“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 ,”

Sanity, in other words, becomes a pressing preoccupation as soon as we recognize the importance of recognition.

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

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

We are tyrannized by our blind spots, and by whatever it is about ourselves that we find unacceptable.

It is as if to say: if these are not valued – if these forms of wanting and feeling and speaking and doing – are not cultivated and encouraged and rewarded in the child, then the child will be mad.

People change, but there really are limits.

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

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.

We are children for a very long time.

The vocabulary of one’s self-criticism is so impoverished and clichéd.

we are continually under threat from what we are unwilling and/or unable to see.

When we define ourselves by what we can recognize, by what we can comprehend- rather than, say, by what we can describe

Transgression is a quest for solitude

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

Excesses of appetite are self-cures for feelings of hopelessness. ..

I asked a girl who came from America to England, when I was only English, and she admitted she had been to a drama school. And I said, “What did they teach you?” And she said, “They taught me to be a candle burning in an empty room.”

My father was a great example of a strong and good man and Christian man, and my mother taught all my six sisters how to be young ladies and mothers and how to take care of your family. And so I think they were – they still are – great examples for all of us to their kids and to the world, too.

My opinion about basketball, the way I was taught, was when you step on the court, you play to win.

My mom and dad always taught acting, so instead of getting me babysitters, they would just bring me to class.

I went out into the world when I was about 22. I wrote books and I illustrated books and did book covers, and I taught tap-dancing, and I was a model in the art school. I had no ability for any of those things, but what else could I do?

If I could pass along anything that my mother or my sisters taught me, I feel like my kids would be very well off.

Growing up in America is like being taught to be stupid.

There’s certain things that I was taught growing up about not quitting and seeing things through.