"The mother can feel herself the center of attention, for her child's eyes follow her everywhere. A child cannot run away from her as her own mother once did."

"Accommodation to parental needs often (but not always) leads to the "as-if personality." This person develops in such a way that he reveals only what is expected of him and fuses so completely with what he reveals that one could scarcely guess how much more there is to him behind this false self. He cannot develop and differentiate his true self, because he is unable to live it. Understandably, this person will complain of a sense of emptiness, futility, or homelessness, for the emptiness is real. A process of emptying, impoverishment, and crippling of his potential actually took place. The integrity of the child was injured when all that was alive and spontaneous in him was cut off."

"The true self cannot communicate because it has remained unconscious, and therefore undeveloped, in its inner prison. The company of prison warders does not encourage lively development. It is only after it is liberated that the self begins to be articulate, to grow, and to develop its creativity. Where there had been only fearful emptiness or equally frightening grandiose fantasies, an unexpected wealth of vitality is now discovered. This is not a homecoming, since this home has never before existed. It is the creation of home."

"Clinging uncritically to traditional ideas and beliefs often serves to obscure or deny real facts of our life history."

"Wer sich nicht mit Politik befaßt, hat die politische Parteinahme, die er sich sparen möchte, bereits vollzogen: er dient der herrschenden Partei."

"Finished things cease to be a shelter for the spirit; but work in progress is a delight"

"What we call unfaithfuless: our attempt for once to get out from behind our own face, our desperate hope of eluding the definitive."

"Does not everyone who describes something he has experienced believe basically that whatever happens to him has some sort of relevance."

"(Present) it is a culture that strictly ignores present obligations and places itself entirely at the service of eternity"

"Half a lifetime is spent with the unspoken question: Will it happen will it not?"

"The sort of misery that brings no moral reward, misery that is of no value to the mind and soul, that is the true misery, it is hopeless, bestial and nothing else."

"To write is to read one's own self"

"You hold the pen like a needle in a seismic observatory, and in fact it is not we who write, but rather we are written. Writing means to read oneself"

"Overcoming prejudice: the only possible way through love, which creates no graven images."

"Uniforms ruin every character"

"A poem, a genuine one, does not need to fear the world; it stands up to it, even when a bell rings and an unexpected guest arrives to tell us, while the same coffee is still in our cups, of his fourteen years in captivity..."

"'Everything that is human looks like a special case'"

"Why there are so many great actresses, so few great woman writers? The erotic urge that lies at the bottom of all art has a feminine and a masculine character. Feminine is the urge to be; masculine the urge to do. Interpretative art always has more of the feminine about it"

"We nest in an accident whose precarious balance, when we happen to become conscious of it, oppresses yet at the same time inspires us"

"To a certain degree we are really the person others have seen in us"

"Time does not change us it just unfolds us"

"The monstruous paradox that people come closer to one another without words"

"I know that I'm the happiest of lovers..."

"It is the secret that a man and a woman keep from each other that makes them a couple"

"Even silence becomes whether we want it or not a statement that is in fact astoundingly presumptuous"

"He knows that every piece of selfknowledge which one cannot keep to oneself makes one smaller and smaller, he knows that he who cannot keep silent his wishes to be recognized in the greatness of his selfknowledge which is no selfknowledge if it cannot be kept silent, and one becomes hypersensitive one feels betrayed because one wants to be recognized by people, one becomes ridiculous ambitious in inverse ratio to ones selfknowledge"

"Technology [is] the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it."

"Carrying on with the conversation like a woman when the bill comes..."

"They wanted what is possible only once: the now."

"My reality doesn't lie in the part I play, but in the unconscious decision as to what kind of part I assign to myself."

"People with the same education as my own, speaking the same words that I do, loving the same books, the same music, the same paintings, are by no means immune from the danger of turning into monsters and doing things we would not have thought possible among the people of our own day, apart from a few pathological exceptions. If they are not immune, Why should I be so confident of my own immunity?"

"Not to know one another to a degree that went beyond all possibility of knowing one another was beautiful."

"It is a sign of non love that is to say a sin, to form a finished image of ones neighbors."

"How can we ever judge a human being when he is and he will always be another person"

"The renunciation of recognition will never become possible without a certitude that our life is directed by a suprahuman authority."

"The horror of uncreative solitude....."

"How much self-knowledge is limited to presenting other people with a more precise and exact description of our weaknesses."

"Nothing is harder than to accept oneself."

"You merely had an affair with me, to be exact, and therefore no right to prevent me from another affair.'"

"Cause and effect are never divided between two people"

"One can be resolved to promote good, or one can be resolved to be a good person- Two separate things that are mutually exclusive"

"You can't make the incomprehensible comprehensible without losing it completely."

"Man hat Arbeitskräfte gerufen, und es kamen Menschen."

"Basically America (the USA) is not a warmongering but simply a commercial society: war as the continuation of business by other means."

"THANATOS AND EROS the American for that is: CASUAL SEX."

"The self knowledge that gradually or abruptly alienates a person from his previous life."

"The dead are difficult because they´ve never known the people I´m involved with today"

"There are moments when her voice is all he needs."

"Life is boring. I have experiences now only when I am writing."

"If on some occasion I happen to read something in it — because, for instance, I need to know a date — I am always disconcerted to find that two or five years ago I came to exactly the same conclusion, only to forget it because I had not succeeded in living up to it; in fact, I had tenaciously been doing the very opposite."