Quotes from Melanie Thernstrom

Tests of love always end badly.

Tests of love always end badly.

It was like sawdust, the unhappiness: it infiltrated everything, everything was a problem, everything made her cry -- school, homework, boyfriends, the future, the lack of future, the uncertainty of future, fear of future, fear in general -- but it was so hard to say exactly what the problem was in the first place.

He's like a lake. You assume it has great depths, pure undisturbed undiscoverable depths. You assume depths must be there because the surface is so flat--pretty and flat and utterly unrevealing. Boring almost, you might say, if you didn't know about the depths, that is, if you didn't believe they were there.

He mentioned a grim truism in analgesia research known as the "30 rule"—that the existing pain drugs generally reduce pain by 30 percent in 30 percent of people—"and before we start treating them, we have no idea who is going to respond or not.