"By proclaiming our morality of equality, or anarchism, we refuse to assume a right which moralists have taken upon themselves to claim, that of mutating the individual in the name of some ideal."

"Culture, at best, can help you understand suffering but does nothing to actually solve it."

"Will all those in Good Relationships please stand? Thank you, feel free to leave if this is not your story-you for whom long-term coupledom is a source of optimism and renewal, not emotional anesthesia. Though before anyone rushes for the exits, a point of clarification: a “good relationship” would probably include having-and wanting to have-sex with your spouse or spouse-equivalent on something more than a quarterly basis. (Maybe with some variation in choreography?) It would mean inhabiting an emotional realm in which monogamy isn’t giving something up (your “freedom,” in the vernacular) because such cost-benefit calculations just don’t compute. It would mean a domestic sphere in which faithfulness wasn’t preemptively secured through routine interrogations (“Who was that on the phone, dear?”), surveillance (“Do you think I didn’t notice how much time you spent talking to X at the reception?”), or impromptu search and seizure.
A “happy” state of monogamy would be defined as a state you don’t have to work at maintaining. After all, doesn’t the demand for fidelity beyond the duration of desire feel like work-or work as currently configured for so many of us handmaidens to the global economy: alienated, routinized, deadening, and not something you would choose to do if you actually had a choice in the matter?"

"… phenomenology, unlike psychology, is entirely uninterested in mental processes understood as real psychological and psychophysical events. It thus bears no burden in establishing the reality of the mental processes it investigates, and whose essential structures it delineates: the phenomenologist need have no more interest in how he ‘can make sure of the existence of those mental processes which serve him as foundations for phenomenological findings than the geometer would be interested in how the existence of figures on the board or the models on the shelf could be methodologically established.’"