Bonnie > Recent Status Updates

“bright ideas really take a small proportion of our time. Most of our time is spent on hard work.”

“…neurosis as a failure of adjustment.”

“ in a world where numbers inexorably take over as our means of identification, like flowing lava threatening to suffocate and fossilize all breathing life in its path…”

“ we were all divided up into punches on an IBM card. “

“ it is an old and ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way”

“Every living thing on this planet, including men, would be wise to be mistrustful of men.”

“[in hospitals] is our concentration on equipment, on blood pressure, or desperate attempt to deny the impending death which is so frightening and discomforting to us that we displace all our knowledge onto machines, since they are less close to us than the suffering face of another human being which would remind us once more of our lack of omnipotence, our own limits and failures and our own mortality.”

“Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers but to be fearless in facing them”

“The search for truth on the level of thinking is but the rejection of the search for meaning on the level of living”

“ …[on god] we have a kind of mutual agreement: I won’t believe in him and he won’t believe in me. That way no one gets hurt.”

“ bitterness and art are close, gossipy neighbors, sharing the same clothesline “

“ destroyed by too many women, a heart picked over, scratched at, taken, lost. “

“…we saw the great rider Ganay fall and heard his skull crumble under the crash helmet as you crack an hard boiled egg against a stone to peek it at a picnic “

“ each time we see the face . . . It is our own ideas of him which we recognize “

“the sentiment that one “should have done something more” reflects an underlying wish to control the uncontrollable.”

“How do I know? All you do is ask questions.?”

“Which will you have: wise madness or foolish sanity?”

“One of the great paradoxes of life is that self-awareness breeds anxiety.”

“Authentic practice combines effort with an openness to grace”

“There is a pleasure in being mad which none but the madmen know.”

“You cannot eat your liver like a cake, you know.”

“ hiding under the covers feels safe until you have to change the sheets”

“ most therapists begin their vocations from a position of idealism; a loss of innocence often follows. Next comes cynicism and a loss of enthusiasm, followed, one hopes, by pragmatism coupled with realistic expectations, integrated experience, and greater flexibility.”

-paraphrase- therapist oscillate between a false sense of confidence and counterfeit expertise..

“ just as change in clients is stymied by a reluctance to act differently or experiment with new modes of being, so, too, do some therapists tend towards safety, security, and predictability at the expense of growth”

vii: “ I believe that our best defense against self-destruction lies in the courageous application of intelligence to human phenomenology “

“In a community of primary relationships, assistance is only one of many dimensions that define people.. in a city of strangers, appearance is the only dimension available for the rapid assessment of others.”

“Math: are you able to turn off your mind to the world and fill it with symbols that follow rules?”

“if you can’t get out of bed for long enough, people come and take your bed away.”

“[bathrooms] are sanctuaries, public places of peace spread through the world”