Lovers, of course, are notoriously frantic epistemologists, second only to paranoiacs (and analysts) as readers of signs and wonders.

The 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.’

There is always a ..belief that by destroying the thing that we love we destroy our needs

Believing in religion is like believing that adulthood is the solution to childhood.

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.

You write to find out what you believe.