The child..will try to make himself..independent of other people. .. Excesses of appetite are self-cures for feelings of hopelessness. ..The child [u….

The past influences everything and dictates nothing..

To grow up is to discover what one is unequal to..

We have been taught to wish for it, but the wish to be understood may be our most vengeful demand, may be the way we hang on, as adults , to our grud….

There is nothing more terrorizing than the possibility that nothing is hidden. There is nothing more scandalous than a happy marriage.

Transgression is a quest for solitude.

Tragic heroes are failed pragmatists. Their ends are unrealistic and their means are impractical..

Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves..

There is always a ..belief that by destroying the thing that we love we destroy our needs.

People change, but there really are limits. One thing you discover in psychoanalytic treatment is the limits of what you can change about yourself or….

The vocabulary of one’s self-criticism is so impoverished and clichéd. We are at our most stupid in our self-hatred..

Monogamy is a way of getting the versions of ourselves down to the minimum..

Believing in religion is like believing that adulthood is the solution to childhood..

Lovers, of course, are notoriously frantic epistemologists, second only to paranoiacs (and analysts) as readers of signs and wonders..

Sanity, as the project of keeping ourselves recognizably human, therefore has to limit the range of human experience. To keep faith with recognition ….

I am always true to myself, that is the problem. Who else could I be true to?.

The whole notion of sanity may be an attempt to medicalize morality - to speak of the good in the language of health: to make us more accurate, more ….

The big secret about Art is that no one wants it to be true..

The child can find out what the object ..might be only by finding ..obstacles to its access.

You write to find out what you believe..