Adam Phillips Quotes

The wish to be understood may be our most vengeful demand, may be the way we hang on, as asults, 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.

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

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.

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

The past influences everything and dictates nothing.

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

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

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

The big secret about Art is that no one wants it to be true.

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