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"As with all experience of a new vocabulary, I began to see the world around me with new clarity and in new detail, and very soon my family, my students, my colleagues, friends and foes alike, found their way into the categories of personality I was internalizing. Not that they were reduced from complex individuals, but the broader lines of their attitudes and imperatives came into focus."

"No longer able to appreciate our loved ones' distinctive ways of living, we try to shape them according to our own values or agendas. Like Pygmalion, in short, we take up the project of sculpting them little by little to suit ourselves. We snipe and criticize, brow-beat and bully, we sculpt with guilt and with praise, with logic and with tears -- whatever methods are most natural to us. Not that we do this ceaselessly, nor always maliciously, but all too often, almost without thinking, we fall into this pattern of coercive behavior."

"And like Pygmalion, we are inevitably frustrated, since our well-intentioned efforts to make over our mates bring us little more than disappointment and conflict. Our loved ones do not -- cannot -- comply meekly with our interference in their lives, and even if they were to surrender to our pressure, they would have to destroy in themselves what attracted us in the first place, their individuality, their distinct breath of life. Our Pygmalion projects must fail: either our loved ones fight back, and our relationships become battlegrounds; or they give in to us, and become as lifeless as Pygmalion's statue. In this paradoxical game, we lose even if we win."