The big secret about Art is that no one wants it to be true.
ADAM PHILLIPSTransgression is a quest for solitude
More Adam Phillips Quotes
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We are at our most stupid in our self-hatred.
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To keep faith with recognition we have to stay recognizable.
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The child [uses] ‘doubt about food to hide doubt about love.’
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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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You write to find out what you believe.
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We are children for a very long time.
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Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be our most violent form of nostalgia.
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The child can find out what the object ..might be only by finding ..obstacles to its access
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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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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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To our grudge against our mothers; the way we never let our mothers off the hook for their not meeting our every need.
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we are continually under threat from what we are unwilling and/or unable to see.
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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.
ADAM PHILLIPS