What I am, at any given moment in the process of my becoming a person, will be determined by my relationships with those who love me or refuse to love me, with those whom I love or refuse to love.

Your emotional life is not written in cement during childhood. You write each chapter as you go along.

It is easier to act yourself into a new way of feeling than to feel yourself into a new way of acting.

We are all much more simply human than otherwise, be we happy and successful, contented and detached, miserable and mentally disordered, or whatever.

If you have to maintain self-esteem by pulling down the standing of others, you are extraordinarily unfortunate.

As you love yourself, so shall you love others. Strange but true, with no exceptions.

It may be possible through detachment, to gain knowledge that is 'useful;' but only through participation is it possible to gain the knowledge that is helpful.

All of us are much more human than otherwise

If you do not feel equal to the headaches that psychiatry induces, you are in the wrong business. It is work - work the like of which I do not know.

There is no fun in psychiatry. If you try to get fun out of it, you pay a considerable price for your unjustifiable optimism.

The supply of interpretations, like that of advice, greatly exceeds the need for them.

I like Carson. I really like Carson. I can hand an idea to him that's still a little rough, and he can turn it over and tumble it and hand it back to me shining. And I can do the same for him.

I needed to stop hiding: I was raped. It was time to honestly be exactly who I was. I saw—the shame wasn't mine, it was his, and I could stop misrepresenting myself, and I could accept myself.

Love is what stands in the way of self discovery, try not to find, it will find you.

Being consumed by what people think of you is the fastest way to forget what God thinks of you.

The thing is, the reader doesn't want to hear about bad times.

Sometimes there are no good choices for government.

As long as there are slaughter houses there will always be battlefields.

I had a weimaraner for 11 years called China, and he was a great dog, a bit mad. They're massive, weimaraners; they've got big floppy ears. They look like a pointer, but they're liver-coloured.

Alexander was not the first Greek to be honoured as a god for political favour.

Don't tell me that [broken heartstrings] hurt less than a broken bone, that an ingrown life is something surgeons can cut away, that there's no way for it to metastasize - it does.