The past influences everything and dictates nothing.

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

You write to find out what you believe.

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

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

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

The child..will try to make himself..independent of other people. .. Excesses of appetite are self-cures for feelings of hopelessness. ..The child [uses] ‘doubt about food to hide doubt about love.’

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

Transgression is a quest for solitude

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.

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

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 grudge against our mothers the way we never let our mothers off the hook for their not meeting our every need. Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be our most violent form of nostalgia.

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

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

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 your life. We are children for a very long time.

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