October 31, 2012

On Kindness

Filed under: Quotes — jessica

Real kindness, real fellow feeling, entails hating and being hated—that is, really feeling available frustrations—and through this, coming to a more realistic relationship. This, one might say, is a more robust version of kindness, a kindness made possible through frustrations and hatred rather than a kindness organized to repudiate (or to disown) such feelings. Kindness of this variety allows for ambivalence and conflict while false, or magical, kindness distorts our perceptions of other people, often by sentimentalizing them, to avoid conflict. Sentimentality is cruelty by other means.

Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor

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