“We are all so much more interesting to ourselves than to anyone else because we know how many potentialities are alive in us, and the person who considers them dead issues and insists on seeing us flatly as no more than we are is appreciated as an enemy rather than a friend. It is perfectly human to ferret out the other's inadequacies, for one reason because we wish to know in which direction he will attack or fail us, for another because we do not want him to be more whole and unassailable than we are. Once inadequacies have been unmasked to our vision, however, they should be concealed from the other's, for the offer of friendship is, in effect, the offer to love, honor, and support the other's fictions. The cruelest affront is treating the person as exactly the person he is. We all long to be understood, but not for what we are. We long to be understood for what we might have been had all been for the best in the best of all possible worlds and, at the same time, to be forgiven”
