Multiplicity Quotes

“You never walk alone. Even the devil is the lord of flies.”
― Gilles Deleuze

“This is the time for every artist in every genre to do what he or she does loudly and consistently. It doesn't matter to me what your position is. You've got to keep asserting the complexity and the originality of life, and the multiplicity of it, and the facets of it. This is about being a complex human being in the world, not about finding a villain. This is no time for anything else than the best that you've got.”
― Toni Morrison

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

“I have often noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress other people even slightly. I am horribly apt to approach some innocent at a gathering, and like the ancient mariner, fix him with a wild, glitt’ring eye and say, “Do you know that in the head of the caterpillar of the ordinary goat moth there are two hundred twenty-eight separate muscles?” The poor wretch flees. I am not making chatter; I mean to change his life.”
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“This cause, therefore, of all existing things cannot be any one of them.”
― Plotinus, The Essential Plotinus

“I understood these things intellectually, the way I understand that the world is round or that gravity is a universal force. But it took me a long time to truly grasp what Dr. Summer had told me many times before: "To survive a violent childhood, you created aspects of your consciousness that held information about the violence away from you. That's why you remember it as if it happened to someone else. You have many ways of being you.”
― Olga Trujillo, The Sum of My Parts: A Survivor's Story of Dissociative Identity Disorder

“Every question, every problem doesn't have a single correct answer. One must permit diversity. A monolith is unstable.”
― Frank Herbert, Children of Dune

“Patrice had long since buried the particulars of events so painful that they caused her to resolve only to see good. With such a stance, such as dissociative split, she could walk with evil and believe it did not exist. She was Joe's perfect mate.”
― Judith Spencer, Satan's High Priest

“There is always another breath in my breath, another thought in my thought, another possession in what I possess, a thousand things and a thousand beings implicated in my complications: every true thought is an aggression.”
― Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense

“State integration involves linkage in at least three different dimensions of our lives. The first level of integration is between our different states—the “inter” dimension. We must accept our multiplicity, the fact that we can show up quite differently in our athletic, intellectual, sexual, spiritual—or many other—states. A heterogeneous collection of states is completely normal in us humans. The key to well-being is collaboration across states, not some rigidly homogeneous unity. The notion that we can have a single, totally consistent way of being is both idealistic and unhealthy.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation

“Think what it would be like to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to cement, to plastic.”
― Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

“For, what is order without common sense, but Bedlam’s front parlor? What is imagination without common sense, but the aspiration to out-dandy Beau Brummell with nothing but a bit of faded muslin and a limp cravat? What is Creation without common sense, but a scandalous thing without form or function, like a matron with half a dozen unattached daughters?

And God looked upon the Creation in all its delightful multiplicity, and saw that, all in all, it was quite Amiable.”
― Vera Nazarian, Northanger Abbey and Angels and Dragons

“In the same way that the women's movement of the seventies and eighties brought rape and incest into public consciousness, we can do the same with the causes and reality of dissociation and multiplicity.”
― Carolyn Spring, Living with the Reality of Dissociative Identity Disorder: Campaigning Voices

“I never had the ambition to do what clinicians call "integrate". Many clinicians think that until your mind comes into one piece, then you have not healed. But I don't care that much about what the experts say.”
― Wendy Hoffman, White Witch in a Black Robe: A True Story About Criminal Mind Control

“Multiple personality usually develops in the presence of severe and repeated trauma, beginning at a very early age, when the personality is developing.”
― Joan Coleman, Attachment, Trauma and Multiplicity: Working with Dissociative Identity Disorder

“DID systems need every single everyone in the system. Everyone has done an important job and has had a specific role that has helped with your overall functioning. Everyone in your system is valuable. Everyone in your system has made their very own unique contribution to the survival of your life events.”
― Kathy Broady

“All of us humans are hypocrite, owing to the multiplicity of our psyche.”
― Anurag Shrivastava, The Web of Karma

“What then? Who then?' she said. 'Thirty-six; in a motor car; a woman. Yes, but a million other things as well.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“Multiplicity which is not reduced to unity is confusion. Unity which does not depend on multiplicity is tyranny.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“Our future can be brighter. We know that with the right help, continued treatment, and support we can potentially aim for partial or full integration. Yet even if this is not possible, whatever happens we can move forwards. We can live with the multiplicity of being an us and not a me, a we and not an I. We know that, as we are already living that life.”
― carol broad, Living with the Reality of Dissociative Identity Disorder: Campaigning Voices

“Those with dissociative disorders face a big enough battle living as multiples and dealing with past trauma. Like everyone else, they deserve to be heard and recognised, not stigmatised.”
― Carol Broad, Living with the Reality of Dissociative Identity Disorder: Campaigning Voices

“When you invest your life, you are multiplying it.”
― Sunday Adelaja, How To Become Great Through Time Conversion: Are you wasting time, spending time or investing time?

“as my understanding of and competence in treating the disorder have grown, multiple personality has come to seem, though still horrendous, less unique and incomprehensible, and thus more manageable”
― Lynn I. Wilson, The Flock: The Autobiography of a Multiple Personality

“if there are indeed many copies of "you", with identical past lives and memories, this kills the traditional notion of determinism: you can't predict your own future-even if you have complete knowledge of the entire past and future history of the cosmos! The reason you can't is that there's no way for you to determine which of these copies is "you"(they all feel that they are). Yet their lives will typically begin to differ eventually, so the best you can do is predict probabilities for what you'll experience from now on.”
― Max Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality

“Perhaps DID raises problematic philosophical and psychological concerns about the nature of the mind itself... Ideas of a unitary ego would incline professionals to see multiplicity as a behavioural disturbance. However, if the mind is seen as a seamless collaboration between multiple selves - a kind of trade union agreement for co-existence - it is less threatening to face this subject.”
― Valerie Sinason, Attachment, Trauma and Multiplicity: Working with Dissociative Identity Disorder

“Given that recent research has demonstrated the complex psychopathology of DID, equating the disorder with one specific but broadly denned behavior (multiple identity enactment) is clearly unwarranted. The latter should be conceptualized as one observable behavior that may or may not be related to a feature of the disorder (identity alteration). As an analogy, equating major depressive disorder with "acting sad" would be similarly unwarranted because the former is a complex depressive disorder characterized by a clear group of depressive symptoms, whereas the latter is one specific behavior that may or may not be related to one of the symptoms of the disorder (sad affect). One could also easily generate a list of factors that affect whether one acts sad that would have little relevance to the complex psychopathology of depressive disorders.”
― David H. Gleaves

“How can what seems to be many really be one? How can what is one manifest as many? Just what is it that there are many of, and what is it that remains one throughout?”
― John O'Neill

“Each of us is two, and when two people meet, come into contact or join together, it’s rare that the four of them can agree. If the man who dreams in the man who acts is so frequently at odds with him, how can he help but be at odds with the man who acts and the man who dreams in the Other?”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition

“I wish to speak about the overall unity of all that exists - about unity in multiplicity. I wish to show you two or three facets of a precious crystal, and to draw your attention to the pale images faintly reflected in them.”
― G.I. Gurdjieff, Views from the Real World

“The Mind is a multiplicity of individuals.”
― Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or, Beyond Essence