“I know how to wait for clarity to emerge from chaos. I know what it is to trust in the power of the unseen.”

“How, I asked, could I have gone my whole life not knowing about my mother? How could I have not known what Keith knew when he saw our house? “It’s your mom,” Helder said. “Because it’s Mom.” He sounded firm and knowing and clear. “When a child has an alcoholic father, he sees him drink all day long but he doesn’t have a label, a concept. You just know that at night, when the tires make a certain sound in the driveway and the doors slam a certain way, with a certain sound, you just know you need to hide.”

“I’d set out to write a book about how we learn to trust our own experience in the face of confusion, doubt, and anxiety. What I ended up with is the story of how we love each other in spite of immense limitations”

“You don’t have to have clarity,” he said, “to take a clear position.”

“I was going to be in therapy for a long, long time. I wasn’t even a sentence yet. But I had some syllables, some new sounds. The first halves of the sentences I was accumulating were solid. I trusted them.”

“Find ways to develop self-awareness so you know what you do well... you do a thousand things brilliantly, and if you don't know what they are you aren't going to be able to become a true evaluator of your own work or other people's.”

“In childhood, it’s our parents who give us our standards for experience: “Here’s an inch,” they say. “And this is a foot.” And a child says, “Thanks! I can make my own yardstick now.” In my family, there wasn’t any kind of calibration demonstration. In the chaos, I struggled to figure out anything at all.”