Benjamin

“Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you'll always find despair.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept

“In choosing to enter fully into each patient’s life, I, the therapist, not only am exposed to the same existential issues as are my patients but must be prepared to examine them with the same rules of inquiry. I must assume that knowing is better than not knowing, venturing than not venturing; and that magic and illusion, however rich, however alluring, ultimately weaken the human spirit.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner

“This encounter, the very heart of psychotherapy, is a caring, deeply human meeting between two people, one (generally, but not always, the patient) more troubled than the other. Therapists have a dual role: they must both observe and participate in the lives of their patients. As observer, one must be sufficiently objective to provide necessary rudimentary guidance to the patient. As participant, one enters into the life of the patient and is affected and sometimes changed by the encounter.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner

“The problem with being young and in a singular place is that one assumes that one will inevitably find oneself in an equally foreign and exotic location at some later point in life. But this is very rarely true.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees