Suppose that throughout your childhood you were good with numbers. Other kids used to copy your homework. You … - James Hillman

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He had senile dementia and liked to go outside naked, but he could still do two things perfectly: win at checkers and write out prescriptions.

James Hillman

Suppose that throughout your childhood you were good with numbers. Other kids used to copy your homework. You figured store discounts faster than your parents. People came to you for help with such things. So you took accounting and eventually became a tax auditor for the IRS. What an embarrassing job, right? You feel you should be writing poetry or doing aviation mechanics or whatever. But then you realize that tax collecting can be a calling too.

Came, Copy, Homework, Jobs, Kids, Writing

Same Author Quotes

Open your heart, your gaze, to the visitations of angels, even if the gifts they bring may not be centeredness and balance but eccentricity and a wholly unfamiliar sense of pleasure called joy.

Angel, Balance, Heart, Inspirational, Pleasure

You know, people come to therapy really for a blessing. Not so much to fix what's broken, but to get what's broken blessed.

Blessed, Blessing, Broken, Fix, People

It's very hard in our adversarial society to find a third view. Take journalism, where everything is always presented as one person against another: "Now we're going to hear the opposing view. " There is never a third view.

Everything, Journalism, Presented, Society, Thirds, Views

I just read about John Le Carre, the great spy novelist. He had an absolutely miserable childhood. His mother deserted him when he was young. His father was a playboy and a drunk. He was shifted around to many different homes. He knew he was a writer when he was about nine, but he was dyslexic. So here was a person with an absolutely messed-up childhood and a symptom that prevented him from doing what he wanted to do most. Yet that very symptom was part of the calling. It forced him to go deeper.

Childhood, Father, Home, Miserable, Mother, Novelist

Rather let us imagine the anima mundi as that particular soul-spark, that seminal image, which offers itself through each thing in its visible form. Then anima mundi indicates the animated possibilities presented by each new event as it is, its sensuous presentation as a face bespeaking its interior image - in short, its availability to imagination, its presence as psychic reality. Not only animals and plants ensouled as in the Romantic vision, but soul is given with each thing, God-given things of nature and man-made things of the street.

Animal, Men, Reality, Sensuous, Things