A strong hatred is the best lamp to bear in our hands as we go over the dark places of life, cutting away the dead things men tell us to revere.
It's my profession to bring people from various outlying districts of the mind to the normal. There seems to be a general feeling it's the place where they ought to be. Sometimes I don't see the urgency myself.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects on the role of a professional in guiding individuals towards conventional thinking and societal norms, questioning the urgency of such a need.
Rebecca West articulates the responsibility of mental health professionals or those in similar roles to help individuals navigate their thoughts and behaviors towards societal norms. She highlights a tension between the perceived necessity of this guidance and her own ambivalence about the urgency of returning individuals to what is considered 'normal.' This suggests a deeper contemplation about the nature of normalcy and the value of diverse mental states.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about mental health, this quote can highlight the role of therapists in navigating mental states.
More from Rebecca West
All quotes →works of art feel towards human beings exactly as we do towards ghosts. The transparency of spectres, the diffuseness in space which lets them drift through doors and walls, and their smell of death, disgust us not more than we disgust works of art by our meaninglessness, our diffuseness in time which lets us drift through three score years and ten without a quarter as much significance as a picture establishes instantaneously.
I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?
All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life.
God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
She did not suddenly start being disagreeable this afternoon, she was so good at it, she had evidently practised whatever are the scales and arpeggios of rudeness every day of her life.
Similar quotes
Since [narcissists] deep down, feel themselves to be faultless, it is inevitable that when they are in conflict with the world they will invariably perceive the conflict as the world's fault. Since they must deny their own badness, they must perceive others as bad. They project their own evil onto the world. They never think of themselves as evil, on the other hand, they consequently see much evil in others.
Psychotherapy is a sanctuary; it is a battleground; it is a place I have been psychotic, neurotic, elated, confused, and despairing beyond belief.
There is no fun in psychiatry. If you try to get fun out of it, you pay a considerable price for your unjustifiable optimism.
Even when adults do feel their safety to be threatened, we may not be able to see this on the surface. Infants will react in a fashion as if they were endangered, if they are disturbed or dropped suddenly, startled by loud noises, flashing light
Behavioral scientists distinguish between fast thinking and slow thinking. Fast thinking is represented in the mind's System 1: it is automatic, intuitive, and often emotional. Slow thinking, reflected in System 2, is deliberative and reflective; it likes statistics. It's hard to think of a purer System 1 candidate than Trump.
I think one of the major results of the psychology of decision making is that people's attitudes and feelings about losses and gains are really not symmetric. So we really feel more pain when we lose $10,000 than we feel pleasure when we get $10,000.