To allow yourself to be loved by another is to put yourself totally in his or her power, to hand him or her the means of your destruction, because, by and large, we love one another only as objects.

The greatest misuse to which we put love, I believe, is to make it the conditional ground on which people can be rather than the unconditional ground from which they can do: we love people as objects rather than subjects.

Intimacy would involve an effort to explore each other's subjectivity, to listen charitably and experience empathetically, to shun labels and categories, to be alert to uniqueness, to allow the possibility of evolution in the psychological and relational spheres, to acknowledge uncertainty and creativity while trying to articulate and examine in good faith the stance we take to each other, and the world.

You can no more banish hatred from your heart than you can summon love into it, and the wisest course is to accept that, whatever you feel, you probably have good reasons for it.