“In the most common fantasy of ideal love, [...], a woman can only unleash her desire in the hands of a man whom she imagines to be more powerful, who does not depend upon her for his strength. [...] The boundedness and limits within which one can surrender, and in which one can experience abandonment and creativity, are sought in the ideal lover. (p. 120)”

“Beauty belongs to the beloved who returns the gaze, in whose eyes we see the sun. But in this . . . beauty, in the mutual gaze, also lies the beginning of terror --awe, idealization, overstimulation, violation, loss.”

“She surrendered then to the pleasure, giving herself over to the power of his touch. Dragging him with her into a sensual haze, reveling in the desire, hiding the strength of her reaction from the man loving her body. Because the truth was that she was no longer in control. Somehow, Evan had wormed his way past her defenses. He’d snuck in and nestled near her heart. And that scared the hell out of her.”

“All that is bad and dreaded is projected into the other, and all the anxiety is seen as the product of external attack rather than one's own subjective state . . . [which] the fear of the other's omnipotence as well as the need to retaliate by asserting one's own omnipotence.”

“[T]he psychoanalytic process should be understood as occurring betweensubjects rather than within the individual. Mental life is seen from an intersubjective perspective. Although this perspective has transformed both our theory and our practice in important ways, such transformations create new problems. A theory in which the individual subject no longer reigns absolute must confront the difficulty each subject has in recognizing the other as an equivalent center of experience…”

“Cain considers life and can find no explanation for it, there is that woman, who although clearly sick with desire is enjoying postponing the moment of surrender, which is not at all the right word, because lilith, when she does finally open her legs to allow herself to be penetrated, will not be surrendering, but trying to devour the man to whom she said, Enter.”

“There can be no love unless there is faith which means a feeling or vision of the ideal's beauty and this ultimately depends upon what intrinsic beauty the ideal has. The nearer an ideal is to Beauty of Consciousness, the greater the possibility of our loving it completely and passionately loving it”