I don’t know how to tell you what I feel. I live in a perpetual expectancy. You come and the time slips away in a dream. It is only when you go that I realize completely your presence. And then it is too late. You numb me. - Henry Miller from a letter to Anaïs Nin (via theclassicsreader)

I stressed the love situation and I still think I was right. Because its very disturbing to speak about love. People think that either you are a little bit ethereal or that you are not aware that there are struggles and hate and violence in the world and so on. Or that you are a little bit religious or something like that. Love has become the modern obscenity, it’s more obscene than sex, you can talk about sex and violence and that’s OK; everybody knows that exists, but love is too strange. - Julia Kristeva, The Portable Kristeva  (via pigmenting)

Ernest Jones, had an idea that, interestingly, sort of disappeared. He believed that everybody’s deepest fear was loss of desire, what he called aphanisis. For him that’s the thing we’re most acutely anxious about, having no desire. People now might call it depression, but it wouldn’t be the right word for it, because he’s talking about a very powerful anxiety of living in a world in which there’s nothing and nobody one wants. But it can be extremely difficult to know what you want, especially if you live in a consumer, capitalist culture which is phobic of frustration—where the moment you feel a glimmer of frustration, there’s something available to meet it. Now, shopping and eating and sex may not be what you’re wanting, but in order to find that out you have to have a conversation with somebody. You can’t sit in a room by yourself like Rodin’s Thinker. Because in your mind, you’re mad. But in conversation you have the chance of not being. Your mind by itself is full of unmediated anxieties and conflicts. In conversation things can be metabolized and digested through somebody else—I say something to you and you can give it back to me in different forms—whereas you’ll notice that your own mind is very often extremely repetitive. It is very difficult to surprise oneself in one’s own mind. The vocabulary of one’s self-criticism is so impoverished and clichéd. We are at our most stupid in our self-hatred. - Adam Phillips in the interview with Paul Holdengräber
(via finita–la–commedia)