“Relationships are never chance events.”

“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.”

“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)”

“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.”

“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)”

“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.”

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