“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)”

“People say, "I have heart disease," not "I am heart disease." Somehow the presumption of a person's individuality is not compromised by those diagnostic labels. All the labels tell us is that the person has a specific challenge with which he or she struggles in a highly diverse life. But call someone "a schizophrenic" or "a borderline" and the shorthand has a way of closing the chapter on the person. It reduces a multifaceted human being to a diagnosis and lulls us into a false sense that those words tell us who the person is, rather than only telling us how the person suffers.”

“She's getting pushy and borderline bratty. We need to have a talk with her about that.""Huh?""That's almost topping from the bottom."Seth closed his eyes and quietly swore. "I have no idea what the fuck you just said.”

“The role of the therapist is to reflect the being/accepting self that was never allowed to be in the borderline.”

“That was the thing about the Goodnight world. No matter what the label said, you could never assume anything only worked like magic.”

“Think of people like bottles full of a liquid inside but without labels; smell the bottle, pour out what is inside and study it carefully. Never mind the labels; pretend that they don’t exist! Labels are misleading!”