The Argonauts

That’s what we both hate about fiction, or at least crappy fiction—it purports to provide occasions for thinking through complex issues, but really it has predetermined the positions, stuffed a narrative full of false choices, and hooked you on them, rendering you less able to see out, to get out.

But really justice has no coordinates, no teleology.

I think my mother is beautiful. But her negative feelings about her body can generate a force field that repels any appreciation of it.

The self without sympathetic attachments is either a fiction or a lunatic…. [Yet] dependence is scorned even in intimate relationships, as though dependence were incompatible with self-reliance rather than the only thing that makes it possible.

Winnicott notably describes “the primitive agonies” not as lacks or voids, but as substantives: “fruits.”

I find it irresistibly interesting when people are cathected onto their bad style rather than simply oblivious to it (a description that may apply to us all; I sense the risk increases with age).

But whatever I am, or have since become, I know now that slipperiness isn’t all of it. I know now that a studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The ple

They seemed to make a fetish of the unsaid, rather than simply letting it be contained in the sayable.

Rather, it is the shared, crushing understanding of what it means to live in a patriarchy.