Quotes from Lori Gottlieb

John points to his tears. "See?" he says. "My fucking humanity." "It's magnificent," I say.

It's well documented that touch is important for well-being throughout our lifetimes.

Wendell's beard is stylish. Scruffy. Unkempt. Rakish. He looks . . . attractive? I remember my earlier denial of any romantic transference with him. And I'd been truthful—as far as I was aware. But why was I so profoundly uncomfortable right now? Had my unconscious been having a passionate affair with Wendell behind my back?

You are not the best person to talk to you about you right now. There is a difference, I point out to them, between self- blame and self-responsibility, which is a corollary to something Jack Kornfield said: 'A second quality of mature spirituality is kindness. It is based on a fundamental notion of self-acceptance.

It looks amazing! Stunning. Gorgeous. The office, I mean. The office looks gorgeous. "Did you use a decorator?" I ask, and he says he did. I figured. If the earlier furniture was his doing, he clearly needed a professional for this. Still, it fits Wendell perfectly. The new Wendell. The spruced-up but still unpretentious Wendell.

the beauty of the word sometimes, how sometimes evens us out, keeps us in the comfortable middle rather than dangling on one end of the spectrum or the other, hanging on for dear life. It helps us escape from the tyranny of black-or-white thinking.

There's a difference between pain and suffering. You're going to have to feel pain -- everyone feels pain at times -- but you don't have to suffer so much. You're not choosing the pain, but you're choosing the suffering. ... If I'm clinging to the suffering so tightly, I must be getting something out of it. It must be serving some purpose for me.

leaving the world a better place than she found it.

a mudança e a perda andam juntas. Não podemos ter mudanças sem perda, motivo pelo qual é tão frequente as pessoas dizerem que querem mudar, mas mesmo assim continuarem exatamente iguais.

They may not be able to imagine their depression lifting anytime soon, but they don't need to. Doing something prompts you to do something else, replacing a vicious cycle with a virtuous one. Most big transformations come about from the hundreds of tiny, almost imperceptible, steps we take along the way.

When you stop tossing junk into the void—words, words, and more words—something important rises to the surface.

Breakups are awful," Claire says, popping some grapes in her mouth. "But we'd be negligent if we didn't do them.

Talking can keep people in their heads and safely away from their emotions.

Those who can't do, teach.

I've told her about the many relationships I've seen implode simply because one person was terrified of being abandoned and so did everything in his or her power to push the other person away. She is starting to see that what makes self-sabotage so tricky is that it attempts to solve one problem (alleviate abandonment anxiety) by creating another (making her partner want to leave).

numbness isn't the absence of feelings; it's a response to being overwhelmed by too many feelings.

He glances toward his cell, which is vibrating again, but I don't follow his gaze. I stay with him, trying to hold on so he won't get pulled away whenever an unwanted feeling appears and go numb. People often mistake numbness for nothingness, but numbness isn't the absence of feelings; it's a response to being overwhelmed by too many feelings.

Implicit in the therapeutic contract is the patient's willingness to tolerate discomfort, because some discomfort is unavoidable for the process to be effective.

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

We are afraid to have hope for things that we might not get.

do with the time he gains except kill it." Fromm was right;

I particularly liked this line from Frankl's book: "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

Many of us take for granted the people we love and the things we find meaningful, only to realize, when our deadline is announced, that we'd been skating by on the project: our lives.

People communicate through their attendance—whether they're prompt or late, cancel an hour beforehand, or don't show up at all.