“What? 'Borderline patients play games'? That what you said? Ernest, you'll never be a real therapist if you think like that. That's exactly what I meant earlier when I talked about the dangers of diagnosis. There are borderlines and there are borderlines. Labels do violence to people. You can't treat the label; you have to treat the person behind the label. (17)”

“Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no one's memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies, too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?”

“Live right, he reminded himself, and have faith that good things will flow from you even if you never learn of them.”

“Like you, I have often wondered why fears reign at night. After twenty years of such wondering, I now believe that fears are not born of darkness; rather, fears are like stars - always there, but obscured by the glare of daylight.”

“Life is a miserable thing. I have decided to spend my life thinking about it.”

“The pain is there; when you close one door on it, it knocks to come in somewhere else...”

“He had learned long ago that, in general, the easier it was for anxious patients to reach him, the less likely they were to call. (107)”