Nancy Pace > Nancy's Quotes

“Feeling at peace, however fragilely, made it easy to slip into the visionary end of the dark-sight. The rose shadows said that they loved the sun, but that they also loved the dark, where their roots grew through the lightless mystery of the earth. The roses said: You do not have to choose. ”
― Robin McKinley, Sunshine

“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.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“The past influences everything and dictates nothing.”
― Adam Phillips, Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories

“Monogamy is a way of getting the versions of ourselves down to the minimum.”
― Adam Phillips, Monogamy

“To grow up is to discover what one is unequal to.”
― Adam Phillips, Equals

“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 hang on, as adults, to the grudge against our mothers; the way we never let our mothers of the hook for their not meeting our every need. Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be, among many other things our most violent form of nostalgia.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

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

“Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves.”
― Adam Phillips

“Believing in religion is like believing that adulthood is the solution to childhood.”
― Adam Phillips, On Balance

“So there is something perhaps more difficult to conceive of, sometimes born of resignation and sometimes not- a life in which not getting it is the point and not the problem; in which the project is to learn how not to ride the bicycle, how not to understand the poem. Or to put it the other way round, this would be a life in which getting it – the will to get it, the ambition to get it – was the problem; in which wanting to be an accomplice didn’t take precedence over making up one’s mind.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“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 is we might be wanting, and missing, of what might really give us pleasure.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“Writers as diverse as Wordsworth and Freud, as Blake and Dickens have all hypothesized that the turbulence and intensity we feel as young children are what ultimately give us our life force as adults. Without this first madness, without being able to sustain this emotional lifeline to our childhoods--to our most passionate selves-- our lives can being to feel futile”
― Adam Phillips

“Kindness—that is, the ability to bear the vulnerability of others, and therefore of oneself—has become a sign of weakness (except of course among saintly people, in whom it is a sign of their exceptionality).”
― Adam Phillips, On Kindness

“When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you
don't blame the lettuce. You look for reasons it is not
doing well. It may need fertilizer, or more water, or
less sun. You never blame the lettuce. Yet if we have
problems with our friends or family, we blame the other
person. But if we know how to take care of them, they will
grow well, like the lettuce. Blaming has no positive
effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reason
and argument. That is my experience. No blame, no
reasoning, no argument, just understanding. If you
understand, and you show that you understand, you can
love, and the situation will change”
― Thich Nhat Hanh

“When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself, and his suffering is spilling over. He does not need punishment; he needs help. That's the message he is sending.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh

“In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“But the worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself; you lie in wait for yourself in caverns and forests. Lonely one, you are going the way to yourself! And your way goes past yourself, and past your seven devils! You will be a heretic to yourself and witch and soothsayer and fool and doubter and unholy one and villain. You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“My dear friend, what is this our life? A boat that swims in the sea, and all one knows for certain about it is that one day it will capsize. Here we are, two good old boats that have been faithful neighbors, and above all your hand has done its best to keep me from "capsizing"! Let us then continue our voyage—each for the other's sake, for a long time yet, a long time! We should miss each other so much! Tolerably calm seas and good winds and above all sun—what I wish for myself, I wish for you, too, and am sorry that my gratitude can find expression only in such a wish and has no influence at all on wind or weather!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“I am one thing, my writings are another.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Love is blind. Friendship closes its eyes.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“I hate who steals my solitude, without really offer me in exchange company.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“You know these things as thoughts, but your thoughts are not your experiences, they are an echo and after-effect of your experiences: as when your room trembles when a carriage goes past. I however am sitting in the carriage, and often I am the carriage itself.
Ina man who thinks like this, the dichotomy between thinking and feeling, intellect and passion, has really disappeared. He feels his thoughts. He can fall in love with an idea. An idea can make him ill.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“The real man wants two different things: danger and play. Therefore he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“One is fruitful only at the cost of being rich in contradictions.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“One sticks to an opinion because he prides himself on having come to it on his own, and another because he has taken great pains to learn it and is proud to have grasped it: and so both do so out of vanity.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“With enough courage, you can do without a reputation.”
― Margaret Mitchell

“What makes us moral beings is that...there are some acts we believe we ought to die rather than commit...But now suppose that one has in fact done one of the things one could not have imagined doing, and finds that one is still alive. At that point, one's choices are suicide, a life of bottomless self-disgust, and an attempt to live so as never to do such a thing again. Dewey recommends the third choice.”
― Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America

“When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, 'I used everything you gave me.”
― Erma Bombeck

“The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.”
― J. Krishnamurti