The past influences everything and dictates nothing.
To grow up is to discover what one is unequal to.
Anger, then, is only for the engaged; for those with projects that matter.
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.
In Freud’s story our possibilities for satisfaction depend upon our capacity for frustration; if we can’t let ourselves feel our frustration – and, surprisingly, this is a surprisingly difficult thing to do – we can’t get a sense of what it...
Tragic heroes are failed pragmatists. Their ends are unrealistic and their means are impractical.
If you want to be with somebody who gets you, you prefer collusion to desire, safety to excitement (sometimes good things to prefer but not always the things most wanted). The wish to be understood may be our most vengeful demand, may be the way we h...
It is the link between satisfaction and redress--the idea that a satisfaction scene, whatever else it is, is a revenge tragedy--that I want to pursue; and the sense that we waylay our desire--make it literally unreal--with pictures of its satisfactio...
