How can I know what I think until I see what I say?
–E. M. Forster
When two people meet for the first time, an exchange takes place, not only of conscious, but of unconscious stirrings.
–Sandor Ferenczi
The limits of my language means the limits of my world.
–Ludwig Wittgenstein
We call contrary to nature what happens contrary to custom; nothing is anything but according to nature, whatever it may be.
–Michel de Montaigne
Things are known not according to their nature but according to the nature of the one who is comprehending them.
–Anicius Boethius
From the fool’s gold mouthpiece, the hollow horn
Plays wasted words, proves to warn
That he not busy being born
Is busy dying.
–Bob Dylan
The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.
–Tom Waits
Nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.
–James Baldwin
Life stand still here.
–Virginia Woolf
One of the things that psychoanalysis has institutionalized is the possibility of being listened to on a long-term basis.
–Adam Phillips
I find humans dull except in grief.
–Max Porter
Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final
–Rainer Maria Rilke
I was angry with my friend;
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe;
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
–William Blake
If I lose you, under these conditions, then I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. Who “am” I, without you? When we lose some of these ties by which we are constituted, we do not know who we are or what to do. On one level, I think I have lost “you” only to discover that “I” have gone missing as well.
–Judith Butler
Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post as soon as there is no enemy in the field.
–John Stuart Mill
However unwillingly a person who has a strong opinion may admit the possibility that his opinion may be false, he ought to be moved by the consideration that, however true it may be, if it is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, it will be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth.
–John Stuart Mill
In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
–John Stuart Mill
We should not expect freedom to be anything less than fiendishly difficult.
–Sarah Bakewell
What do we imagine we might want when we’re not under surveillance?
–Adam Phillips
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. One fancies a heart like our own must be beating in every crystal and cell, and we feel like stopping to speak to the plants and animals as friendly fellow mountaineers.
–John Muir
Somewhere midway through my own analysis, after I had undergone much change, I visualized the core of myself as being, nonetheless, like a steel ball bearing, with varicolored sectors on its surface. At least, I told myself, this would not change. I have long since lost any such image of the core of my identity; it became dissolved in grief and my sense of identity now possesses something of the fluidity of tears. But for a number of years anything which threatened that so-rigid view of the core of myself was experienced as terrifying craziness.
— Harold Searles
Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.
― Edna St. Vincent Millay
Fear of the unknown is cured through flight into the intelligible… The familiar, the unsurprising, restores our collusive sanity.
–Adam Phillips
The quintessential irony of an emancipatory psychoanalysis resides in the analyst who insists that the patient exercise his or her own right to be free and to own his or her own life.
–William J. Coburn
There is nothing quite like the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual if you are looking for a convenient device to reduce the complexity and contextuality of experiencing and meaning-making down to two-dimensional caricatures of what is human.
–William J. Coburn
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
What was it about the [human] species that would save the symbol and discard the thing it stood for?
–Richard Powers
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
–Walt Whitman
Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm?
–Herman Melville
We say ‘inner world’ or ‘outer world,’ but actually there is just one whole world.
–Shunryu Suzuki
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
–Mary Oliver
See how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when love once comes to bend them.
–Herman Melville
What punishment can never fully acknowledge is that actions can’t be undone, that time is irreversible. We tend to punish people when we don’t know what else to do with them. Punishment is a failure of imagination and people must take the consequences of their actions – both the punishers and the punished.
–Adam Phillips
It wasn’t easy to raise myself from the dead—it’s an expensive pastime.
–Magda Szabo
People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.
–James Baldwin
How is one to face the reality that a way of facing reality is coming to an end?
–Jonathan Lear
What one calls by the somewhat tarnished term love is par excellence the fact that the death of the other affects me more than my own.
—Emmanuel Levinas
Grieving entails no less than relearning the world.
—Anna Aragno
Everybody want to go to heaven
But nobody want to go now.
–Kenny Chesney
Separation: Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
—W. S. Merwin
Nothing is more important as a defining ingredient in a truly therapeutic system than that the analyst safeguard the extension of the inquiry [and, I would add, ways of interacting] into realms of the patient’s experience that are threatening to the analyst’s sense of self.
–Bernard Brandchaft
Our temporal existence: a finite stretch of indeterminate length in which to be, book-ended at its beginning and its end by an infinite abyss of nothingness.
—Robert D. Stolorow
Pain is not pathology.
–Robert D. Stolorow
We only become who we are through the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.
–Jean-Paul Sartre
It is joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found.
–D. W. Winnicott
While you’re alive and I am too
And after all this time
You’re always on my mind
I still miss you
–Rodney Crowell
Even the silence/ has a story to tell you.
–Jacqueline Woodson
Do you even grasp what a stunning idea it is to just be? How subversive it is?
–David Grossman
Strange it is and wonderful to mark how upon this planet of ours the smallest and most insignificant of events set a train of consequences in motion which act and react until their final results are portentous and incalculable.
–A. Conan Doyle
Lifting a depression can make a huge difference in how a person is able to live her life. The problem only arises if one assumes that, having lifted the depression, there is no further question about how to live.
–Jonathan Lear
william j. coburn, ph.d., psy.d. 