Quotes from Judith Guest

I keep telling you that feeling is not selective. You can't feel pain, you aren't gonna feel anything else either.

The small seed of despair cracks open and sends experimental tendrils upward to the fragile skin of calm holding him together.

People have a right to be the way they are.

And do not be paralyzed. It is better to move than to be unable to move, because you fear loss so much: loss of order, loss of security, loss of predictability.

To have a reason to get up in the morning, it is necessary to have some kind of guiding principle. A belief of some kind

Geez, if I could get through to you, kiddo, that depression is not sobbing and crying and giving vent, it is plain and simple reduction of feeling. Reduction, see? Of all feeling. People who keep stiff upper lips find that it's damn hard to smile.

People use people according to their own needs. Or don't use them. When a primary need is one of safety.

Everything seems excessive, now, and too intense, too important.

She hands him his coffee; crosses to the doorway; motes of dust flutter nervously in her wake.

Make notes—I've lost more material than I've ever written. Contrary to popular opinion, it's not still up there in one's brain. It's in outer space and it ain't coming back.

fast. Get those months, days, hours, minutes out of the way, it can't be quick enough.

Because it has always been easier to believe himself capable of evil than to accept evil in others.

See? Haven't lost your sense of humor after all but your sense of identity is what seems to have been misplaced. No. Wrong. You can't lose what you never had.

And what about tomorrow then? And all the tomorrows to come? Why can't we talk about it? Why can't we ever talk about it?

A little advice about feelings kiddo; don't expect it always to tickle." Dr, Berger

And once I wanted to be a fireman. Then

it is love, imperfect and unordered, that keeps them apart, even as it holds them somehow together...

He had left off being a perfectionist then, when he discovered that not promptly kept appointments, not a house circumspectly clean, not membership in Onwentsia, or the Lake Forest Golf and Country Club, or the Lawyers' Club, not power, or knowledge, or goodness - not anything - cleared you through the terrifying office of chance; that it is chance and not perfection that rules the world.

Maybe you gotta feel lousy sometime, in order to feel better. A little advice, kiddo, about feeling. Don't think too much about it. And don't expect it always to tickle.

It has always been easier to believe himself capable of evil than to accept evil in others.

He will be eighteen in January, but he looks younger than that, and vulnerable; yet older at the same time. Tired. His face is drawn. He has an urge to shield him, but how? There is no way. No way at all.

Some people with awful cards can be successful because of how they deal with the tragedies they're handed, and that seems courageous to me.

I notice when I'm on these trips, I read like mad. It's the only thing that seems to center me, bring me back to remembering who I am. Or forgetting who I am!

To have a reason to get up in the morning, it is necessary to possess a guiding principle. A belief of some kind. A bumper sticker, if you will.