One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.
Recounting of a life story . . . leads one inevitably to the consideration of problems which are no longer psychological but spiritual.
Who then tells a finer tale than any of us? Silence does.
All men should strive to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.
You know what happens to scar tissue. It’s the strongest part of your skin.
When weaving, an Indian woman leaves a flaw in the blanket to let the soul out.
The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous. But neither, in my experience, do we ever reach a plane of detachment regarding our parents, however wise and old we may become. To pretend otherwise is to cheat.
In the office there was an old, soft, and worn blue velvet couch, above which a hundred thousand dissected dreams floated in the peaceful, still air.
Psychoanalysis is confession without absolution.
It is slow, painful, and difficult for an adult to reconstruct a radically different way of seeing life, however needlessly miserable his preconceptions make him.
The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.
There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
One day, someone showed me a glass of water that was half full. And he said, “Is it half full or half empty?” So I drank the water. No more problem.
If you want to know who you are, you could do a lot worse than look to your feet for an answer. Introspection in the long run doesn’t get very far because . . . you are, in your quest to see yourself whole, doomed always to see infinitely less than what there will always remain to see. Thus, when you wake up in the morning . . . if you want to know who you are, watch your feet. Because where your feet take you, that is who you are.
What I most want is to spring out of this personality, then to sit apart from that leaping. I’ve lived too long where I can be reached.
When we came in she had her chair sideways, by the window, looking out at the snow, and she said, without even looking up to know that it was us, that the doctor had said that sitting and staring at the snow was a waste of time. She should get involved in something. She laughed and told us it wasn’t a waste of time. It would be a waste of time just to stare at snowflakes, but she was counting, and even that might be a waste of time, but she was only counting the ones that were just alike.
