“It was so easy to disown what you couldn’t recognize, to keep yourself apart from things that were foreign and unsettling”

Source: Meditations

Source: Dreamland (2000)

Variant: What was the point in crying when there was no one to comfort you? And what was worse, when you couldn't even comfort yourself?
Source: City of Glass

Source: The Exiled Queen

Variant: Because he knows you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy.
Source: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), Ch. 25
Context: While McMurphy laughs. Rocking farther and farther backward against the cabin top, spreading his laugh out across the water — laughing at the girl, at the guys, at George, at me sucking my bleeding thumb, at the captain back at the pier... and the Big Nurse and all of it. Because he knows you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy. He knows there's a painful side; he knows my thumb smarts and his girlfriend has a bruised breast and the doctor is losing his glasses, but he won't let the pain blot out the humor no more'n he'll let the humor blot out the pain.

Source: The Last Summer

Source: Sweethearts

Source: The Dresden Files, Changes (2010), Chapter 33