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Book: Love's Executioner
Quotes of Book: Love's Executioner
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  1. Irvin D. Yalom _ Love's Executioner

    I have heard many dying patients remark that the most awful thing about dying is that it must be done alone. Yet, even at the point of death, the willingness of another to be fully present may penetrate the isolation. As a patient said in "Do Not Go Gentle," "Even though you're alone in your boat, it's always comforting to see the lights of the other boats bobbing nearby.
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  2. Irvin D. Yalom _ Love's Executioner

    If a way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.
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  3. Irvin D. Yalom _ Love's Executioner

    Though we try hard to go through life two by two or in groups, there are times, especially when death approaches, that the truth-that we are born alone and must die alone-breaks through with chilling clarity. I have heard many dying patients remark that the most awful thing about dying is that it must be done alone. Yet, even at the point of death, the willingness of another to be fully present may penetrate the isolation.
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  4. Irvin D. Yalom _ Love's Executioner

    One of the great paradoxes of life is that self-awareness breeds anxiety. Fusion eradicates anxiety in a radical fashion-by eliminating self-awareness. The person who has fallen in love, and entered a blissful state of merger, is not self-reflective because the questioning lonely I {and the attendant anxiety of isolation} dissolve into the we. Thus one sheds anxiety but loses oneself.
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  5. Irvin D. Yalom _ Love's Executioner

    While there is no solution to existential isolation, therapists must discourage false solutions. One's efforts to escape isolation can sabotage one's relationships with other people. Many a friendship or marriage has failed because, instead of relating to, and caring for, one another, one person uses another as a shield against isolation.
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  6. Irvin D. Yalom _ Love's Executioner

    Existential isolation, a third given, refers to the unbridgeable gap between self and others, a gap that exists even in the presence of deeply gratifying interpersonal relationships. One is isolated not only from other beings but, to the extent that one constitutes one's world, from world as well.
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  7. Irvin D. Yalom _ Love's Executioner

    From the beginning, of course, I had known that the pure forcefulness of my argument would not penetrate deep enough to effect any change. It almost never does. It's never worked for me when I've been in therapy. Only when one feels an insight in one's bones does one own it. Only then can one act on it and change. Pop psychologists forever talk about "responsibility assumption," but it's all words: it is extraordinarily hard, even terrifying, to own the insight that you and only you construct your own life design. Thus, the problem in therapy is always how to move from an ineffectual intellectual appreciation of a truth about oneself to some emotional experience of it. It is only when therapy enlists deep emotions that it becomes a powerful force for change. And powerlessness was
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  8. Irvin D. Yalom _ Love's Executioner

    If we relate to people believing that we can categorize them, we will neither identify nor nuture the parts, the vital parts, of the other that transcends category. The enabling relationship always assumes that the other is never fully knowable.
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  9. Irvin D. Yalom _ Love's Executioner

    Indeed, the capacity to tolerate uncertainty is a prerequisite for the profession.
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  10. Irvin D. Yalom _ Love's Executioner

    Existential isolation, a third given, refers to the unbridgeable gap between self and others, a gap that exists even in the presence of deeply gratifying interpersonal relationships.
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  11. Irvin D. Yalom _ Love's Executioner

    Freedom means that one is responsible for one's own choices, actions, one's own life situation. Though
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  12. Irvin D. Yalom _ Love's Executioner

    I have found that four givens are particularly relevant to psychotherapy: the inevitability of death for each of us and for those we love; the freedom to make our lives as we will; our ultimate aloneness; and, finally, the absence of any obvious meaning or sense to life."
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