"What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music."
And the thing about a successful life is that a lot of the time, our ideas of what it would mean to live successfully are not our own. They're sucked in from other people; chiefly, if you're a man, your father, and if you're a woman, your mother. Psychoanalysis has been drumming home this message for about 80 years. No one's quite listening hard enough, but I very much believe it's true.
