Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.
Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer, and each dreamer has his own folds to open and knots to untie.
There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.
I’ve always thought of wholeness and integration as necessary myths. We’re gragmented beings who cement ourselves together, but there are always cracks. Living with the cracks is part of being, well, reasonably healthy.
We read each other through our eyes, and anatomically they are an extension of our brains. When we catch someone’s eye, we look into a mind.
Ture stories can’t be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.
Being a mother is complicated because its not just a paternal culture making demands on you; its those internal demands and expectations that women have and are self-generated.
Every sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evident in the language we use about it.
I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.
The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree or another, we all invent our personal pasts. And for most of us those pasts are built from emotionally colored memories.
Our memory fragments don’t have any coherence until they’re imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.
The truth is that personality inevitably bleeds into all forms of our intellectual life. We all extrapolate from our own lives in order to understand the world.
Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn’t a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words.
Memory changes as a person matures.
We chart delusions through collective agreement.
The fictive is an emormous territory it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends.
Bedtime rituals for children ease the way to the elsewhere of slumber – teeth brushing and pajamas, the voice of a parent reading, the feel and smell of the old blanket or toy, the nightlight glowing in a corner.
There is no reason we should expect young children to enter the nocturnal darkness of sleep and dreams without help.
We sometimes imagine we want what we don’t really want.
Intellectual curiosity about one’s own illness is certainly born of a desire for mastery. If I couldn’t cure myself, perhaps I could at least begin to understand myself.