"Children usually do not blame themselves for getting lost."

"My different personalities leave me in peace now."

"Things are not as we would like them to be. There is only one way to deal with it, namely to try and be all right oneself."

"I am glad that I do not have any children."

"How can one know anything at all about people?"

"Everything becomes so problematic because of basic faults: from a discontent with myself."

"Who promised you that only for joy were you brought to this earth?"

"I was always looking outside myself for strength and confidence but it comes from within. It is there all the time."

"It is only when parental feelings are ineffective or too ambivalent or when the mother's emotions are temporarily engaged elsewhere that children feel lost."

"We are aware only of the empty space in the forest, which only yesterday was filled with trees."

"Papa always makes it clear that he would like to know me as much more rational and lucid than the girls and women he gets to know during his analytic hours."

"Papa continually emphasizes how much remains unexplained. With the other psychoanalytic writers, everything is always so known and fixed."

"A first visit to a madhouse is always a shock."

"Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training."

"How one can live without being able to judge oneself, criticize what one has accomplished, and still enjoy what one does, is unimaginable to me."

"If I have a stupid day, everything looks wrong to me."

"We live trapped, between the churned-up and examined past and a future that waits for our work."

"Why do we go around acting as though everything was friendship and reliability when basically everything everywhere is full of sudden hate and ugliness?"

"We are imprisoned in the realm of life, like a sailor on his tiny boat, on an infinite ocean."

"What I have always wanted for myself is much more primitive. It is probably nothing more than the affection of the people with whom I am in contact, and their good opinion of me."

"If some longing goes unmet, don't be astonished. We call that Life."