Quotes from Gordon Livingston

The good news is that we have effective treatments for the symptoms of depression; the bad news is that medication will not make you happy. Happiness is not simply the absence of despair. It is an affirmative state in which our lives have both meaning and pleasure.

What all of us hesitate to admit is that we tend to be more helpful to people who are like us.

As much as we try, we do not control how we feel or what we think.

Finally, if the person I'm talking to appears wedded determinedly to the past and unwilling to contemplate a better future, I grow impatient. It is misplaced kindness to offer only sympathy, even where it is clearly justified. It is hope that I'm really selling. If, after extended effort, I cannot persuade someone to buy, I am wasting both our time by continuing.

If this formulation appears to be overly analytical and to ignore the mysterious process of "falling in love," that is because in my experience the "chemistry" that causes us to choose one person over all other possibilities can be seen in retrospect as a combination of readiness, lust, and hope rather than an indefinable but powerful union of two souls. I would be more ready to believe in the latter if there was more evidence of its persistence over time.

Before we can do anything, we must be able to imagine it.

We also need to learn the art of letting go: of the past, of unresolved grievances, of our younger selves. Nobody gets out of here alive.

Everything we are afraid to try, all our unfulfilled dreams, constitute a limitation on what we are and could become.