his words carefully. "It's okay to disappoint people sometimes. It's okay for us to say no simply because we don't want to do something." Intellectually, — Lisa Unger

Life is an impossible twist of choice and circumstance. One rarely exists without the other. — Lisa Unger

I was 15 years old at university, studying economics and philosophy, and I saw a retrospective of Australian film. They were very raw. 'Picnic at Hanging Rock,' 'Gallipoli;' they were fantastic. — Deborah Kara Unger

Once you've started down that road to self-discovery, no matter how treacherous the path before you, you can't turn back. The universe doesn't allow it. — Lisa Unger

Hope is good. Without it, well, you do the math. But hope has to be like a prayer. Putting it out there to something more powerful than yourself. — Lisa Unger

Writers are first and foremost observers. We lose ourselves in the watching and then the telling of the world we find. Often we feel on the fringes, in the margins of life. And that's where we belong. What you are a part of, you cannot observe. — Lisa Unger

Social solidarity must rest (instead) on the sole secure basis it can have: direct responsibility of people for one another. Such responsibility can be realized through the principle that every able-bodied adult holds a position within a caring economy - the part of the economy in which people care for one another - as well as within the production system — Roberto Unger

Judgment is such a useful shield, isn't it? We can hide behind it, rise above others on its crest, keep ourselves safe and separate. — Lisa Unger

In my research about the patient-therapist relationship, as well as the particular — Lisa Unger

Somehow I escaped punishment in that life, and so now, lifetimes later, a very special kind of hell is being rained down on me, the full rage of karmic justice. — Lisa Unger

Fear holds on. Love lets go. — Lisa Unger

Anger is not the absence of love. Anger broke you apart. Love and anger wrap around each other and becomes one living thing inside your heart. — Lisa Unger

In their predictable lives, where everything — Lisa Unger

Each of us extracted different people from our parents by our personalities and hence we had different experiences growing up. — Lisa Unger

She knew him in a way that you can only know someone you love totally. Daily, she forgave his flaws, just as she knew he forgave hers. Maybe that alone was the foundation of a good marriage, an endless willingness to forgive and to love in spite of ourselves, an ability to ride the highs and endure the lows, the decision to always go home. She — Lisa Unger

The choices we made ... These were the right choices. They were positive and proactive. And it was, for a time, good for everyone, most especially our boy. But were these choices really? Or were they reactions? Reactions to something that life had thrown at us, something we didn't choose and didn't want. Is there a difference between reaction and choice? I don't know the answer. — Lisa Unger

I live for the blank page. — Lisa Unger

Ralph Waldo Emerson thought of weeds as plants whose virtues had not yet been discovered. — Lisa Unger

He's dead, Annie. But as long as you haven't dealt with the memories of the things he has done to you, he'll live on. We'll always have to face these times when you think he's returned for you. You'll never be free." It — Lisa Unger

Said. I've heard enough. From — Lisa Unger

I've had my fill of cool, Willow. These days it's kindness, honesty, and stability that impress me. — Lisa Unger

Who you marry, what you choose as your profession, how you were raised - yes, that is the big picture. But, as they say, the devil's in the details. — Lisa Unger

I have started taking the pills and I pray that everyone is right, that I have been sabotaged by my own brain chemicals. And that the little blue pill is going to put things right again. — Lisa Unger

Grief is not linear. It's not a slow progression forward toward healing, it's a zigzag, a terrible back-and-forth from devastated to okay until finally there are more okay patches and fewer devastated ones. — Lisa Unger

What does it mean to forgive someone? It only means that you release the anger, the hatred. It doesn't mean that you're saying it's all right now, or that you've forgotten the wrong. It just means that you've drained the boil. When you touch it, it doesn't hurt as much. That's all. — Lisa Unger

Bill Ayers, Frank Marshall Davis, Edward Said, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, and Jeremiah Wright. This is a group I've previously called Obama's founding fathers. — Dinesh D'Souza

As parents, we must accept that our children are who they are. We can't make them into something we want, or be disappointed in them because they don't meet our artificial expectations. — Lisa Unger

Never forget those first five minutes, when you thought how much you loved each other was the only thing that mattered. Because in truth it is the only thing that matters. That love is what gets you through all the other stuff. — Lisa Unger

If I weren't a writer, I'd be a psychiatrist. — Lisa Unger

I didn't see the point of judging and analyzing a single moment in someone's life. — Lisa Unger

You [meaning mothers] said good-bye a little every day
from the minute they left your body until they left your home. — Lisa Unger

We seek out a balance, most notably between logic and emotion, like Spock and Kirk, or Data and Data in that episode where his emotion chip overloaded his positronic relays. You — Russ Unger

... there was only one rule. Work hard and be nice, and everything would go just fine. That should be the rule for life, too, Emily thought. But, of course, that wasn't how things went. — Lisa Unger

You cannot hope for change in others, you can only work toward it in yourself. And that's hard work. — Lisa Unger

We hate our parents for having their own lives, don't we, for making decisions for themselves that don't seem to take us into account. They're not people, not really. They're parents; how dare they live and love and die without us? — Lisa Unger

Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep. - John Milton, Paradise Lost — Lisa Unger

You didn't wind up on a pole without a lot of help from your family. — Lisa Unger

But that's the thing about mental illness; there's no such thing as a cookie-cutter diagnosis. We're all crazy in our own special way. Some of us just have it worse than others. — Lisa Unger

The embodied self is the same person who woke to the world in a burst of visonary immediacy, who soon found that he was not the center of that world but on the contrary, a dependent and even hapless creature, and who then discovered that he was doomed to die — Roberto Unger

I don't remember a time when I didn't define myself as a writer. — Lisa Unger

There have been plenty of chances to close my eyes and go back to the sleep of my life as it was, but I hadn't taken any of them. Do I wish now that I had? It's hard to answer that question, as the wraiths move closer. — Lisa Unger

Everything is autobiographical, and nothing is autobiographical. That's fiction. — Lisa Unger

I'm a 'bound book' kind of girl. I have a Kindle, and I enjoy it for some things, like convenience or instant gratification, or all the little things that you can do with them. — Lisa Unger

When our actions and choices are based on fear and denial ... Well, nothing good can come of that. Ever. — Lisa Unger

Never talk to strangers. If someone ever tries to take you, fight with everything you have. Scream as loud as you can. (He'd never told her what to do if the man was too strong and there was no one to hear her screaming.) — Lisa Unger

But that was the hypocrisy of adulthood: You never wanted the children you cared about to do things you'd done when you were heedless of the fragility of life. — Lisa Unger

I love the village in my computer. There's little validation in the day-to-day life of a writer; sometimes we ache for a connection. — Lisa Unger

He faces the burdens of belittlement a third time as he grows older, and settles into an existence that he has embraced, or that has been forced upon him. A carapace of routine, of compromise, of silent surrenders, of half-term solutions, and of diminished consciousness begins to form around him. He turns himself over to the rigidified version of the self: the character. He begins to die small deaths, many times over. He fails to die only once, which is what he would desire if he were able fully to recognize the value of life. This third encounter with belittlement reveals belittlement for what it in fact is: death by installments. — Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Dysfunction isn't a choice, it's a disease. — Lisa Unger

Shock is the stepsister of denial. It cushions the blow to your psyche when really fucked up things happen. — Lisa Unger

It was so much simpler to see other people's wrongs and make them pay. It was so much harder to have compassion, to see yourself in others and find forgiveness. — Lisa Unger

How many people can you claim truly care about you? I mean, not just the people in your life who are fun to hang out with, not just the people who you love and trust. But people who feel good when you are happy and successful, feel bad when you are hurt or going through a hard time, people who would walk away from their lives for a little while to help you with yours. Not many. I felt that from Jake and I wasn't sure how to handle it. Because there's another side to it, you know. When someone is invested in your well-being, like your parents, for example, you become responsible for them in a way. Anything you do to hurt yourself hurts them. I already felt responsible for too many people that way. You're not really free when people care about you; not if you care about them. — Lisa Unger

It was a strange lightness, a drifting feeling. Zero gravity. I understood that everything that once seemed solid and immovable might just float away. And that this was a truth of life, not an illusion in the grieving mind of a child. Everything that is hard and heavy in your world is made up of billions of molecules in constant motion offering the illusion of permanence. But it all tends toward breaking down and falling away. Some things just go more quickly, more surprisingly, than others. — Lisa Unger

Our dominant idea about the mind fail to recognise the conflict between the two sides of the mind - the mind as machine and the mind as anti-machine, delighting in its powers of combination and transgression. They fail as well to appreciate the extend to which the relative presence of these two sides of the mind is influenced by the organisation of society and of the culture, with the result that the history of politics is internal to the history of the mind. In these as in many other respects, our beliefs about ourselves resist acknowledging the relation between our context-shaped and our context-transcending identities and powers. — Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Truman Capote was a magical, beautiful writer. — Lisa Unger

Hope is more the consequence of action than its cause. As the experience of the spectator favors fatalism, so the experience of the agent produces hope. — Roberto Mangabeira Unger

It was fear. Fear that, after all the years of protecting his health, his heart, his mind, setting bedtimes and boundaries, giving warnings about strangers and looking both ways before crossing the street, it wouldn't be enough. Fear that, as he stood on the threshold of adulthood, forces beyond their control would take him down a path where they could no longer reach him. Fear that he'd be seduced by something ugly and would choose it. And that there would be nothing they could do but let him go. — Lisa Unger

When we put on clothes, we're telling ourselves something, and we're communicating that something to every person we meet. — Lisa Unger

Others of us are lost. We're forever seeking. We torture ourselves with philosophies and ache to see the world. We question everything, even our own existence. We ask a lifetime of questions and are never satisfied with the answers because we don't recognize anyone as an authority to give them. We see life and the world as an enormous puzzle that we might never understand, that our questions might go unanswered until the day we die, almost never occurs to us. And when it does, it fills us with dread. — Lisa Unger

But then again, we're all on death row, aren't we? Most of us just don't know it. — Lisa Unger

Of course, like all organic processes, there is an ebb and a flow to writing. One does not exist without the other. The writer needs to be vigilant in protecting both, confident in the knowledge that the village will be there when we choose, finally, to open the door. — Lisa Unger

Maybe I have this fascination with the dark side because I live in the light. I don't have any dysfunction, and I've never experienced trauma. — Lisa Unger

What we think of as our "gut instincts" are really a very complex mosaic of past experiences, deep-seated hopes, fears, desires. — Lisa Unger

Brazil has no future as a China with fewer people. — Roberto Unger

driven, passionate, mercurial, irascible" [the character of Michelangelo] — Miles J. Unger

Emily thought maybe it was simpler than that: Some people gave money instead of love because it was all they had to give. A full bank account and a life of good deeds achieved with money didn't mean a full heart or a giving soul - often just the opposite. — Lisa Unger

Love, a promise delivered already broken. — Lisa Unger

People who stay in the same town with the same friends for their entire lives never get a chance to find out who they can really be, because they will always be considered as who they were. — Lisa Unger

Chevy Stevens is in top form. ALWAYS WATCHING is a tense and twisty exploration of dark memories, hidden pasts, and a place that seems like heaven but might be hell. This is a deep and exciting novel, as unsettling as it is gripping. — Lisa Unger

Jeremy Renner is an incredible actor. — Billy Unger

The truth has not so much set us free as it has ripped away a carefully constructed facade, leaving us naked to begin again. — Lisa Unger

But did you know that eyewitness testimony is often totally unreliable? The human memory only records events through the filter of its own frame of reference. We try to fit the information we receive into schemas, units of knowledge that we possess about the world that correspond with frequently encountered situations, individuals, ideas, and situations. In other words, we often see things as we expect to see them, or want to see them, and not always as they are. — Lisa Unger

There is no external refuge." Meaning, you cannot look into the outer world to feel safe, to feel at peace. You cannot look without for understanding, or for justice. You must look within. I — Lisa Unger

It sounded to him like the noise of too many mouths that talk and too few minds that think. — Lisa Unger

Many people believe that evil is the presence of something. I think it's the absence of something. — Lisa Unger

An awareness of your own worth is the most attractive quality in the world. — Lisa Unger

Energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only change form. — Lisa Unger

I regard myself as a man without charm in a country of charmers. — Roberto Unger

Insofar we are death-bound, existence is urgent and frightful. Insofar as are groundless, it is vertiginous and dreamlike. Insofar as we are insatiable, it is unquiet and tormented. — Roberto Unger

Eloise knew that it was so much more complicated than that. There are no trades in this life, and depression is a dark, dark doorway some people have no choice but to walk through. — Lisa Unger

I'd love to work with Tom Cruise. — Billy Unger

On 'Lab Rats,' I read the script probably three or four times before we ever even do a table read because I want to be completely prepared. And I want to know exactly which beats I have to hit and where I need to make something comical. Some lines need a little more than others do just to get the point across, to get the joke to be funny. — Billy Unger

He didn't seem like the sharpest tool in the shed. — Lisa Unger

They don't find peace. It's pure bullshit. When something unspeakable happens, or when you do something unspeakable, it changes you. It takes you apart and reassembles you. You are a Frankenstein of circumstance, and the parts never fit back quite right and the life you live is a stolen one. You don't deserve to walk among the living, and you know it. — Lisa Unger

We may say we're looking for love, following dreams, chasing the dollar, but aren't we just looking for a place where we belong? A place where our thoughts, feelings, and fears are understood? - Ridley Jones — Lisa Unger

Love accepts. Forgiveness comes in time. — Lisa Unger

I don't believe in mistakes. Never have. I believe that there are a multitude of paths before us and it's just a matter of which way we walk home. I don't believe in regret. If you regret things about your life, than I'll bet that you're not paying attention. Regret is just imagining that you know what would have happened if you took that job in California or married your high-school sweetheart or just looked one more time before you stepped out into the street ... or didn't. But you don't know; you can't possibly know. — Lisa Unger

When you love someone, it doesn't really matter if they love you back or not. Having love in your heart for someone is its own reward. or punishment, depending on the circumstances. — Lisa Unger