“No one and nothing can harm us, child, except what we fear and love.”

“One ought to be afraid of nothing other then things possessed of power to do us harm, but things innoucuous need not be feared.”

“Sometimes we do terrible things to the ones we love just to see what harm we can cause.”

“Fear is always with us: that we are not good enough or strong enough, and so will fail; that we will be hurt. Fear that what we love will be taken from us. Fear of dying, even fear of God, or of no God. But God surprises us by giving us strength to bear what we must; by giving us joy when we think that nothing but sadness is possible.”

“We infrequently contemplate the harms that await any new-born child—pain, disappointment, anxiety, grief, and death. For any given child we cannot predict what form these harms will take or how severe they will be, but we can be sure that at least some of them will occur. None of this befalls the nonexistent. Only existers suffer harm.”

“But what Freud showed us… was that nothing can be grasped, destroyed, or burnt, except in a symbolic way, as one says, in effigie, in absentia.”