Quotes from Lying on the Couch

“Only the wounded healer can truly heal. (97)”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from Lying on the Couch

“What? 'Borderline patients play games'? That what you said? Ernest, you'll never be a real therapist if you think like that. That's exactly what I meant earlier when I talked about the dangers of diagnosis. There are borderlines and there are borderlines. Labels do violence to people. You can't treat the label; you have to treat the person behind the label. (17)”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from Lying on the Couch

“He had learned long ago that, in general, the easier it was for anxious patients to reach him, the less likely they were to call. (107)”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from Lying on the Couch

“Nonetheless, the past is part of your present consciousness—it forms the spectacles through which you experience the present.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from Lying on the Couch

“چطور می توان مردی را به چنگ آورد؟
سئله ساده ایه، فقط باید به چشمان یک مرد خیره شد و چند ثانیه صبر کرد. همین!”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from Lying on the Couch

“این رویاها نظر فروید را در این باره که عملکرد اولیه رویاها حفظ خواب است اثبات می کرد. در این نمونه، فکر وحشتناک سوزاندن جسد به چیزی ملایم تر و دلپذیرتر تبدیل شده است: چهره دوست داشتنی و جذاب خرس آتش نشان. ولی این رویاها تنها تا حدودی موفق بود: هرچند باعث شده بود که ارنست خوابش را ادامه دهد اضطراب مرگ کل رویایش را در ترس فروبرد.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from Lying on the Couch

“گذشته بخشی از شرایط امروزته. گذشته برات عینکی درست می کنه که باهاش زمان حال رو تجربه می کنی.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from Lying on the Couch

“یه مرد خوش قیافه فقیر با 1دلار و 50سنت برات یه کاپوچینو می خره.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from Lying on the Couch

“Seymour a Ernest: "A veces el destino nos coloca en una posición dónde lo correcto resulta equivocado”
― Irvin D. Yalom, quote from Lying on the Couch

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“Studentdom, he felt, must pass its own Examinations and define its own Commencement--a slow, most painful process, made the more anguishing by bloody intelligences like the Bonifacists of Siegfrieder College. Yet however it seemed at times that men got nowhere, but only repeated class by class the mistakes of their predecessors, two crucial facts about them were at once their hope and the limitation of their possibility, so he believed. One was their historicity: the campus was young, the student race even younger, and by contrast with the whole of past time, the great collegiate cultures had been born only yesterday. The other had to do with comparative cyclology, a field of systematic speculation he could not review for me just then, but whose present relevance lay in the correspondency he held to obtain between the life-history of individuals and the history of studentdom in general. As the embryologists maintained that ontogeny repeats phylogeny, so, Max claimed, the race itself--and on a smaller scale, West-Campus culture--followed demonstrably--in capital letters, as it were, or slow motion--the life-pattern of its least new freshman. This was the basis of Spielman's Law--ontogeny repeats cosmogeny--and there was much more to it and to the science of cyclology whereof it was first principle. The important thing for now was that, by his calculations, West-Campus as a whole was in mid-adolescence...
'Look how we been acting,' he invited me, referring to intercollegiate political squabbles; 'the colleges are spoilt kids, and the whole University a mindless baby, ja? Okay: so weren't we all once, Enos Enoch too? And we got to admit that the University's a precocious kid. If the history of life on campus hadn't been so childish, we couldn't hope it'll reach maturity.' Studentdom had passed already, he asserted, from a disorganized, pre-literate infancy (of which Croaker was a modern representative, nothing ever being entirely lost) through a rather brilliant early childhood ('...ancient Lykeion, Remus, T'ang...') which formed its basic and somewhat contradictory character; it had undergone a period of naive general faith in parental authority (by which he meant early Founderism) and survived critical spells of disillusionment, skepticism, rationalism, willfulness, self-criticism, violence, disorientation, despair, and the like--all characteristic of pre-adolescence and adolescence, at least in their West-Campus form. I even recognized some of those stages in my own recent past; indeed, Max's description of the present state of West-Campus studentdom reminded me uncomfortably of my behavior in the Lady-Creamhair period: capricious, at odds with itself, perverse, hard to live with. Its schisms, as manifested in the Quiet Riot, had been aggravated and rendered dangerous by the access of unwonted power--as when, in the space of a few semesters, a boy finds himself suddenly muscular, deep-voiced, aware of his failings, proud of his strengths, capable of truly potent love and hatred--and on his own. What hope there was that such an adolescent would reach maturity (not to say Commencement) without destroying himself was precisely the hope of the University.”
― John Barth, quote from Giles Goat-Boy

“I really was never any more than what I was -a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze.”
― Bob Dylan, quote from Chronicles, Volume One

“Lord, grant us rest tonight, and if we must be wakeful, cheerful.”
― Robert Bolt, quote from A Man for All Seasons

“Life isn't, and has never been, a 2-0 home victory after a fish and chip lunch.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from Fever Pitch

“Perhaps love is essential because it's unnecessary.”
― Julian Barnes, quote from A History of the World in 10½ Chapters

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