Sam Keen Quotes

You really know a person when you sleep so near to them, or when you eat with them.

The mystery isn't in the technique, it's in each of us.

If you have a harem of 40 women, you never get to know any of them very well.

Part of the fun of life is interacting with people and not knowing what the truth is inside. Letting them reveal that to you is what binds you to people.

Beyond the beauty, the sex, the titillation, the surface, there is a human being. And that has to emerge.

I actually think it's harder to play vulnerability, because you're having to delve deeper into portions of your own psyche, what it is that makes you human.

Even The Impostors, as silly as it is, is a very intimate film, in a way.

The mystery at the center of 'Burial Rites' is not who killed whom on the night of March 13, 1828. It is the mystery each of us encounters: Can we every truly know another? Can we ever truly know ourselves?

What interests me most are the emotional lives of the people. If I don't have that, it's not worth doing, frankly.

I was always very proud of myself that I could wrest emotion from a doll or a puppet. It never occurred to me that I could find real emotion in a person.

Sometimes, we only get to know someone as one aspect of who they are. Then you start peeling back the layers and understanding more and more about who they are - their vulnerabilities, their fears, their joys, all those other words that equal humanity.

One of the illusions that we live by is that we can really know anybody else, and we're often surprised by traits in people that we thought we knew very well. The struggle to overcome loneliness, which is sort of our universal burden, leads us to leap to conclusions about who other people are.

We don't fall in love with perfect people. We fall in love with complex ones.

To know me is to love me. This cliche is popular for a reason, because most of us, I imagine, believe deep in our hearts that if anyone truly got to know us, they'd truly get to love us - or at least know why we're the way we are. The problem in life, maybe the central problem, is that so few people ever seem to have sufficient curiosity to do the job on us that we know we deserve.

I simply value Arthur Capel friendship. And even so, he knows very little about me.

And maybe it is only by finding yourself that you can feel the true intensity of becoming close to another person.

Love is active penetration of the other person, in which my desire to know is stilled by union. In the act of fusion I know you, I know myself, I know everybody - and I "know" nothing.

Strangers are endearing because you don’t know them yet.

No one has ever known me as clearly as you. No one has ever shown me that love allows everything. Not pretty or safe or easy but something I never knew. Love within reason, that isn't love and I learned that from you.

A stranger is shot in the street, you hardly move to help. But if, half an hour before, you spent just ten minutes with the fellow and knew a little about him and his family, you might just jump in front of his killer and try to stop it. Really knowing is good. Not knowing, or refusing to know is bad, or amoral, at least. You can’t act if you don’t know.

Identification is not the same as knowing someone through and through.

You've got to know someone pretty well to hate them.

The messiness [in my books] is nothing like an Atwood novel. For me, the deeper subjects are secrets versus intimacy, and how both beget safety but also threaten it. And there is a lot for me about loss, too.

I'm like a book you have to read. A book can't read itself to you. It doesn't even know what it's about. I don't know what I'm about.