Quotes from Stephanie Dowrick

Your attitude to life is far more important in determining your happiness than your money, appearance, social status or talent.

Restraint offers a space between intention and action and the opportunity to protect others from actions or reactions that should exist only in your imagination

Opening to the sacred, we transform our vision of ourselves.

Imagine the world we would live in if we dared to see all of life as sacred - unconditionally.

Happiness--like love--is itself an attitude.

Love teaches you to care for others. It also gives you your best chance to grow up.

Sound crazy? It may well be, but it is precisely in relationships of intimacy that your craziness (and mine) will be hardest to conceal. p.215

What helps most is remembering that such a cry or attack or sly blow is a reflection of that other person's inner state; it is not an omniscient summary of you. Your reaction reflects your own inner state, and that can tell you which aspects of your own inner world are needy of attention. p.291

It should not be difficult to accept the idea that someone else is, in 'your experience of them', in part your self-creation. But it is difficult and sometimes impossible. Impossible because accepting the idea that you are in part creating your 'other' forces you to take on board a high degree of self responsibility. Few of us easily do that. p.234

Restraint offers a space between intention and action and the opportunity to protect others from actions or reactions that should exist only in your imagination

the responsibility for their wellbeing and for the fundamental meaning they give to their own life must, in adulthood, be theirs. To accept the burden that someone 'can't live without you' is unrealistic. It infantilises that person and overburdens you. p.226

as I have seen with other people whose sense of their work is vocational rather than pragmatic, my desire to write, to understand things at a depth I can reach in no other way, pushes me to write and go on writing, even when my wants—for an easier or more sociable life, or one less exposed and fraught—are certainly well known to my rational mind. p.293

You are a self and an other. Your 'others' are in part your own creation. This in turn affects and shapes your experiences of self. Your levels of self-awareness and self-acceptance largely shape how you perceive others. p.231

I have been using the word 'other' as though it were self-explanatory, yet who the 'other' is must always be something of a mystery. It is a mystery at an immediate level in the sense that no person is entirely knowable.

Someone who is comfortable in their own company and can be alone without feeling unduly anxious, defensive or half-alive is experiencing solitude

Art is childhood, after all," wrote Rilke

while other people can bring insight and support (and trouble and pain) into our lives, no-one can save us: we can only save ourselves.

You are a self and an other. • Your 'others' are in part your own creation. • This in turn affects and shapes your experiences of self. • Your levels of self-awareness and self-acceptance largely shape how you perceive others.

You are a different 'other' for each person you come into contact with, depending on how they 'read' or experience you. And, of course, each person you meet is an other for you in a way which comes very much out of your subjective reading of who that person is, your unconscious assumptions, as well as what could be called facts about the person.

To the flow of recognition between my 'I' and your 'you' I bring my desires, my prejudices, and the force of my needs—conscious and unconscious—to the 'evidence' before me. In doing this, I create my own version of you. What this adds up to is that you are a somewhat different other for each person with whom you have contact.

Heterosexuals often fall into the trap of expecting all their emotional needs to be met by the other person.

different aspects of our complexity are 'drawn out' by different people, and that it is also possible to experience ourselves differently and more positively in a less stressed, more mutually accepting relationship.

After all, what is 'poetry itself'? Where are its horizons? What draws a reader to 'read' the world and their own self through this particular medium, even if only occasionally? Because it is often on 'occasions'—sacred or ritualised moments, or moments made holy by celebration or grief—that poetry is reached for, its peculiar intensity and compression instinctively demanded. But this is not a separation from life; rather, it is an illumination of it.

Intimacy is not a matter of extending your self-absorption to include someone else. Much more than that, it is a matter of tuning into someone else's reality and risking being changed by that experience.