Being brought up in a culture is a matter of learning appropriate forms of feeling as much as particular ways of thinking.

The difference between the thinking of the paranoid patient and the scientist comes from the latter's ability and willingness to test out his fantasies or grandiose conceptualizations through the...

How could he possibly explain himself to these people? They wanted to learn English for show - off social reasons, or to be able to read Aldous Huxley in the original. Whereas he had learned German...

You see, Kenny, there are some things you don't even know you know, until you're asked.

We have been married a little over a year and already there is a terrible silence around some subjects. We never speak of the disappearance of my brothers — a stranger listening to us would think it...

there is a difference between denial and delusion. The difference is that denial is a fun game and delusion is pitiable and requires meds that you will be too delusional to enjoy.

He had learned a lesson about propaganda in politics and mused wearily that "no character, however upright, is a match for constantly reiterated attacks, however false." If a charge was made often...

Shame, I do believe, is the most powerful emotion known to man; most discoveries and journeys of importance have been accomplished because of the ignominy that would be the result if the attempt was...

How like a spoon with a razor edge is human need.

Love was supposed to be a kind of blissful insanity.

...three percent of all males are deemed to be antisocial and without conscience, while only one percent of females seem to lack compassion for others. But the icy manipulations of that one percent...

People grieve in different ways, some silently, some in anger, some in spite. Rarely does grief bring out the best in people, despite what local historians like to tell you.

What is a memory anyway but a painful dispute with the past?

Our contradictions are never so to ourselves.

The difference was that Flossie Gaddis was starved about men and Sissy was healthily hungry about them. And what a difference that made.

Bad news always travels faster than good.

I've seen enough in this world to know that two people who can make each other that miserable must love each other a lot.

He's a bully. I love bullies. They have such big, shiny red buttons to push.

The final therapy, as Freud said, is work and love.

The power of music, narrative, and drama is of the greatest practical and theoretical importance. One may see this even in the case of idiots, with IQs below 20 and the extremest motor incompetence...

Fanatics always seem to have the same scrubbed and staring look about them. They have the look of people who do not masturbate, but who think about it almost all the time.

Personality and personal identity are in some ways like coordinates on the street map drawn by our intersecting relationships.

These young men, in other words, represented a variety of types, but one thing they had in common was that they'd all given up on committing positively to anything in life. This was not their fault,...

A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.

The icky part was knowing I was in the presence of a woman so crazy that she thought her highest calling was to incubate encapsulated alien teratomas until they came squirting out of her body and...

All people are both the objects and the perpetrators of prejudice. Our understanding of the prejudice directed against us informs our response to others.

If I decide to end my life, psychologically I wouldn't have to go far, because mentally and emotionally I am more prepared for this than for the unplanned daily perturbations marking each morning and...

His parents called him Youngster. They did this in the subconscious hope that he might take the hint. Wensleydale gave the impression of having been born with a mental age of 47.

Guilt was the grease in which the wheels of the authority turned.

The hippo of recollection stirred in the muddy waters of the mind.