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Famous Eva Illouz Quotes

“Never really either private or public, the modern self establishes its value through processes that are at once psychological and sociological, private and public, emotional and ritualistic. Clearly, then, in modern erotic/romantic relationships what is at stake are the self, its emotions, interiority, and, mostly, the way these are recognized (or fail to be recognized) by others.”

LoveSelfRomance Love
Book:Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation
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“Even the sociologists who conceded that modernity meant progress over ignorance, chronic poverty, and pervasive subjection still viewed it as an impoverishment of our capacities to tell beautiful stories and to live in richly textured cultures. Modernity sobered people up from the powerful but sweet delusions and illusions that had made the misery of their lives bearable. Devoid of these fantasies, we would lead our lives without commitment to higher principles and values, without the fervor and ecstasy of the sacred, without the heroism of saints, without the certainty and orderliness of divine commandments, but most of all without those fictions that console and beautify.”

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Book:Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation
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“Western culture has endlessly represented the ways in which love miraculously erupts in people’s lives, the mythical moment in which one knows someone is destined to us; the feverish waiting for a phone call or an email, the thrill that runs our spine at the mere thought of him or her. To be in love is to become an adept of Plato, to see through a person an Idea, perfect and complete.2 Endless novels, poems, or movies teach us the art of becoming Plato’s disciples, loving the perfection manifested by the beloved. Yet, a culture that has so much to say about love is far more silent on the no-less-mysterious moment when we avoid falling in love, where we fall out of love, when the one who kept us awake at night now leaves us indifferent, when we hurry away from those who excited us a few months or even a few hours ago. This silence is all the more puzzling as the number of relationships that dissolve soon after their beginning or at some point down along their emotional line is staggering.Perhaps our culture does not know how to represent or think about this because we live in and through stories and dramas, and “unloving” is not a plot with a clear structure. More often than not it does not start with an inaugural moment, a revelation. On the contrary, some relationships fade or evaporate before or soon after they properly started, while others end with slow and incomprehensible death.”

BreakupRomantic LoveEnd Of LoveUnloving
Book:El fin del amor: Una sociología de las relaciones negativas
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“This is reminiscent of the words by the poet Theodore Roethke, quoted by psychologist Timothy Wilson: “[S]elf-contemplation is a curse/ That makes an old confusion worse.”112 Eugene is waiting for an emotional self-revelation which he cannot achieve through rational introspection because the self is not a “hard,” fixed, knowable entity with clear edges, and with content. The social self is in fact a pragmatic entity, ongoingly shaped by circumstances and others' actions. In engaging in introspection, we try to discover fixed needs or wants, but these needs or wants are being shaped in response to situations. For this reason, introspection interferes with the capacity to feel strong and unmitigated emotions, activated through non-rational cognitive circuits.”

IntrospectionSelf Contemplation
Book:Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation
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