59 Quotes by Adam Phillips

"The fight to end Global Poverty goes beyond today, goes beyond this week. The Millennium Development Goals seek to put an end to extreme poverty, where people live on less than $1 a day,"

"We have been taught to wish for it, but the wish to be understood may be our most vengeful demand, may be the way we hang on, as adults , 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."

"And reality matters because it is the only thing that can satisfy us."

"We make ourselves out of the demands others make of us, and out of whatever else we can use."

"Our excesses are the best clue we have to our own poverty, and our best way of concealing it from ourselves."

"Transgression is a quest for solitude."

"Before you have children, the novelist Fay Weldon once said, you can believe you are a nice person: after you have children you understand how wars start."

"It is difficult to enjoy people for whom we have waited too long. And in this familiar situation, which evokes such intensities of feeling, we wait and we try to do something other than waiting, and we often get bored – the boredom of protest that is always a screen for rage."

"Writers as diverse as Wordsworth and Freud, as Blake and Dickens have all hypothesized that the turbulence and intensity we feel as young children are what ultimately give us our life force as adults. Without this first madness, without being able to sustain this emotional lifeline to our childhoods – to our most passionate selves – our lives can being to feel futile."

"We don’t have relationships to get our needs met, we have relationships to discover what our needs might be."