the family, whatever else it is, is an education in wanting, and so also in frustration; because the family more or less meets our needs and wants, it is, by the same token, where we learn about frustration. Because anyone who can satisfy us, anyone who can make us feel better, is going to be the same person who frustrates us and can make us feel

Theories of human nature, after all, can only be stories about what people are deemed to need and want.

Tragedy is what is created by people who refuse to give up.

We are asking what we are going to have to lose to gain what we think we want.

belief without curiosity is one of the forms the death instinct takes. Belief without curiosity is stultifying. And that may be its point.

When our preferred versions of ourselves are not an inspiration, they are a tyranny (a tyranny with which we can humiliate ourselves).

Just as our shame keeps us in an intimate relationship with our shamers, exclusion tends to keep us in touch with our excluders.

the study of literature, we might say, is always broaching this conflict between the aliveness and deathliness, or deadliness, of language.

Over-decisiveness here – a simulated sense of conviction – is a version of familiarization; when I am being over-decisive I am saying to myself and others, ‘I know what I think and I know what I’m doing’;