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

“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)”

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

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

“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.”

“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)”

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