“The only way to get what you want is to make them more afraid of you than they are of each other.”

“… there are two ways of being unhappy. Not getting what you want is one. Getting what you want is the other.”

“Decide that you want it more than you are afraid of it.”

“What a way to show I love you
Other than below or above you
What a way to kiss each other goodbye
What a way to start tomorrow
Knowing that there'll be no sorrow
What a way to keep each other alive”

“If you’ve ever sat in a room with twins, immediately you’re forced to deal with this confusion. You’re afraid to call them by name because you’re afraid you’re going to get it wrong. At first being a twin is a source of power, you can switch, you can fool people—but then it becomes a vulnerability because people confuse you when you don’t want them to. The famous story of the twins who were both spanked when either one of them did something wrong because the parents wanted to make sure they got the right twin. So that would immediately make each twin totally responsible for the other one’s actions and therefore would make you want to control the other twin’s actions. It gets quite twisted and the confusion of identities becomes quite intense.”

“Remember that all the others are more afraid than you”

“Do you want to understand how to swim, or do you want to jump in and start swimming? Only people who are afraid of the water want to understand it. Other people jump in and get wet.”

“If you want to control someone, all you have to do is to make them feel afraid.”

“The idea of painless, non-threatening coercion is an illusion. Fear is the inseparable companion of coercion, and its inescapable consequence. If you think it your duty to make children do what you want, whether they will or not, then it follows inexorably that you must make them afraid of what will happen to them if they don’t do what you want.”

“What happens to people that love each other?'
'I suppose they have whatever they have and they are more fortunate than others. Then one of them gets the emptiness for ever.”