"Trust your hunches. They're usually based on facts filed away just below the conscious level"
About this Quote
The line works because it performs a gentle bait-and-switch. “Trust your hunches” sounds like permission to be impulsive, then she tightens the leash: those hunches are “based on facts.” The subtext is an argument about authority. Your conscious mind isn’t the only reliable witness; your pattern-recognition machinery has been clocking micro-details - tone shifts, inconsistencies, familiar setups - and assembling them into an alarm bell. By calling those inputs “facts filed away,” she borrows the language of bureaucracy and record-keeping to make intuition feel legitimate, even respectable.
There’s also a quiet therapeutic nudge here. Many people arrive in counseling because they ignored what they sensed: a relationship turning coercive, a job that felt off, a boundary crossed. Brothers offers a way to honor that signal without spiraling into paranoia. It’s not “believe every feeling,” it’s “treat your feeling as a lead.” The challenge she leaves unsaid: hunches get sharper with experience and self-knowledge, and they get distorted by fear, bias, and wishful thinking. Trust them - then check the file.
Quote Details
| Topic | Decision-Making |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Brothers, Joyce. (2026, January 15). Trust your hunches. They're usually based on facts filed away just below the conscious level. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/trust-your-hunches-theyre-usually-based-on-facts-129044/
Chicago Style
Brothers, Joyce. "Trust your hunches. They're usually based on facts filed away just below the conscious level." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/trust-your-hunches-theyre-usually-based-on-facts-129044/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Trust your hunches. They're usually based on facts filed away just below the conscious level." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/trust-your-hunches-theyre-usually-based-on-facts-129044/. Accessed 16 Feb. 2026.










