Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Thierry Bokanowski

Quote by Thierry Bokanowski

“,,The danger that arises to someone when a love object is “lost”—through death, or betrayal, or disappointment—is not primarily the loss of that particular person or institution or ideal; the danger is to the person’s sense of himself, which depends on his sense of an ongoing internal attachment to his loved object.”

Quote by Thierry Bokanowski

Book:On Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia"
Create image

Work

On Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia"

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Thierry Bokanowski

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Thierry Bokanowski. more

You May Also Like

“All that day and all that night there sat an awful gladness in my heart,—nay, blame me not if I see the world thus darkly through the Veil,—and my soul whispers ever to me saying, “Not dead, not dead, but escaped; not bond, but free.” No bitter meanness now shall sicken his baby heart till it die a living death, no taunt shall madden his happy boyhood. Fool that I was to think or wish that this little soul should grow choked and deformed within the Veil! I might have known that yonder deep unworldly look that ever and anon floated past his eyes was peering far beyond this narrow Now. In the poise of his little curl-crowned head did there not sit all that wild pride of being which his father had hardly crushed in his own heart? For what, forsooth, shall a Negro want with pride amid the studied humiliations of fifty million fellows? Well sped, my boy, before the world had dubbed your ambition insolence, had held your ideals unattainable, and taught you to cringe and bow. Better far this nameless void that stops my life than a sea of sorrow for you.”

DeathFreedomLossGriefRacismPrejudiceMourningAfrican AmericansBlacksDeath Of A Child
Book:The Souls of Black Folk
Create image

“Father! Father!' the boy called repeatedly, but the man remained lifeless in his arms. The horrified boy felt hopeless, deprived of any basis for understanding as to what had happened. Now he was left alone, without answers or any help, desperate to do something to help his father. Tierney didn’t know what to do. Confused and terrified, the boy cradled his father’s limp body in his arms and wept bitterly.”

LossFantasyTragedyScience FictionTime Travel
Book:The Rings of Hesaurun
Create image

“Somewhere between brute silence and last Sunday's Thirteen hundred thousand sermons; Somewhere between Calvin on Christ (God help us!) and the lizards; Somewhere between seeing and speaking, somewhere Between our soiled and greasy currency of words And the first star, the great moths fluttering About the ghosts of flowers, Lies the clear place where I, no longer I, Nevertheless remember Love's nightlong wisdom of the other shore; And, listening to the wind, remember too That other night, that first of widowhood, Sleepless, with death beside me in the dark. Mine, mine, all mine, mine inescapably! But I, no longer I, In this clear place between my thought and silence See all I had and long, anguish and joys, Glowing like gentians in the Alpine grass, Blue, unpossessed and open.”

LoveLossContemplation
Book:Island
Create image

“Cities can do this. Cast off their onetime identity and - while wearing the same (but now reconstructed) exterior-become something new. We as individuals can also change physical shape. We can lose weight and gain muscle, or go the other way and give in to flab. We can wear clothes that speak volumes about the images we want to present to the world. We can display our wealth, our poverty, our sense of confidence, our sense of self doubt. We can, like cities, change all the externals. But what we can never do is change the story that has made us what we are. It's a story completely dictated by the accumulation of life's manifold complexities- it's capacity for astonishment and horror, for sanguinity and hopelessness, for pellucid light and the most profound darkness. We are what has happened to us. And we carry everywhere all that has shaped us-all that we lacked, all that we wanted but never got, all that we got but never wanted, all that was found and lost.”

PainLossIdentitiyAcceptance Of GriefAcceptance Of Our Past
Book:The Moment
Create image

“Thoughts at a Café Table Between the Kazan and the Iron Gates Progress has now placed the whole of this landscape underwater. A traveller sitting at my old table on the quay at Orsova would have to peer at the scenery through a thick brass-hinged disc of glass; this would frame a prospect of murk and slime [...] Moving a couple of miles downstream, he would fumble his way on to the waterlogged island and among the drowned Turkish houses; or, upstream, flounder among the weeds and rubble choking Count Széchenyi's road and peer across the dark gulf at the vestiges of Trajan on the other side; and all round him, above and below, the dark abyss would yawn and the narrows where currents once rushed and cataracts shuddered from bank to bank and echoes zigzagged along the vertiginous clefts would be sunk in diluvian since. [...] He could toil many days up these cheerless soundings, for Rumania and Yugoslavia have built one of the world's biggest ferro-concrete dams and hydro-electric power plants across the Iron Gates. This has turned a hundred and thirty miles of the Danube into a vast pond which has swollen and blurred the course of the river beyond recognition. It has abolished cayons, turned beetling crags into mild hills and ascended the beautiful Cerna valley almost to the Baths of Hercules. Many thousands of the inhabitabnts of Orşova and the riparian hamlets had to be uprooted and transplanted elsewhere. The islanders of Ada Kaleh have been moved to another islet downstream and their old home has vanished under the still surface as though it has never been. Let us hope that the power generated by the dam has spread well-being on either bank and lit up Rumanian and Yugoslav towns brighter than ever before because, in everything but economics, the damage is irreparrable. [... M]yths, lost voices, history and hearsay have all been put to rout, leaving nothing but this valley of shadow. Goethe's advice, 'Bewahre Dich vor Räuber und Ritter und Gespenstergeschichten',* has been taken literally, and everything has fled. _____________ * Beware of the robber, the cavalier, and ghost stories.”

CultureNatureLossHistoryProgressDestructionVandalismHydro PowerUtilitarism
Book:Between the Woods and the Water
Create image