Quotes from Keith Ablow

People react predictably, especially when they don't have time to think.

Most of you guys can't see the potential in a nervous breakdown. A real collapse. There's more chance of finding yourself in a major depression than there is in a bottle Prozac.

But insight doesn't necessarily produce self-control. Sometimes you just see your destructiveness more clearly.

People react predictably, especially when they don't have time to think.

My throat tightened, but I held back the tears and reminded myself that withdrawing from a woman is no different than kicking a drug; you feel shaky and you want it, but eventually the need passes, and you feel restored.

We are, all of us, crippled and twisted. Most of us strive desperately to keep our grotesqueries out of sight and mind. Our suffering is transformed by an alchemy of the soul into addiction, ulcers, strokes, hatred, even war.

Relationships are never chance events.

Some people hurt so much they can't take what they need, even when someone wants to give it to them. (106)

But that's the hardest part of healing.' What?' Realizing there's no one to hate.

When people can do something simple to avoid conflict--say, hit a button or unlock a latch--they'll generally do it.

Most children would rather preserve the fantasy of a loving connection with their fathers and mothers, at all costs, even if it costs them their self-esteem. When you're three or seven years old, it's less frightening to think of yourself as an unlovable, disappointing screwup than to recognize the fact that you're living with a monster.

What was it about not knowing a person that allowed you to wonder whether she might be the answer to all your problems?

The roots of any evil deed can be traced to the perpetrator's refusal to experience pain.

People blush when one of their core truths is revealed.

God is not attracted to mountaintops or church steeples. God is drawn to suffering, and the dark places it surfaces, which is why sharing pain freely feels very much like love, and may be the same thing. (207)

The truth will set you free. Unless you're guilty.

The irrational thoughts were the ones with the power to burn holes in your gut.

A jealous husband is an ugly thing.

For a psychiatrist to be any good, he has to be willing to corner you, close off the easy exits, even when it hurts. It's supposed to. (46)

Plenty of people who survive tragedies end up ambivalent about danger--frightened by it, yet strangely drawn to it.

The bad things don't seem to happen to bad people.' That's because they already did. There's no original evil left in the world.

Sometimes when you push someone, you find out who that person really is.

Maybe the trying is the thing. Maybe it doesn't get better than that. Maybe you never quite get there. And maybe that's okay.

What about my rights? What about a person's privacy? Did all that just go to hell after 9/11?