We flashed our feathers when the feathers were fit to be flashed, and now, in drearier days, many stay indoors.
Some people who think they are in unhappy marriages are just in unhappy bodies.
You can be creative and not addictive, or addictive and not creative. Most addicted people do not produce anything of remarkable note.
I feel that the world needs writers. We need to know what’s really going on.
They want to play at being mothers. So let them. Expressing tenderness in their own way will not prevent girls from enjoying a successful career in the future; indeed, the ability to nurture is as valuable a skill in the workplace as the ability to lead.
There is cruelty in divorce. There is cruelty in forced or unfortunate marriage. We will continue to cry at weddings because we know how bittersweet, how fragile is the truth. We will always need legal divorce just as an emergency escape hatch is crucial in every submarine. No sense, however, in denying that after every divorce someone will be running like a cat, tin cans tied to its tail: spooked and slowed down.
I have two writer daughters, and a psychoanalyst daughter, and a lawyer daughter, and they wish we didn’t write, I’m sure, but we write. If we were a painting family, we would paint.
We were not always 70, or rather our 70 is an accumulation of all the other ways we were. Our 5-year-old selves became our 10-year-old selves, and so on and on; and if we unpack our selves, the full album appears. Every moment is a part of the following moment, and we are all a continuum.
Friendship needs both confidences and confidence in the other’s outstretched hand.
I have always been fascinated by the human mind, conscious and unconscious – that is what writing and reading is about, too. The why of your life and the why of your choices and the what has happened that you know and the what that you don’t know is really riveting, and psychoanalysts share my wonder at how it all unfolds.
Decay is quiet but ghastly, explosion is dramatic and dreadful. There’s not much to choose between the two of them in reality, and most of our lives have sufficient of both.
If I were planning to be stranded on a desert island, I wouldn’t take Freud’s books with me, because I’ve already read them all.
