Quotes from Jonathan Nasaw

As any psychiatrist will tell you, it is a fact of life, a psychological home truth, that every human being from Mother Teresa to Jack the Ripper operates from the same basic needs, using the same basic defenses, and accessing the same basic pool of emotions as every other human being. Deep down below the surface, we all want to be safe, we all want to be loved, and we all want to be respected. (15)

Fears of the future [are] almost always rooted in the past. (175)

The little office, scarcely large enough to contain Dr. Irene's desk at one end and the couch at the other, held a world of memories for Lily. Here, fifty minutes at a time, two or three times a week, she'd spilled out her hopes and fears, her childhood nightmares and adolescent insecurities – in a sense, she'd grown up in this room.

Fear, of course, was always, and in the end only, about itself. (45)

It's hard to imagine two personalities less alike than the pair who shared Ulysses Maxwell's mind. Where Lyssy was sunny and outgoing, as friendly and disingenuous as a puppy dog, Max was brooding and saturnine, with a sardonic wit and the compassion of a starving alley cat—if they hadn't occupied the same body, he'd have strangled the cheerful little bastard years ago.

with his shorts dragged down and his jacket rucked up, he was showing more crack than an inner-city coke dealer.