Creatures Of A Day: And Other Tales Of Psychotherapy Quotes
"I feel blessed by not having been visited by one of those [writing blocks] creatures and I was keen to help him tackle it."
"We instantly knew one another: our parents had suffered through the Great Depression, we had witnessed those legendary duels between DiMaggio and Ted Williams."
"I don’t ingest and metabolize words, I love to dance with them."
"The drive to explain is an epidemic in modern thought and its major carriers are contemporary therapists."
"Everything bad began one morning when I was eight years old."
"Free-floating guilt searching for a sin—that’s me."
"Actors impersonate people. That’s what actors do!"
"I think about the pointlessness of spending all my life at work and of making more money than I need."
"Thank you for telling me that. It means a lot when you speak personally to me."
"The presence of darkness sets the stage for awareness of one’s own death."
"Death couldn’t be fixed. Not even by my father, who could fix almost anything."
"The fear of death is hardwired into all of us. It enables us to survive."
"The decision as to whether you’re finished and ready to stop rests with you."
"I meet a lot of terrific women, and the same thing happens every time."
"The amount of death terror experienced is closely related to the amount of life unlived."
"You’re allowing a fear of some fleeting feeling passing through my mind to influence the entire course of your one and only life."
"I had access to the real stuff—special knowledge of her fears and passions and inner conversations and fantasies and dreams."
"I’ve observed again and again that the amount of death terror experienced is closely related to the amount of life unlived."
"If we can identify the helpful factors, you may be able to call upon them in the future."
"It’s a close cousin to saying to yourself, ‘If I am not spontaneous, I won’t exist.’"
"I had a sense of our working well together. But in these last sessions, we’ve really hit a wall."
"I’m with your dad on that: I can’t imagine a disembodied consciousness."
"Thank you all for coming to say goodbye to our Astrid."
"I know I’ve pushed you hard—too hard perhaps—but look at what we’ve done."
"Sometimes thoughts enter the mind involuntarily in daydreams, for example, or night dreams."
"Soon you will have forgotten all things: soon all things will have forgotten you."
"All is as thinking makes it so—and you control your thinking."
"I’ve often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others."
"If any man despises me, that is his problem. My only concern is not doing or saying anything deserving of contempt."
"Never esteem anything as an advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose your self-respect."
"If someone can prove me wrong and show me my mistakes in any thought or action. I shall gladly change. I seek the truth, which never harmed anyone: the harm is to persist in one’s own self-deception and ignorance."
"Remember that this noble vintage is grape juice, and the purple robes of imperial office are sheep wool dyed with shellfish blood."
"The time is at hand when you will have forgotten everything; and the time is at hand when all will have forgotten you."
"Always reflect that soon you will be no one, and nowhere."
"All of us are creatures of a day; the rememberer and the remembered alike. All is ephemeral—both memory and the object of memory."