Hussein Mohamoud

“I remember a seminar I once attended that was led by a brilliant and flamboyant Hungarian analyst named Robert Bak. The issue under debate was the nature of transference, and I raised my hand and asked rhetorically, "What would you call an interpersonal relationship where infantile wishes, and defenses against those wishes, get expressed in such a way that the persons within that relationship don't see each other for what they objectively are but, rather, view each other in terms of their infantile needs and their infantile conflicts. What would you call that?" And Bak looked over at me ironically and said, 'I'd call that life.”
― Janet Malcolm

“Theory and interpretation, far from threatening works of art, keep them alive.”
― Janet Malcolm, Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers

“Do you have any idea how many lives we must have gone through before we even got the first idea that there is more to life than eating, or fighting, or power in the Flock? A thousand lives, Jon, ten thousand!… We choose our next world through what we learn in this one…”
― Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull

“Trials are won by attorneys whose stories fit, and lost by those whose stories are like the shapeless housecoat that truth, in her disdain of appearances, has chosen as her uniform.”
― Janet Malcolm, The Crime of Sheila McGough