“The future is a fantasy that shapes our present.”

“Psychoanalysts are fond of pointing out that the past is alive in the present. But the future is alive in the present too. The future is not some place we're going to, but an idea in our mind now. It is something we're creating, that in turn creates us. The future is a fantasy that shapes our present.”

― Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves 

Stephen Grosz - Quotes

“Closure is just as delusive-it is the false hope that we can deaden our living grief.”
― Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves

“Being present, whether with children, with friends, or even with oneself, is hard work. But isn't this attentiveness -- the feeling that someone is trying to think about us -- something we want more than praise?”
― Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves

“It is less painful, it turns out, to feel betrayed than to feel forgotten.”
― Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves

“In trying so hard to be different from our parents, we're actually doing much the same thing -- doling out empty praise the way an earlier generation doled out thoughtless criticism. If we do it to avoid thinking about our child and her world, then praise, just like criticism, is ultimately expressing our indifference.”
― Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves

“As he spoke, I had the mental image of a small boy switching on the nightlight, not because he wants to be able to find his parents during the night, but because he fears his parents will forget him - lose him - in the dark.”
― Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves

“For a minute, the fantasy frightened her, but ultimately, this fear saved her from feeling alone.”
― Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves

“i knew tht we all have the capacity to act in self-destructive ways, nevertheless i had a kind of faith that the desire to live was more powerful. now, instead, i felt its fragility. peter's suicide made me feel that the battle between the forces of life and death was far more evenly pitched.”
― Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves

“He seemed never to have acquired a skill that we all need: the ability to make another person worry about us.”
― Stephen Grosz

“my breakdown was like a furnace and what was burned away was any belief in my own feelings”
― Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves

The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves

Buy The Examined Life here.

This book is about learning to live.

In simple stories of encounter between a psychoanalyst and his patients, The Examined Life reveals how the art of insight can illuminate the most complicated, confounding and human of experiences.

These are stories about our everyday lives: they are about the people we love and the lies that we tell; the changes we bear, and the grief. Ultimately, they show us not only how we lose ourselves but how we might find ourselves too.

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