Jill Alexander Essbaum Quotes

I do believe that dreams are interpretable. Analysis and praxis have taught me so.

At the midnight of our trouble,
there are signs in the moon and in the stars.
He will not say that he belongs to me,
and still I bend to wash his feet.

Only in the present tense is the subject married to its verb. The action - all action, past and future - comes at the end. At the very end, when there is nothing left to do but act.

Novelty's a cloth that wears thin at an alarming rate.

Jung said that beautiful women were sources of terror. That as a general rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment. Anna

She bought a pretzel from a vendor and

Let's get you one, Anna."
"A lover?"
Edith rolled her eyes. "No. A fucking houseplant. Yes, a lover." Edith smirked. "It'll cheer you up!

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A measure of narcissism is healthy. But out of balance, what was once appropriate self-confidence becomes grandiose, pathological, and destructive.

Is that not always the case? Given any two people in a relationship, one will always love more, the other less. Right?

Pain is the proof of life

On another she made chitchat with the cashier at the Coop. That was an absolute first. The checker offered a forced, availing smile in return.

Narcissism isn't vanity, Anna. We're all narcissists to a degree. A measure of narcissism is healthy. But out of balance, what was once appropriate self-confidence becomes grandiose, pathological, and destructive. You have little regard for those around you. You do what you will with a libertine's abandon. Boredom sets in. A bored woman is a dangerous woman.

Truth is told when it tells itself.

Is it possible to fall in love over a single look? Anna couldn't say. But at the behest of a glance tossed casually down upon her, she was made witness, victim, and slave to the culmination of all her mythologies.

The trouble with mistakes is that they rarely seem like mistakes when they are made.

It's a travesty when a woman wastes herself.

For ... if love is not infinite or eternal? Then I want nothing of it.

There's always a correspondence between one's dreams and one's wounds.

EVERY FEW WEEKS AND SOMETIMES MORE OFTEN THAN THAT, the Benzes would receive in the postbox affixed to the wall outside their front door a notice printed on a half-size sheet of white paper, bordered in a bold black line. They were death announcements. Ein Bestattungsanzeige. The postman delivered them along with the mail whenever a Dietlikon resident died. It was a small-town courtesy, not a typical Swiss practice.

Same seeks same; we search out the familiar.

Suggested they try the Glatt, an enormous American-style mall in Wallisellen, one town over from Dietlikon.

There are two basic groups of German verbs ... strong and weak. Weak verbs are regular verbs that follow typical rules. Strong verbs are irregular. They don't follow patterns. You deal with strong verbs on your own terms ... Like people, ... The strong ones stand out. The weak ones are the same.

The deepest sleep is meant only for children and perfect fools.

Synchronicity often masquerades as coincidence. As right-place-right-time-ness. As an and-then-suddenly kind of incident.

A cock wants a hole.

Shames the shadow of love she thought

I think it's important to let each thing you write teach you how to write it. You must listen to what you do. Let it be in control. I don't step in until I know what it demands of me.

Anna, I only know this: when it is your turn to die - my turn, anyone's - when it is time for you to let go of one life and reach out for another, you will be left with no choice but to hurl yourself willingly into the mother arms of transfiguration. It's not an end. It's a beginning.

Bored women join clubs and volunteer. Sad women have affairs.

I've never been nearly as alone as I always say I am

That it ought to be known I was born this way,
With indiscriminate tendencies.

Synchronicity is the external manifestation of an inner reality.

Then Anna and Archie took the number 10 tram from Sternen Oerlikon,

Analysis isn't pliers, and truth is not teeth: you can't pull it out by force. A mouth stays closes as long as it wants to. Truth is told when it tells itself.

Solitude was her anchor. A familiar misery, and anymore the safest, most sensible approach.

Anna's conclusions were these: That fire is beautifully cruel. That fusion occurs only at a specific heat. That blood, in fact, can boil. That the dissolution of an affair is an entropic reaction, and the disorder it tends toward is flammable. That a heart will burn. And burn and burn and burn.

Ghosts," Doktor Messerli continued, "aren't always the spirits of the human dead bound to the earth. A ghost can be the residual feeling that follows an act you have accomplished but feel bad about. Or the act itself. Something you've been or done that you cannot escape.

And rose from her stool to make a big, bullying point of walking to the scales and weighing them herself. Anna felt scolded and two feet tall. She carried the agitation all the way home and didn't speak another word of German for the rest of the day.

As fussy as they were about cleanliness and order, the Swiss seemed to Anna to be rather lax about graffiti.

I am beholden to my own peculiar irony: to survive I self-destruct.

Anna was grateful for Ursula - really she was. But Ursula, who was usually never blatantly unkind to Anna, still treated her as a foreign object, a means to the end of her son's happiness (if indeed "happy" was the word for what Bruno was, and Anna was almost sure it wasn't) and the vessel by which her grandchildren - whom she deeply loved - were carried into the world. The help that Ursula offered was for the children's sake, not Anna's.

An obsession is a defense against feeling out of control. A compulsion is the failure of that defense.

She thought about Switzerland. Where a smile will give you away as an American.

Anna's spiritual formation was relegated to cultural expressions of faith: the Christmas Baby Jesus and his gifts, the Easter risen Christ and his chocolate bunnies, and a copy of The Thorn Birds pulled from her mother's bookshelf.

No one is promised a tomorrow. She had been wrong about every man she loved or said she loved. She'd been wrong about everything. She'd entered into her life in the middle of its story. She had confused herself with the actress who portrayed her.

A LONELY WOMAN IS a dangerous woman." Doktor Messerli spoke with grave sincerity. "A lonely woman is a bored woman. Bored women act on impulse.

Even the loveliest shoulders can bear but so much.

No pain ever takes full leave of its person. That pain is greedy and doesn't give ground. That a body remembers what hurts it and how. Old pains get swallowed by new pains. But newer pains always follow suit.

A secret's safest hiding place is in the open.

To the non-Swiss ear it sounds as if the speaker is construing made-up words from the oddest rhythms and the queerest clipped consonants and the most perturbing arrangement of gaping, rangy vowels.

He'd taken the boys to the Hallenstadion many times to see the ZSC Lions play.

Whores, Anna once read, make the very best wives. They are accustomed to the varying moods of men, they keep their broken hearts to themselves, and easy women always ease through grief.

The heart, which

isn't immune to anything, turns numb to all
others, dumb as the muscle that it is,

I'm cheating on the man I'm cheating on my husband with, Anna thought. I grow less decent every passing day.

Yes, you do hate Switzerland. And," doctor Messerli paused for effect, "you love it. You love it and you hate it. What you don't feel is apathy. You're not indifferent. You're ambivalent."
Anna had thought about this before, when nights came during which she could do nothing but wander Dietlikon's sleeping streets or hike the hill behind her house to sit upon the bench where most often she went to weep. She'd considered her ambivalence many, many times, and in the end, she's diagnosed herself with a disease that she'd also invented. Switzerland syndrome. Like Stockholm syndrome. But instead of my captors, I'm attached to the room in which I'm held captive. It's the prison I'm bound to, not the warden.

Anna was absolutely right. It was the landscape. it was the geography. The fields, the streams, the lakes, the forests. And the mountains. On exceptionally clear days when the weather was right, if you walked south on Dietlikon's Bahnhofstrasse you could see the crisp outlines of snow-capped Alps against a blazing blue horizon eighty kilometers away. On these certain days it was something in the magic of the atmosphere that made them tangible and moved them close. The mutability of those particular mountains reminded Anna of herself. And it wasn't simply the natural landscape that she attached herself to emotionally. It was the cobblestone roads of Zürich's old town and the spires of this church and the towers of that one. And the trains, the trains, the goddamn

IS THERE A DIFFERENCE between shame and guilt?" Anna asked. "Shame is psychic extortion," Doktor Messerli answered. "Shame lies. Shame a woman and she will believe she is fundamentally wrong, organically delinquent. The only confidence she will have will be in her failures. You will never convince her otherwise.

Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your hearth or burn down your house, you can never tell. - JOAN CRAWFORD

We [people] are made separate by the things we do or do not do. Responsibilities of all types curb us. Desire betrays us. No wound is ever truly petty. And there are so many ways to be locked apart from the rest of the world.

When the morning skies grow red And o'er us their radiance shed, Thou, O Lord, appeareth in their light. When the Alps glow bright with splendor, Pray to God, to Him surrender, For you feel and understand, For you feel and understand, That he dwelleth in this land. That he dwelleth in this land. - FIRST VERSE OF THE "SCHWEIZERPSALM," THE SWISS NATIONAL ANTHEM

She could go anywhere she wanted. The going wasn't the problem. The problem was belonging where she went.

I'm suspicious of dreams in books too. Because they're boring and too self-serving.

I am the sum of all my twitches.

A man can smell a woman's sadness

Sometimes, some of us in some things we do know better. When we know better, I think it's imperative that we do better. Otherwise we're perpetuating myths that have for centuries done us no good. Men and women alike. No one is exempt from being called into consciousness.

One day after class, she dropped her purse outside Bahnhof Oerlikon

What had she learned about verbs? In the past and future tenses, the verb came at the end. And in the present it followed the subject. Wherever she went it tailed her. She dragged it behind like a sack of stones.

You leave the analyst's office aware of your singularity and your solitude alike. It's you who lives in the prison of your skin. No one gets the afterglow they want. Everyone dies alone. Analysis is a process. The process is a slow procession. It is a cortège.

This season's promotion was a set of knives. Anna saved the stickers - Merkli - but rarely cashed them in.

He is not here. Where did it go, my grief, my grief?
Once you loved me on a hillside. I was pretty
and tender as silence. Some things I knew well enough:
first you love and then you lose.
I had no idea there was nothing more.