The vocabulary of one’s self-criticism is so impoverished and clichéd. We are at our most stupid in our self-hatred.
Adam PhillipsThe 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. 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.
Adam PhillipsEverybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves.
Adam PhillipsSanity, as the project of keeping ourselves recognizably human, therefore has to limit the range of human experience. To keep faith with recognition we have to stay recognizable. Sanity, in other words, becomes a pressing preoccupation as soon as we recognize the importance of recognition. When we define ourselves by what we can recognize, by what we can comprehend- rather than, say, by what we can describe- we are continually under threat from what we are unwilling and/or unable to see. We are tyrannized by our blind spots, and by whatever it is about ourselves that we find unacceptable.
Adam PhillipsTragic heroes are failed pragmatists. Their ends are unrealistic and their means are impractical.
Adam PhillipsWe 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 , to our grudge against our mothers; the way we never let our mothers off the hook for their not meeting our every need. Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be our most violent form of nostalgia.
Adam PhillipsThe child..will try to make himself..independent of other people. .. Excesses of appetite are self-cures for feelings of hopelessness. ..The child [uses] ‘doubt about food to hide doubt about love.’
Adam PhillipsLovers, of course, are notoriously frantic epistemologists, second only to paranoiacs (and analysts) as readers of signs and wonders.
Adam PhillipsThere is nothing more terrorizing than the possibility that nothing is hidden. There is nothing more scandalous than a happy marriage
Adam PhillipsThere is always a ..belief that by destroying the thing that we love we destroy our needs
Adam Phillips