Katie Kitamura Quotes

I'm always interested in a character who does something and doesn't understand why they've done it.

I think most people are inherently interested in how their brain works, in what makes them tick.

Everyone knows nowadays that people 'have complexes'. What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us.

This is another major feature of thought: Thought doesn't know it is doing something and then it struggles against it is doing. It doesn't want to know that it is doing it.

I think I'm very interested in people, in the way our minds work and how we navigate through the experience that is life. Very interested in people's struggles and their choices and their regrets and joys. I'm very interested in the human animal.

The point of psychoanalysis is to really understand the roots of your behavior. Understand why you are doing the things you're doing - and connect your unconscious to your conscious.

Man is not what he thinks he is, he is what he hides.

I have always been fascinated by the human mind, conscious and unconscious - that is what writing and reading is about, too. The why of your life and the why of your choices and the what has happened that you know and the what that you don't know is really riveting, and psychoanalysts share my wonder at how it all unfolds.

Figuring out why people who choose not to do something don't in fact do it is like attempting to interview the elves who live inside your refrigerator but come out only when the light is off.

We often do not know ourselves the grounds On which we act, though plain to others.

So complex is the human spirit that it can itself scarce discern the deep springs which impel it to action.

Ah! but the moods lie in his nature, my boy, just as much as his reflections did, and more. A man can never do anything at variance with his own nature. He carries within him the germ of his most exceptional action; and if we wise people make eminent fools of ourselves on any particular occasion, we must endure the legitimate conclusion that we carry a few grains of folly to our ounce of wisdom.

I think, over the course of one's lifetime, there are always certain core elements that are intriguing to you, and you take different looks as you get older, but it's something you keep coming back to. I've always been interested in the relationship between vulnerability and control. That's something that's a big thing for people, whoever they are, no matter how old you are. I think at different times, you're more aware than others.

While people argue with one another about the specifics of Freud's work and blame him for the prejudices of his time, they overlook the fundamental truth of his writing, his grand humility: that we frequently do not know our own motivations in life and are prisoners to what we cannot understand. We can recognize only a small fragment of our own, and an even smaller fragment of anyone else's, impetus.

Don't give me that look. I'm not trying to find out who you are. I don't care who you are. I just want to know why it is you are the way you are.

There are not anywhere else so many ways of trickery, so many false lights, so many veils, so many guises, so many illusive deceits, as are practiced in every man's conscience in respect to his motives, thoughts, feelings, conduct, and character.

O Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider that we not only carry each a future Ghost within him; but are, in very deed, Ghosts!

In each of us there is another whom we do not know.

Sometimes it is painful to be oneself; at other times it seems impossible to escape oneself.

The key to every man is his thought.

I am infinitely strange to myself.

Except that a human being is both the public and the private. We are both, private and public in the same person.

You’re a human, you should understand self-obsession.

But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33)

The her that lived in her looked out through her eyes, through my eyes, and at the me that lives in me.