#pathology

Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people. ↗

— Jonathan Franzen

#co-dependence #divorce #idealism #idealists #marriage

Walter had never liked cats. They'd seemed to him the sociopaths of the pet world, a species domesticated as an evil necessary for the control of rodents and subsequently fetishized the way unhappy countries fetishize their militaries, saluting the uniforms of killers as cat owners stroke their animals' lovely fur and forgive their claws and fangs. He'd never seen anything in a cat's face but simpering incuriosity and self-interest; you only had to tease one with a mouse-toy to see where it's true heart lay...cats were all about using people ↗

— Jonathan Franzen

#animals #cats #cats-being-needed #dogs #dogs-and-cats

One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#health #love #pathology #right #wrong

Indifference to me, is the epitome of all evil. ↗

— Elie Wiesel

#ayn-rand #evil #evil-men #objectivism #psychopathic-personalities

There are men who have themselves whipped simply to increase their sexual pleasure. These, in contrast with true masochists, regard flagellation as a means to an end. ↗

— Richard von Krafft-Ebing

#masochism #pleasure #psychopathology #sex #men

The level of shyness has gone up dramatically in the last decade. I think shyness is an index of social pathology rather than a pathology of the individual. ↗

— Philip Zimbardo

#dramatically #gone #i #i think #index

The shock of unemployment becomes a pathology in its own right. ↗

— Robert Farrar Capon

#own #pathology #right #shock #unemployment

It is my opinion that the isolated mind loses its purchase on reality all too easily and becomes prone to fantasy. ↗

— Frank Tallis

#imagination #insanity #isolation #mind #pathology

Her parents, she said, has put a pinball machine inside her head when she was five years old. The red balls told her when she should laugh, the blue ones when she should be silent and keep away from other people; the green balls told her that she should start multiplying by three. Every few days a silver ball would make its way through the pins of the machine. At this point her head turned and she stared at me; I assumed she was checking to see if I was still listening. I was, of course. How could one not? The whole thing was bizarre but riveting. I asked her, What does the silver ball mean? She looked at me intently, and then everything went dead in her eyes. She stared off into space, caught up in some internal world. I never found out what the silver ball meant. ↗

— Kay Redfield Jamison

#bipolar-disorder #depression #mania #manic #manic-depression

All our hope rests upon the possibility of a change of the laws which concern it, so that only rape or the comission of public offence, when this can be proved at the same time, shall be punishable. ↗

— Richard von Krafft-Ebing

#equity #gay-rights #homosexuality #hope #law