“We are children for a very long time.”

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.

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. ..

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 scientific in our wanting – but by the same token it becomes a form of moral blackmail.

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

Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be our most violent form of nostalgia.

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

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 ,

One thing you discover in psychoanalytic treatment is the limits of what you can change about yourself or your life.

He had learned long ago that, in general, the easier it was for anxious patients to reach him, the less likely they were to call. (107)

As long as you’re enthralled by a lifeless form, you’re not free.

For a long time I listened to other people to decide whether I was still Christian or not, and I would sort of vet myself by the traditional formulae.

In the long run, most of us spend about fifteen minutes total in the entanglements of passion, and the rest of our days looking back on it, humming the tune.

I would not be at all surprised to find that it was for gold that Cain committed the first murder. (It happened a very long time ago, and Holy Writ, though no doubt divinely inspired, is a trifle careless about details. God is not a historian).

I have a long-standing interest in what I like to think of as “forbidden knowledge”: methods of unarmed killing, lock picking, breaking and entry, spy stuff, and other things that the government wants only a few select individuals to know.

As long as the plots keep arriving from outer space, I’ll go on with my virgins.

I’ve always said I have nothing against a woman doing anything a man can do as long as she gets home in time to cook dinner.