Quotessence
Home / Authors / Adam Phillips Books
Adam Phillips

Adam Phillips Books

Writer

In Writing

A source page for quotes linked to Adam Phillips.

0 quotes

Monogamy

A source page for quotes linked to Adam Phillips.

0 quotes

Going sane

A source page for quotes linked to Adam Phillips.

0 quotes

Darwin's Worms

A source page for quotes linked to Adam Phillips.

0 quotes

On Balance

A source page for quotes linked to Adam Phillips.

0 quotes

On Flirtation

A source page for quotes linked to Adam Phillips.

0 quotes

Related Quotes

“It is as if, oddly, you were waiting for someone but you didn’t know who they were until they arrived. Whether or not you were aware that there was something missing in your life, you will be when you meet the person you want. What psychoanalysis will add to this love story is that the person you fall in love with really is the man or woman of your dreams; that you have dreamed them up before you met them; not out of nothing — nothing comes of nothing — but out of prior experience, both real and wished for. You recognize them with such certainty because you already, in a certain sense, know them; and because you have quite literally been expecting them, you feel as though you have known them for ever, and yet, at the same time, they are quite foreign to you. They are familiar foreign bodies.”

LoveDreamDesireFamiliar
Book:Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life
Create image

“[attention seeking] is a way of wanting something without knowing what it is. A social ability, an appeal to others to help us with our wanting. To be and make others comfortable with our attention-seeking, we transform it into art, or success, or likable public snippets of our lives. If we were to take these gestures in the literal sense, maybe all we’re trying to communicate is that we want to be cared for.”

ArtAttentionAttention Seeking
Author:Adam Phillips
Create image

“In Darwin's writing people, as animals, may be unhappy, but they are doing what they cannot help do; in Freud's account people are equally driven, but their unhappiness shows they are divided against themselves. They always seem to want more than, or something other than, their mere existence and the reproduction of their genetic inheritance. As though our nature is to demand of nature more than it can give. There is a fantasy life that is a theatre of excess.”

FantasyHuman NatureFreudDarwin
Book:Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories
Create image

“However much you have been wanting and hoping and dreaming of meeting the person of your dreams, it is only when you meet them that you will start missing them. It seems that the presence of an object is required to make its absence felt (or to make the absence of something felt). A kind of longing may have preceded their arrival, but you have to meet in order to feel the full force of your frustration in their absence.”

WantLovePsychologyLongingAbsenceFrustrationMissing Someone
Book:Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life
Create image

“If you want to be with somebody who gets you, you prefer collusion to desire, safety to excitement (sometimes good things to prefer but not always the things most wanted). The wish to be understood may be our most vengeful demand, may be the way we hang on, as adults, to the grudge against our mothers; the way we never let our mothers of the hook for their not meeting our every need. Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be, among many other things our most violent form of nostalgia.”

UnderstandingNostalgiaMothers
Book:Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life
Create image

“So there is something perhaps more difficult to conceive of, sometimes born of resignation and sometimes not- a life in which not getting it is the point and not the problem; in which the project is to learn how not to ride the bicycle, how not to understand the poem. Or to put it the other way round, this would be a life in which getting it – the will to get it, the ambition to get it – was the problem; in which wanting to be an accomplice didn’t take precedence over making up one’s mind.”

BicycleGetting It
Book:Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life
Create image

“The whole notion of sanity may be an attempt to medicalize morality - to speak of the good in the language of health: to make us more accurate, more scientific in our wanting - but by the same token it becomes a form of moral blackmail. It is as if to say: if these are not valued - if these forms of wanting and feeling and speaking and doing - are not cultivated and encouraged and rewarded in the child, then the child will be mad.”

IfsMayChildrenWholeFeelingsFormSpeakLanguageMoralMoralityMadNotionSanityAccurateTokensBlackmail
Book:Going sane
Create image

“Sanity, as the project of keeping ourselves recognizably human, therefore has to limit the range of human experience. To keep faith with recognition we have to stay recognizable. Sanity, in other words, becomes a pressing preoccupation as soon as we recognize the importance of recognition. When we define ourselves by what we can recognize, by what we can comprehend- rather than, say, by what we can describe- we are continually under threat from what we are unwilling and/or unable to see. We are tyrannized by our blind spots, and by whatever it is about ourselves that we find unacceptable.”

HumansLimitsProjectsImportanceBlindThreatSpotsRecognitionRangeSanityHuman ExperienceUnwillingPreoccupationKeep The FaithBlind Spots
Book:Going sane
Create image

“We have been taught to wish for it, but the wish to be understood may be our most vengeful demand, may be the way we hang on, as adults , to our grudge against our mothers; the way we never let our mothers off the hook for their not meeting our every need. Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be our most violent form of nostalgia.”

WayWantNeedsMayFormMotherWishUnderstandingPsychologyDemandUnderstoodAdultsMeetingsNostalgiaViolentHookVengeanceGrudgeVengeful
Author:Adam Phillips
Create image