Quotes from Lori Gottlieb

Uncertainty, I'm starting to realize, doesn't mean the loss of hope—it means there's possibility. I don't know what will happen next—how potentially exciting!

Wendell once pointed out that we talk to ourselves more than we'll talk to any other person over the course of our lives but that our words aren't always kind or true or helpful

These were often the same people who later admitted that they also glanced at pinging phones during sex or while sitting on the toilet. Upon learning this, I placed a bottle of Purell in my office.)

One of the most important steps in therapy is helping other people take responsibility for their current predicaments, because once they realize that they can (and must) construct their own lives, they're free to generate change.

Anger is the go-to feeling for most people because it's outward-directed—angrily blaming others can feel deliciously sanctimonious. But often it's only the tip of the iceberg, and if you look beneath the surface, you'll glimpse submerged feelings you either weren't aware of or didn't want to show: fear, helplessness, envy, loneliness, insecurity.

Maybe everything they complain about isn't actually a problem! Maybe it's fine the way it is. Maybe it's even great, like their haircut. Maybe they'd be happier if they didn't try to change things. Just be.

You have a limited time to live, and your dream is to work at Trader Joe's?

The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm had made this point more than fifty years earlier: "Modern man thinks he loses something — time — when he does not do things quickly; yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains except kill it.

Some scientists have come up with a complex mathematical equation to predict happiness based on the premise that happiness stems not from how well things go but whether things go better than expected.

In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

creativity described as being the ability to grasp the essence of one thing and the essence of some very different thing and smash them together to create some entirely new thing. That's

but I figured that this comment was just one of John's defenses against getting close to anybody or acknowledging his need for another human being.

anger serves another function—it pushes people away and keeps them from getting close enough to see you.

He thought I was a modern-day version of Freud's female hysteric, experiencing what's known as conversion disorder. This is a condition in which a person's anxiety is "converted" into neurologic conditions such as paralysis, balance issues, incontinence, blindness, deafness, tremors, or seizures. The symptoms are often temporary and tend to be related (sometimes symbolically) to the psychological stressor at its root.

You can't get through your pain by diminishing it,

But I assure him that he's not breaking down; he's breaking open.

The only way to get to the other side of the tunnel is to go through it, not around it. But I can't even picture the entrance right now.

You get through your pain by accepting it and figuring out what to do with it. You can't change what you're denying or minimizing. And, of course, often what seem like trivial worries are manifestations of deeper ones.

once they realize that they can (and must) construct their own lives, they're free to generate change.

Everyone should have at least one epic love story in their lives.

Will you see the human in my being?

I was finding it hard to manage my negative thoughts because, outside of Wendell's office, they didn't have much of an outlet.

You didn't fall in love with me before our first date, when I told you I had a six-year-old," I say. "You knew what to do then, didn't you?" More suffocating silence. As you've probably guessed, this conversation goes nowhere.

Is Boyfriend unhappy with something in the relationship that he's afraid to tell me about? I ask him calmly, my voice softer now, because I'm mindful of the fact that Very Angry People aren't Very Approachable.