I sincerely believe that we not only have the right to know what is good and what is evil; we have the duty to acquire that knowledge if we hope to assume responsibility for our own lives and those of our children. Only by knowing the truth can we be set free.
In a world where England is finished and dead: I do not wish to live.
No one really believes in equality who’s on top.
Hate is perhaps the most dynamic of all emotions – fear may immobilize, love may stay the hand, but hate urges to action...
Rare indeed is the nature that does not become a little more intense when its own affairs come under discussion.
Silences, as every observer knows, have strange characteristics all their own – passionate silences, and hateful silences, and silences full of friendly, purring content.
It’s been my experience, Charlotte, that the crisis never comes as or when you expect.
People love to talk but hate to listen.
It is always difficult for a woman to be grateful for a form of chivalry that seems to be based on the premise that she is a moron.
Good manners are the techniques of expressing consideration for the feelings of others.
When a woman like that whom I’ve seen so much, All of a sudden drops out of touch; Is always busy and never can, Spare you a moment, it means a man.
Love will not always linger longest with those who hold it in too clenched a fist.
Conversation is a partnership, not a relation of master and slave, as most people try to make it.
A child too, can never grasp the fact that the same mother who cooks so well, is so concerned about his cough, and helps so kindly with his homework, in some circumstance has no more feeling than a wall of his hidden inner world.
The truth about our childhood is stored up in our body, and although we can repress it, we can never alter it. Our intellect can be deceived, our feelings manipulated, and conceptions confused, and our body tricked with medication. But someday our body will present its bill, for it is as incorruptible as a child, who, still whole in spirit, will accept no compromises or excuses, and it will not stop tormenting us until we stop evading the truth.
In order to become whole we must try, in a long process, to discover our own personal truth, a truth that may cause pain before giving us a new sphere of freedom. If we choose instead to content ourselves with intellectual “wisdom,” we will remain in the sphere of illusion and self-deception.
We become free by transforming ourselves from unaware victims of the past into responsible individuals in the present, who are aware of our past and are thus able to live with it.
Only the never-ending work of mourning can help us from lapsing into the illusion that we have found the parent we once urgently needed – empathic and open, understanding and understandable, honest and available, helpful and loving, feeling, transparent, clear, without unintelligible contradictions. Such a parent was never ours, for a mother can react empathically only to the extent that she has become free of her own childhood; when she denies the vicissitudes of her early life, she wears invisible chains.
For one is free from it only when self-esteem is based on the authenticity of ones own feelings and not on the possession of certain qualities.
Depression as Denial of the Self Depression consists of a denial of one’s own emotional reactions. This denial begins in the service of an absolutely essential adaptation during childhood and indicates a very early injury. There are many children who have not been free, right from the beginning, to experience the very simplest of feelings, such as discontent, anger, rage, pain, even hunger – and, of course, enjoyment of their own bodies.