Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves.

Tragic heroes are failed pragmatists. Their ends are unrealistic and their means are impractical.

Monogamy is a way of getting the versions of ourselves down to the minimum.

People change, but there really are limits. One thing you discover in psychoanalytic treatment is the limits of what you can change about yourself or your life. We are children for a very long time.

To grow up is to discover what one is unequal to.

There is nothing more terrorizing than the possibility that nothing is hidden. There is nothing more scandalous than a happy marriage

Sanity, 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.