59 Quotes by Adam Phillips

"There is nothing more terrorizing than the possibility that nothing is hidden. There is nothing more scandalous than a happy marriage"

"Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves."

"The child can find out what the object ..might be only by finding ..obstacles to its access"

"People change, but there really are limits. One thing you discover in psychoanalytic treatment is the limits of what you can change about yourself or your life. We are children for a very long time."

"The child..will try to make himself..independent of other people. .. Excesses of appetite are self-cures for feelings of hopelessness. ..The child [uses] ‘doubt about food to hide doubt about love.’"

"Lovers, of course, are notoriously frantic epistemologists, second only to paranoiacs (and analysts) as readers of signs and wonders."

"The vocabulary of one’s self-criticism is so impoverished and clichéd. We are at our most stupid in our self-hatred."

"There is always a ..belief that by destroying the thing that we love we destroy our needs"

"The wish to be understood may be our most vengeful demand, may be the way we hang on, as asults, to our grudge against our mothers; the way we never let our mothers off the hook for their not meeting our every need. Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be our most violent form of nostalgia."

"It's really obvious how strong the U.S. voice is in the United Nations. What the U.S. says and does can cripple or bring life to the programs that can help poor people across the world. So as an American, I feel compelled to raise my voice out of love for the neighbor who doesn't have that opportunity."