Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be our most violent form of nostalgia.
ADAM PHILLIPSEverybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves.
More Adam Phillips Quotes
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We are tyrannized by our blind spots, and by whatever it is about ourselves that we find unacceptable.
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Excesses of appetite are self-cures for feelings of hopelessness. ..
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Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves.
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I am always true to myself, that is the problem. Who else could I be true to?
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To keep faith with recognition we have to stay recognizable.
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Believing in religion is like believing that adulthood is the solution to childhood.
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Sanity, as the project of keeping ourselves recognizably human, therefore has to limit the range of human experience.
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When we define ourselves by what we can recognize, by what we can comprehend- rather than, say, by what we can describe
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There is nothing more scandalous than a happy marriage
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The vocabulary of one’s self-criticism is so impoverished and clichéd.
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Sanity, in other words, becomes a pressing preoccupation as soon as we recognize the importance of recognition.
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Monogamy is a way of getting the versions of ourselves down to the minimum.
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We are children for a very long time.
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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.
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we are continually under threat from what we are unwilling and/or unable to see.
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