Keith Ablow

“Human empathy, while not found on any chart of human anatomy, is the reason we instinctively hurt for our children… it is the reason that one human being’s intensely personal tests and triumphs can be harnessed to the good of countless others.”

“I shook my head at all the things that can happen to break a man as he grows up and away from the pure potential of infancy, all the things that had fractured inside me. And I prayed silently that this infant, born into chaos, might meet with kindness, experience joy and find passion in life. Every one of us ought to be able to count on that much. (308)”

“It is a terrible and exquisitely human irony that children inadequately nurtured almost never give up on the breast. The thirst for love from a mother or father who cannot provide it is seemingly unquenchable. I have treated sixty- and seventy-year-old business executives, politicians, and physicians still desperate for approval from shriveled, emotionally barren men and women in their eighties and nineties. (257)”

“There's no original evil left in the world. Everyone's just recycling pain. (257)”

“Woody Allen once said that 90 percent of life is about showing up. Ninety percent of healing people in psychological pain is shutting up - at least long enough to let them bleed the truth. That sounds easy, but it isn't. (68)”

“Everything terrible is something that needs our love. - Rilke (231)”

“...Some people hurt so much they can't take what they need, even when someone wants to give it to them. (106)”

“...Loving anyone, anywhere, at any time, leaves you infinitely vulnerable at every single moment.”

“Deep down, everyone wants the truth.”

“What about my rights? What about a person's privacy? Did all that just go to hell after 9/11?”

“When people can do something simple to avoid conflict--say, hit a button or unlock a latch--they'll generally do it.”

“What was it about not knowing a person that allowed you to wonder whether she might be the answer to all your problems?”

“Maybe the trying is the thing. Maybe it doesn't get better than that. Maybe you never quite get there. And maybe that's okay.”

“Nothing overdone, nothing racy, which made her all the more alluring.”

“The good guys had to operate on a higher level than the killers--just for society to keep track of who was who.”

“Like most of the connections that explain the pain in our hearts, he couldn't bring it to mind. He couldn't see the truth because it was too big and it was right in front of him.”

“Sometimes when you push someone, you find out who that person really is.”

“Watching her, he saw again how she teetered between adolescence and adulthood, with a raw sensuality that had to deposit her in a kind of no-man's land--too much a woman for boys her own age, too young for fully adult men.”

“A jealous husband is an ugly thing.”

“The irrational thoughts were the ones with the power to burn holes in your gut.”

“The truth will set you free. Unless you're guilty.”

“People blush when one of their core truths is revealed.”

“As if you don’t already know all this, men who beat up on women are different than the rest of us. Okay? They’re unhinged. Out there. Without feelings. And anyone arrogant enough to violate an order of the court, when it could get him a year or more in jail, is different, too. He doesn’t get the idea of boundaries – like, where his life stops and other people’s start.' He let his hands settle back to his coffee cup. If you or I were the subject of a restraining order, we’d be twenty miles from ground zero at all times. We’re not gonna screw with the justice system once it buries its teeth in us.' He paused, sipped his coffee.”

“Maybe learning to be human was about learning to live in pain, not trying to figure out how to live pain-free. (156)”

“For a psychiatrist to be any good, he has to be willing to corner you, close off the easy exits, even when it hurts. It's supposed to. (46)”

“He started to feel for himself, which is the only way to start feeling for others. (24)”

“You've got to think of every talent you have, every gift you could give the world around you. And you've got to take the chance of giving it. (246)”

“...the horrific fact that our lives and those of the people we love are impermanent and exquisitely fragile, that any of us can cease to exist without warning, that loving anyone, anywhere, at any time, leaves you infinitely vulnerable at every single moment. (20)”

“Most children would rather preserve the fantasy of a loving connection with their fathers and mothers, at all costs, even if it costs them their self-esteem. When you're three or seven years old, it's less frightening to think of yourself as an unlovable, disappointing screwup than to recognize the fact that you're living with a monster.”

“Everyone - rich or poor, black or white, educated or not - is in emotional turmoil, in some sort of pain. (51)”

“That's what a little victory in psychiatry looks like. You slip into the shadows, dodging the mind's defense mechanisms, glad enough to take a half-step toward the truth. Behind the next word or the next glance may lurk the demon you seek, all in flames, desperate to be held, but set to flee. (8)”

“We are, all of us, crippled and twisted. Most of us strive desperately to keep our grotesqueries out of sight and mind. Our suffering is transformed by an alchemy of the soul into addiction, ulcers, strokes, hatred, even war.”

“But that's the hardest part of healing.'What?'Realizing there's no one to hate.”

“The bad things don't seem to happen to bad people.'That's because they already did. There's no original evil left in the world.”

“God is not attracted to mountaintops or church steeples. God is drawn to suffering, and the dark places it surfaces.”

“Plenty of people who survive tragedies end up ambivalent about danger--frightened by it, yet strangely drawn to it.”

“Relationships are never chance events.”

“People react predictably, especially when they don't have time to think.”

“The roots of any evil deed can be traced to the perpetrator's refusal to experience pain.”

“Most of you guys can't see the potential in a nervous breakdown. A real collapse. There's more chance of finding yourself in a major depression than there is in a bottle Prozac.”

“I figured anybody who talked about church as much as she did was using it a little like cocaine anyhow.”

“But insight doesn't necessarily produce self-control. Sometimes you just see your destructiveness more clearly.”

“My throat tightened, but I held back the tears and reminded myself that withdrawing from a woman is no different than kicking a drug; you feel shaky and you want it, but eventually the need passes, and you feel restored.”