Oedipal Quotes & Sayings

He was calmly eating his soup, laughing with pleasant good-humour, as if he had come all the way to Calais for the express purpose of enjoying supper at this filthy inn, in the company of his arch-enemy. — Emmuska Orczy

my parents Oedipal fakers — Lidia Yuknavitch

In our culture, the Oedipal drama succeeds in making us assume either a male or female sexual position. Certainly this is an ancient construct that's rapidly coming apart. — John Maus

In fact, the anti-Muslim stance of much of Hindu nationalism can be construed as partly a displaced hostility against the colonial power which could not be expressed directly because of the new legitimacy created within Hinduism for this power. Such a dynamic would seem to roughly duplicate the displacement of Oedipal hostilities in the authoritarian personality. — Ashis Nandy

You are a gift to life. Share your bounty. — Amy Leigh Mercree

I don't admire Freud as much as some people do. Imagine Shakespeare being aware of the Oedipal complex when he wrote Hamlet. It would have been a disaster. — Nathalie Sarraute

Sweet wine pours from broken pitchers. Wisdom flows from broken lives." My — Joy Ohagwu

The new companies often put the old ones out of business; the young were forever eating the old. The whole of the Valley was a speeded-up Oedipal drama. In this drama technology played a very clear role. It was the murder weapon. — Michael Lewis

Fury ... sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal ... drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths — Salman Rushdie

It is said Somerset Maugham traveled the world with a notebook to learn the essence of life and Kafka sat in a room for the same objective. Yet Kafka came out with a better world-view. — U.R. Ananthamurthy

They, like me, like all of us, had, once upon a time, in a past so far away it seemed like heaven, caught by chance a glimpse of an inner essence, only to forget what it was. It was this lost memory that pained us, reduced us to ruins, though still we struggled to be ourselves. — Orhan Pamuk

The thing about books is, there are quite a number you don't have to read. — Donald Barthelme

The old cowboy doffs his hat and says, "Much obliged," as an expression of gratitude. I'm obligated to you, he is saying. The words imply humility: that I cannot get along by myself. They imply reliance: that I need the people around me, that I need God. They imply value: that I recognize the cost involved in the giving. And the words imply gladness: that my life has been filled with the joy that comes when human beings connect in gracious ways. That's — Gordon MacDonald

The other that will guide you and itself through this dissolution is a rhythm, text, music, and within language, a text. But what is the connection that holds you both together? Counter-desire, the negative of desire, inside-out desire, capable of questioning (or provoking) its own infinite quest. Romantic, filial, adolescent, exclusive, blind and Oedipal: it is all that, but for others. It returns to where you are, both of you, disappointed, irritated, ambitious, in love with history, critical, on the edge and even in the midst of its own identity crisis; a crisis of enunciation and of the interdependence of its movements, an instinctual drive that descends in waves, tearing apart the symbolic thesis. — Julia Kristeva

I have found people on both sides of the aisle, white and black, that'll give you the shirt off their back. And I've also found people that won't give you a piece of bread if you're starving to death. — Al Green

In the modern Oedipal story, it's the mother who kills the father and then takes the son. — Chuck Palahniuk

The Jackson gaffe, with its Oedipal violence ("I want to cut his nuts out"), is especially poignant because it goes to the heart of a generational conflict in the black community, concerning what we will say in public and what we say in private. For it has been a point of honor, among the civil rights generation, that any criticism or negative analysis of our community, expressed, as they often are by white politicians, without context, without real empathy or understanding, should not be repeated by a black politician when the white community is listening, even if (especially if) the criticism happens to be true (more than half of all black American children live in single-parent households). — Zadie Smith

But now the problem of the causa-sui project of the genius. In the normal Oedipal project the person internalizes the parents and the superego they embody, that is, the culture at large. But the genius cannot do this because his project is unique; it cannot be filled up by the parents or the culture. It is created specifically by a renunciation of the parents, a renunciation of what they represent and even of their own concrete persons-at least in fantasy-as there doesn't seem to be anything in them that has caused the genius. Here we see whence the genius gets his extra burden of guilt: he has renounced the father both spiritually and physically. This act gives him extra anxiety because now he is vulnerable in his turn, as he has no one to stand on. He is alone in his freedom. Guilt is a function of fear, as Rank said. — Ernest Becker

Only when we stop holding others accountable for all of our troubles can we truly be free. — Tian Dayton

The summer ends and we wonder who we are And there you go, my friends, with your boxes in your car And today I passed the high school, the river, the maple tree I passed the farms that made it Through the last days of the century And I knew that I was going to learn again Again, in this less hazy light I saw the fields beyond the fields The fields beyond the field — Dar Williams

Obviously, we will respond to the concerns of any member of Congress. The government of Uzbekistan has been a good partner in the war on terrorism. — Brian Whitman

Life is fury, he'd thought. Fury - sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal - drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. Out of furia comes creation, inspiration, originality, passion, but also violence, pain, pure unafraid destruction, the giving and receiving of blows from which we never recover. The Furies pursue us; Shiva dances his furious dance to create and also to destroy. But never mind about gods! Sara ranting at him represented the human spirit in its purest, least socialized form. This is what we are, what we civilize ourselves to disguise - the terrifying human animal in us, the exalted, transcendent, self-destructive, untramelled lord of creation. — Salman Rushdie

He's as bad as my mother. Maybe worse. He's a market-research consultant. He studies people's facial expressions to see how they feel about commercials and products. He used to be a psychologist but he makes more money helping big corporations dupe the public. The worst part is he can look at your face and say 'Your upper lip just twitched! Anger! You're angry. Don't try to hide it from me, young man. Why does it make you angry when I say those pants make you look like a girl? Doe you have something against girls? Perhaps some unresolved Oedipal feelings? — Natalie Standiford

The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity. — Donna J. Haraway

Make my happiness , i will make yours . let no man prevent me , i have her and i will keep her. — Charlotte Bronte

Luckily, I am writing a memoir and not a work of fiction, and therefore I do not have to account for my grandmother's unpleasing character and look for the Oedipal fixation or the traumatic experience which would give her that clinical authenticity that is nowadays so desirable in portraiture. — Mary McCarthy

Nothing is quite so horrifying and paralyzing as to win the Oedipal struggle and to be awarded your mother as the prize. — Frank Pittman

I wasn't convinced a shop girl would know the word 'Oedipal. — Shirley Hazzard

I told him about the Oedipal thing, about my father leaving when I was very young so I knew how to pine for men, but not how to love them. So he said, 'You'd probably would have been perfect for somebody in World War Two. You'd meet him and then he would get shipped overseas.' And I said, 'Maybe on our date I could drop you off and you could enlist,' and he said he would just got out and rent a uniform. So he was very funny. — Carrie Fisher

A food truce, the picnic suspension of oedipal feeling that permits the generations to love each other at family reunions. — Karen Russell

The boys he met at Annandale only understood one kind of woman. They needed to be coddled and cooed over as their own mothers had done their whole lives. — Thomm Quackenbush

For in a civilization which has lost the meaning of life, the most important thing a Christian can do is to live, and life, understood from the point of view of faith, has an extraordinary explosive force. — Jacques Ellul

This kind of pragmatism has become a hallmark of our psychological culture. In the mid-1990s, I described how it was commonplace for people to "cycle through" different ideas of the human mind as (to name only a few images) mechanism, spirit, chemistry, and vessel for the soul.14 These days, the cycling through intensifies. We are in much more direct contact with the machine side of mind. People are fitted with a computer chip to help with Parkinson's. They learn to see their minds as program and hardware. They take antidepressants prescribed by their psychotherapists, confident that the biochemical and oedipal self can be treated in one room. They look for signs of emotion in a brain scan. Old jokes about couples needing "chemistry" turn out not to be jokes at all. — Sherry Turkle

During the prayers of the day, there was one less "amen". — Phindiwe Nkosi

A room containing Philip Roth, I have noticed, begins hilariously to whirl and pulse with a mix of rebelliousness and constriction that I take to be Oedipal. — John Updike

The greatness of man lies in his decision to be stronger than his condition. — Albert Camus

A diet counselor once told me that all overweight people are angry with their mothers and channel their frustrations into overeating. So I guess that means all thin people are happy, calm, and have resolved their Oedipal entanglements. — Wendy Wasserstein