Quotes from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“You're never ready for what you have to do. You just do it. That makes you ready.”
― quote from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“Isolated, she managed somehow to feel free—albeit with a freedom that made her want to smash a hole in the very center of the universe.”
― quote from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“There is no past. Past is present when you carry it with you.”
― quote from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“I want somebody to love, and I want somebody to love me. And nobody ever will. And that's why it hurts. Because it makes a difference. And when nobody cares, it makes you all mad inside and it makes you want to say things, tear up things, break things, get through the glass.”
― quote from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“I’m not fit to occupy space. Excuse me for living.”
― quote from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“I have to force myself even to move my eyeballs. It's so easy just to stare.”
― quote from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“Theirs was the eternal youth of an alternating self, a youth with the constant although unfulfilled promise of growing up”
― quote from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“The anger. The terror. The feeling of entrapment. the profound distrust of people.The wistful, plaintive conviction that a window, a thing, was more important than she. These feelings and attitudes, expressed in the course of this hour, were symptoms of some profound disturbance.”
― quote from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“The neurologist had dismissed her case after a single visit, handing out an easy nostrum by telling her father that if she continued to write poetry, she would be all right.”
― quote from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“Vicky became more serious and her tone more reflective as she remarked, "Life has so much pain that one needs a catharsis. I don't mean escape. You don't escape in books. On the contrary, they help you to realize yourself more fully. Mon Dieu, I'm glad I have them. When I find myself in a situation in which I'd rather not be - because of the perculiar circumstances of my life - I have this outlet. You may think me tres superieure but I'm not really, I am just what I am and live the way I like.”
― quote from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“She'd abandoned the animal she loved as she herself had been abandoned repeatedly in the past by people who had claimed to love her.”
― quote from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“It all made sense — terrible sense. The panic she had experienced in the warehouse district because of not knowing what had happened had been superseded at the newsstand by the even greater panic of partial knowledge. And now the torment of partly knowing had yielded to the infinitely greater terror of knowing precisely”
― quote from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“I realized how trapped I was by all the talk of the end of the world.”
― quote from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“God fearing and man hating. Sugar sugar. There was so much sugar in the way they pretended to treat each other that I suffered from diabetes of the soul.”
― quote from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“Willard married his father in female form.”
― quote from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“You knock yourself down. You don't think much of yourself. That's an uncomfortable feeling. So you project it on others and say, 'They don't like me.”
― quote from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“After writing the letter Sybil lost almost two days. "Coming to," she stumbled across what she had written just before she had dissociated and wrote to Dr. Wilbur as follows: It's just so hard to have to feel, believe, and admit that I do not have conscious control over my selves. It is so much more threatening to have something out of hand than to believe that at any moment I can stop (I started to say "This foolishness") any time I need to. When I wrote the previous letter, I had made up my mind I would show you how I could be very composed and cool and not need to ask you to listen to me nor to explain anything to me nor need any help. By telling you that all this about the multiple personalities was not really true I could show, or so I thought, that I did not need you. Well, it would be easier if it were put on. But the only ruse of which I'm guilty is to have pretended for so long before coming to you that nothing was wrong. Pretending that the personalities did not exist has now caused me to lose about two days.”
― quote from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“It is so much more threatening to have something out of hand than to believe that at any moment I can stop (I started to say "This foolishness") any time I need to.”
― quote from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“It is so much more threatening to have something out of hand than to believe that at any moment I can stop (I started to say "This foolishness") any time I need to. When I wrote the previous letter, I had made up my mind I would show you how I could be very composed and cool and not need to ask you to listen to me nor to explain anything to me nor need any help. By telling you that all this about the multiple personalities was not really true but just put on, I could show, or so I thought, that I did not need you. Well, it would have been easier if it were put on. But the only ruse of which I'm guilty is to have pretended for so long before coming to you that nothing was wrong. Pretending that the personalities did not exist has now caused me to lose about two days.
Three weeks later Sybil reaffirmed her belief in the existence of her other selves in a letter to Miss Updyke, the school nurse of undergraduate days.”
― quote from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“When I wrote the previous letter, I had made up my mind I would show you how I could be very composed and cool and not need to ask you to listen to me nor to explain anything to me nor need any help. By telling you that all this about the multiple personalities was not really true but just put on, I could show, or so I thought, that I did not need you. Well, it would have been easier if it were put on.”
― quote from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“Well, it would have been easier if it were put on. But the only ruse of which I'm guilty is to have pretended for so long before coming to you that nothing was wrong. Pretending that the personalities did not exist has now caused me to lose about two days.”
― quote from Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

Popular quotes

“New Song When the new king rules, it is new song time (Isa 42:10). It has always been new song time when the new king arrives and there is no more calling of the skilled mourners who know how to cry on call. The funeral is ended, for now it is festival time. It is time for the children and for all who can sing new songs and discern new situations. The old songs had to be sung in the presence of mockers (Ps 137:3). And they were an embarrassment because they spoke about all that had failed. But new song time is a way to sing a new social reality as the freedom songs stood behind every freedom act. The energy comes from the song that will sing Yahweh to his throne and Babylon to her grave. As Abraham Heschel has seen, only people in covenant can sing. New song time is when a new covenant inaugurates a new mode of reality.”
― Walter Brueggemann, quote from The Prophetic Imagination

“Even at its darkest moment, life was a precious gift.”
― Mary Balogh, quote from Silent Melody

“Πλησιάζεις εύκολα μια ζωντανή ψυχή, και μέσα απ’ το έγκλημα, και μέσα από τα πιο θλιβερά βίτσια, - μα η βλακεία είναι αδιαπέραστη.”
― François Mauriac, quote from Viper's Tangle

“How much we know ourselves is extremely important but how we treat ourselves is the most important.”
― Brené Brown, quote from The Power of Vulnerability: Teachings of Authenticity, Connections and Courage

“Though we can never be fully pure in body, we can be fully pure in heart. Half black, half white, half evil, half good, we are all the same, struggling to find our path in this seemingly never-ending chasm of darkness. And may we one day reach the light we so eagerly seek, knowing that the freedom from darkness may only come when we shine our own light upon others.”
― E.J. Squires, quote from Wraithsong

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