James Hillman, Excerpt from "We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy--And the World's Getting Worse"

     Psychologists are engaged in the business of consciousness. People come to see us about this or that problem, symptom, or trouble in order to become more conscious. We take things apart, that is, analyze problems, feelings, dreams so that they become more conscious.
     Now what is this consciousness? What actually goes on in becoming more conscious? What goes on in conversation? If you listened to a tape of an analysis hour, an hour of becoming conscious in therapy, you would hear a conversation. That’s all it is—conversation. You become more conversant with your dreams, about your relationships, your fears
and needs.
     Consciousness is really nothing more than maintaining conversation, and unconsciousness is really nothing more than letting things fall out of conversation, no longer talking about something—or what Freud called repression.
     Conversation isn’t easy. You know how hard it is in a family, what an art it is to keep a conversation going. You know the tortures of the family dinner table, how more and more is left unsaid. So, of course, Freud found repression mainly in the family. It’s a place where conversation often has a hard time.
     Or take a dinner party. Strike up a conversation and keep it flowing—not a monologue, not only opinions and sounding off, not only firing questions, but conversation as an exploration, a little risky adventure, a discovery, an interesting happening. Parties, doing lunch, and
7:30 A.M. breakfasts are terribly important in a city for keeping its conversation going, keeping the consciousness of the City at a certain intensity, moving its mind adventurously toward deeper discoveries.
     What doesn’t work, we also pretty well know: personalism—just talking out loud about what we feel. Complaints. Opinions. Information doesn’t work—simply reporting what’s new, where you’ve been, what you’ve heard. And lullabies don’t help either—singing charming little stories to prevent anything from entering the heart or the mind. And boosterism isn’t conversation either—broadcasting, self-advertising what we are doing, have done, going to do. You can’t converse with a sales pitch of positive preaching. All these kinds of talk have to be cured
in therapy; they interfere with conversation.
     So, not just any talk is conversation, not any talk raises consciousness. A subject can be talked to death, a person talked to sleep. Good conversation has an edge: it opens your eyes to something, quickens your ears. And good conversation reverberates: it keeps on talking in your mind later in the day; the next day, you find yourself still conversing with what was said. That reverberation afterwards is the very raising of consciousness; your mind’s been moved. You are at another level with your reflections.

--James Hillman, We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy--And the World's Getting Worse

Marcel Theroux, Excerpt from 'Strange Bodies'

"Johnson has the best phrase for it. In one of his letters, he writes that ‘in the deaths of those close to us, the continuity of being is lacerated’. The continuity of being. The human personality is not an object, it’s a process, a constant state of becoming, that depends on a web of interdependencies, binding us to one another with invisible filaments, to our time, to memories and possessions, and back to our changing selves. And even that image probably overstates the solidity and integrity of the human personality. Strip a person away from the relationships that constitute their identity, the friends, the loved ones, the familiar sounds, and the outcome is bound to be breakdown and madness."
--Marcel Theroux, Strange Bodies

Miscellaneous quotation

 "Until you’re about the age of twenty, you read everything, and you like it simply because you are reading it. Then between twenty and thirty you pick what you want, and you read the best, you read all the great works. After that you sit and wait for them to be written. But you know, the least known, the least famous writers, they are the better ones."
--Gabriel Garcia Marquez

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1973/01/the-yellow-trolley-car-in-barcelona-and-other-visions/

John Keats, "Ode on Melancholy"

No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist

       Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;

Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd

       By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;

               Make not your rosary of yew-berries,

       Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be

               Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl

A partner in your sorrow's mysteries;

       For shade to shade will come too drowsily,

               And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

But when the melancholy fit shall fall

       Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,

That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,

       And hides the green hill in an April shroud;

Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,

       Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,

               Or on the wealth of globed peonies;

Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,

       Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,

               And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;

       And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips

Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,

       Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:

Ay, in the very temple of Delight

       Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,

               Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue

       Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;

His soul shalt taste the sadness of her might,

               And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

--John Keats, "Ode on Melancholy"