A Good and Happy Child Quotes

“dream interpretation were ways of converting our little personal miseries into big robust myths”
― Justin Evans, A Good and Happy Child

“It was a house halfway between this and that, between upper-middle-class luxuries and absentminded squalor. My father had been too distracted, while he was alive,”
― Justin Evans, A Good and Happy Child

“[...] and I said to myself: Aha. George used to have a way of coping."
"When?" I said, confused. "You mean, when I was a kid?"
"Have you ever heard," you said, "of the idea of the shadow self?"
Sure, I told you. It was one of the Jungian archetypes—one of the symbols of the collective unconscious. That was pretty much all I remembered from college.
"Not bad. Do you know what function it plays, in analysis?" you asked. I shook my head. You continued. "The shadow is a frequent figure in dreams. It can appear as a kind of doppelgänger; an evil twin. It embodies our repressed desires. The dark stuff. The shameful stuff. The you-want-to-fuck-your-mother stuff." (48)”
― Justin Evans, A Good and Happy Child

“. Grading papers,” he repeated with scorn. “There is no human achievement so great, that a freshman cannot reduce it to drivel.”
― Justin Evans, A Good and Happy Child