Jemma

“She expressed herself in sentences that were well constructed, and without error, even though she had stopped going to school, but – further – she left no trace of effort, you weren’t aware of the artifice of the written word. I read and I saw her, heard her. The voice set in the writing overwhelmed me, enthralled me even more than when we talked face to face; it was completely cleansed of the dross of speech, the confusion of the oral.”
― Elena Ferrante

“If poetry introduces the strange, it does so by means of the familiar. The poetic is the familiar dissolving into the strange, and ourselves with it. It never dispossesses us entirely, for the words, the images (once dissolved) are charged with emotions already experienced, attached to objects which link them to the known.”
― Georges Bataille, Inner Experience

“Freudian notion that people act out what they cannot remember or what they cannot allow themselves to feel. It follows that as long as people are able to enact a dynamic (in this case, most frequently a disavowed dependency or a compulsion to be in control), they do not have to think about why they persistently behave in a particular way. When there are no negative consequences for their behavior, interpretations just roll off them.”
― Nancy McWilliams, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy: A Practitioner's Guide

“Feelings have their own kind of wisdom.”
― Nancy McWilliams, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy: A Practitioner's Guide