I am always true to myself, that is the problem. Who else could I be true to?
ADAM PHILLIPSIt 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.
More Adam Phillips Quotes
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To keep faith with recognition we have to stay recognizable.
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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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Excesses of appetite are self-cures for feelings of hopelessness. ..
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We are at our most stupid in our self-hatred.
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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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Sanity, as the project of keeping ourselves recognizably human, therefore has to limit the range of human experience.
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The vocabulary of one’s self-criticism is so impoverished and clichéd.
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we are continually under threat from what we are unwilling and/or unable to see.
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Believing in religion is like believing that adulthood is the solution to childhood.
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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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To grow up is to discover what one is unequal to.
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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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Transgression is a quest for solitude
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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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There is nothing more terrorizing than the possibility that nothing is hidden.
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You write to find out what you believe.
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The past influences everything and dictates nothing.
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There is always a ..belief that by destroying the thing that we love we destroy our needs
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Monogamy is a way of getting the versions of ourselves down to the minimum.
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The child [uses] ‘doubt about food to hide doubt about love.’
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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.
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People change, but there really are limits.
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The big secret about Art is that no one wants it to be true.
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Lovers, of course, are notoriously frantic epistemologists, second only to paranoiacs (and analysts) as readers of signs and wonders.
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The child..will try to make himself..independent of other people. .
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Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be our most violent form of nostalgia.
ADAM PHILLIPS