The Incurable Romantic Quotes

“All mature adults must accept that they are essentially unknowable--and that they will never know the one they love. Even when we kiss there is distance; it is a distance that cannot be bridged by romantic love and must be respected if a relationship is to succeed. The real metric by which we can gauge the authenticity of love is not how close we want to be, how merged and intermingled, but how far we can stand apart and still be together.”
― Frank Tallis, The Incurable Romantic: And Other Tales of Madness and Desire

“Moreover, we forget things every day, so in a sense we are constantly dissolving into nothingness.”
― Frank Tallis, The Incurable Romantic: and Other Unsettling Revelations

“Smrtka vždy odchádza z javiska s potmehúdskym pohľadom - možno naznačuje, že jej tajným darom je obnova.”
― Frank Tallis, The Incurable Romantic: And Other Tales of Madness and Desire

“All mature adults must accept that they are essentially unknowable--and that they will never know the one they love.”
― Frank Tallis, The Incurable Romantic: And Other Tales of Madness and Desire

“While working in a genito-urinary medicine clinic I saw a significant number of young men—some in their teens—who engaged in frequent unprotected sex because they wanted to contract HIV. This was at a time when HIV was almost exclusively associated with homosexuality, the development of AIDS and premature death. For many reasons, mostly social and cultural, HIV had become mixed up with sexual politics and notions of selfhood. These young men wanted to be HIV-positive to strengthen their sense of being gay and acquire status within the wider gay community. Many of them achieved their aim —and subsequently died.”
― Frank Tallis, The Incurable Romantic: And Other Tales of Madness and Desire

“A consultant I once worked for was renowned for his warmth and kindness. (..) A colleague told me, confidentially, that this same consultant was also in charge of a ward located in another hospital where patients were bound in restraints, force-fed and abused by a team of sadistic nurses. (..) Was the kindly consultant for whom I had so much respect an authentic Jekyll and Hyde? I doubt I would have remembered this story—it still sounds to me like an urban legend—were it not for the fact that I had had first-hand experience of equally odd characters and situations in other hospital settings.”
― Frank Tallis, The Incurable Romantic: And Other Tales of Madness and Desire

“Consideration of the origins of repetition-compulsion eventually led Freud to infer the existence of the death instinct, a drive that lends support to all forms of self-defeating behaviour and ultimately self-destruction. He justified the notion with recourse to a law of nature: organisms evolve from inanimate matter and must inevitably return to the inanimate state. This common destiny finds correspondences in our thoughts and predispositions. When we engage in selfdefeating behaviours, we are allowing the death instinct to carry us a little closer to oblivion.”
― Frank Tallis, The Incurable Romantic: And Other Tales of Madness and Desire

“All mature adults must accept that they are essentially unknowable—and that they will never know the one they love...The real metric by which we can gauge the authenticity of love is not how close we want to be, how merged and intermingled, but how far we can stand apart and still be together”
― Frank Tallis, The Incurable Romantic: And Other Tales of Madness and Desire