Excerpts from When Nietzsche Wept  by Irvin Yalom

But surly … you must realize that there is no reality to any of your preoccupations! … these don’t really exist. These poor phantasms are not part of numinal reality. All seeing is relative, and so is all knowing. We invent what we experience. And what we have invented, we can destroy.

P. 221

“… That’s what Bertha means, passion and magic. Life without passion – who can live such a life?” he opened his eyes suddenly. “Can you? Can anyone?”
“Please chimneysweep about passion and living,” Nietzsche prodded him.
“One of my patients is a midwife,” Breuer went on. “She’s old, wizened, alone. Her heart is failing. But still she’s passionate about living. Once I asked her about the source of her passion. She said it was the moment between lifting a silent newborn and giving it the slap of life. She was renewed, she said, by immersion in that moment that straddle existence and oblivion.”

P. 232

It’s strange, Josef, how I’m always soothed by a cemetery. I told you my father was a Lutheran minister. But did I also tell you that my backyard and play area was the village churchyard? Incidentally, do you know Montaigne’s essay on death—where he advises us to live in a room with a window overlooking a cemetery? It clears one’s head, he claims, and keeps life’s priorities in perspective. Do cemeteries do that for you?

P. 249

I was in great distress. I felt like an anvil: your words were hammer blows. Long afterward, they still reverberated, especially one phrase.”
“Which was———”
“That the only way I could save my marriage was to give it up. One of your more confusing pronouncements: the more I thought about it, the dizzier I got!”
“Then I should have been more clear, Josef. I meant only to say that an ideal marriage relationship exists only when it is not necessary for each person’s survival.”
Seeing no sign of enlightenment on Breuer’s face, Nietzsche added, “I meant only that, to fully relate to another, one must first relate to oneself. If we cannot embrace our own aloneness, we will simply use the other as a shield against isolation. Only when one can live like the eagle—with no audience whatsoever—can one turn to another in love; only then is one able to care about the enlargement of the other’s being. Ergo, if one is unable to give up a marriage, then the marriage is doomed.

P. 288