Serra

“The pathologized images have moved the soul in several ways: we are afraid; we feel vulnerable and in danger; our very physical sustance and sanity appear to be menaced; we want to prevent or rectify. Especially this last seizes us. We feel protective, impelled to correct, straighten, repair. For we have confused something sick with something wrong. [...]
affliction reaches us partly through the guilt it brings. Guilt belongs to the experiences of deviation, the the sense of being off, failing, 'missing the mark'. [...]
However the true missing of the mark is taking the guilt literally, where failings becomes faults to be set right. This places the guilt on the shoulders of the ego who 'should not' have failed. Then pathologizing reinforces the ego's style and guilt serves a secondary gain, increasing the ego's sense of importance: ego becomes superego, drivenly busy with repairing wrongs. A guilty ego is no less egocentric than a proud one.”
― James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology

“If he hadn't lied to you, he would have been a different person than he is.' She is trying to get me to see that although I thought I loved this man very completely for exactly who he was, I was in fact blind to the man he actually was, or is.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“Moreover, my policy at the time was that, when confronted by two courses of action, one should always choose the less conservative and more generous. I thought this was tantamount to a moral obligation for anyone who had any advantages at all, and especially for anyone who wanted to be a writer.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“Most people, the minute they meet you, were sizing you up for some competition for resources. It was as if everyone lived in fear of a shipwreck, where only so many people would fit on the lifeboat, and they were constantly trying to stake out their property and identify dispensable people – people they could get rid of.... Everyone is trying to reassure themselves: I'm not going to get kicked off the boat, they are. They're always separating people into two groups, allies and dispensable people... The number of people who want to understand what you're like instead of trying to figure out whether you get to stay on the boat - it's really limited.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot