James

“...we cannot afford to minimize the damaging effects that secret-keeping may have on children. As my colleague Harriet Lerner highlights, secrecy "puts a crack in the foundation of the relationship with both parents and operates like an underground river of confusion and pain that affects everything. It not infrequently leads to symptomatic behavior and acting out by kids and teens who are then put in therapy where the real source of anxiety and distress is never identified.”
― Esther Perel, The State of Affairs Rethinking Infidelity / Mating In Captivity 2 Books

“Because we cannot have the lover, it ensures that we keep wanting, for we always want that which we cannot have. It is this just-out-of-reach quality that lends affairs their erotic mystique and ensures that the flame of desire keeps burning.”
― Esther Perel, The State of Affairs Rethinking Infidelity / Mating In Captivity 2 Books

“No sooner in the small town than I found myself in the hustle and bustle of local society, which, so it seemed to me, had been going the rounds during my absence, on the lookout for a victim. And now the unconscionable enemy was back again. Even on my way into town, they overtook me in their cars and informed others of my arrival. The commando was waiting for me, disguised as evening strollers.”
― Peter Handke; Ralph Manheim [trans, Repetition

“Sometimes, in looking at me, her face froze into an expression of pity without a glimmer of compassion. I had often been characterized by someone – a priest, a teacher, a girl, a classmate; but in that silent look of my mother's I felt not only characterized but seen through and condemned [...] And when for the first time, after all the years at the seminary, where no one called us by anything but our family names, I heard the girl next to me at the state school address me quite casually by my first name, I took it as a characterization that exonerated me, almost as a caress. I had a feeling of relief and I can still see the sparkle of the girl's hair. And so, once I learned to decipher my mother's looks, I knew: This is no place for me.”
― Peter Handke; Ralph Manheim [trans, Repetition