When we define ourselves by what we can recognize, by what we can comprehend- rather than, say, by what we can describe
ADAM PHILLIPSThe child [uses] ‘doubt about food to hide doubt about love.’
More Adam Phillips Quotes
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Excesses of appetite are self-cures for feelings of hopelessness. ..
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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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Tragic heroes are failed pragmatists. Their ends are unrealistic and their means are impractical.
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You write to find out what you believe.
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The child [uses] ‘doubt about food to hide doubt about love.’
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We are children for a very long time.
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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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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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We are tyrannized by our blind spots, and by whatever it is about ourselves that we find unacceptable.
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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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We are at our most stupid in our self-hatred.
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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 ,
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There is nothing more terrorizing than the possibility that nothing is hidden.
ADAM PHILLIPS