“Perhaps we can conceive of the ironist as the fetishist's apprentice, reaching out for all readers, ensnaring them in a tangle of ambiguity, uncertainty and indecision from which there is no escape. Irony, quite possibly, makes fetishists of us all.”

“Repress the natural and it comes back even stronger: not everyone can be a fetishist”

“We all know that a book is not really a person. It isn’t a human being. But if you are a lover of books as books – as objects, that is – and ignore the human element in them – that is, their voices – you will be committing an error of the soul, because you will be an idolator, or else a fetishist.”

“I know...but just the same" – this is Octave Mannoni's formulation of the structure of the fetish, and more generally of fetishistic thinking. The fetishist knows that an old, cherished belief is false but nonetheless continues to believe it. The nonetheless is not articulated, it is the fetish.”

“Sometimes it seems unfair that events so old can reach forward through the years, sinking claws into one's life and twisting all that follows it. Yet perhaps that is the ultimate justice: we are the sum of all we have done added to the sum of all that has been done to us. There is no escaping that, not for any of us.”

“the world is full of wondrous possibilities. In fact, some believe that everything is possible until we make a choice and choose a particular direction to go in. Possibilities quotes allow us to see all sides of the proverbial coin. We cannot only see the potential pitfalls, but also all of the choices that are available to us. Through possibilities quotes, we may even learn that we choose to limit our options without knowing all the ones available, perhaps out of fear, perhaps out of impatience, but we limit nonetheless. Only by learning this can we truly go forward, discovering our true potential and exploring all the possibilities.”