Odysseus

“For the human soul is virtually indestructible, and its ability to rise from the ashes remains as long as the body draws breath.”
― Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence

“I am the shoemaker who sees only shoes in the world; being a therapist, I see only pain in humans. All scientists have to be careful of this because when we have a hammer, everything in the world looks like a nail.”
― Arthur Janov, Biology of Love

“Only the never-ending work of mourning can help us from lapsing into the illusion that we have found the parent we once urgently needed—empathic and open, understanding and understandable, honest and available, helpful and loving, feeling, transparent, clear, without unintelligible contradictions. Such a parent was never ours, for a mother can react empathically only to the extent that she has become free of her own childhood; when she denies the vicissitudes of her early life, she wears invisible chains.”
― Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self

“The true opposite of depression is neither gaiety nor absence of pain, but vitality—the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings. It is part of the kaleidoscope of life that these feelings are not only happy, beautiful, or good but can reflect the entire range of human experience, including envy, jealousy, rage, disgust, greed, despair, and grief. But this freedom cannot be achieved if its childhood roots are cut off. Our access to the true self is possible only when we no longer have to be afraid of the intense emotional world of early childhood. Once we have experienced and become familiar with this world, it is no longer strange and threatening.”
― Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self