The discovery of an important need is almost as important as the invention which satisfies this need.
The big secret about Art is that no one wants it to be true.
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.
Tragic heroes are failed pragmatists. Their ends are unrealistic and their means are impractical.
There is always a. . belief that by destroying the thing that we love we destroy our needs
Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves.
Sanity, as the project of keeping ourselves recognizably human, therefore has to limit the range of human experience. To keep faith with recognition we have to stay recognizable. Sanity, in other words, becomes a pressing preoccupation as soon as we recognize the importance of recognition. When we define ourselves by what we can recognize, by what we can comprehend- rather than, say, by what we can describe- we are continually under threat from what we are unwilling andor unable to see. We are tyrannized by our blind spots, and by whatever it is about ourselves that we find unacceptable.
I'm a father. It isn't just my life any more. I don't want my kid finding bottles in the house or seeing his father completely smashed.
You know how on the evening news they always tell you that the stock market is up in active trading, or off in moderate trading, or trading in mixed activity, or whatever. Well, who gives a
I often reflect on what an extraordinary time (pun intended) it is to be alive here in the beginning of the twenty-first century. It took life billions of years to get to this point. It took humans thousands of years to piece together a meaningful understanding of our cosmos, our planet and ourselves. Think how fortunate we are to know this much. But think also of all that's yet to be discovered. Here's hoping the deep answers to the deep questions-from the nature of consciousness to the origin of life-will be found in not too much more time.
Flattery, the dangerous nurse of vice.