You can believe something really hard,' Faith says, 'and still be wrong.

Odd things happen in a battle, and the human heart has strange and gruesome depths and the human brain still stranger shallows;

The man who believes he can deceive the system and deceive us is definitely mentally ill.

Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?

Inevitably, anytime we are too vulnerable we feel the need to protect ourselves from further wounds. So we resort to sarcasm, cutting humor, criticism -- anything that will keep from exposing the...

When someone is telling you their story over and over, they are trying to figure something out.

The truth is that torture creates the torturers

In other words, it requires deliberate self-deception, including a constant effort to repress or block out unpleasant possibilities and 'negative' thoughts. The truly self-confident, or those who have...

I wonder why reality has to be simple. My experience has taught me that, on the contrary, it is rarely so, and when there is something that seems extraordinarily clear, an action that appears to obey...

Unsociable even at home and unable to meet the eyes of strangers when she ventured out, Emily made her awkward way across days and years whose bareness appalls her biographers.

Sometimes I think the urge to believe in our own worldview is our most powerful intellectual imperative, the mind's equivalent of feeding, fighting, and fornicating. People will eagerly twist facts...

When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice, Amos

Betsy: "Do you have daddy issues, Warren?" Warren: "Dad was supportive, intelligent, read to me as a kid, left me a trillion dollars. It's hard to complain."

Denial is a critical part of the human coping mechanism. Without it, we would all wake up terrified every morning about all the ways we could die. Instead, our minds block out our existential fears by...

Make no mistake. I take these children seriously. It is not possible to see too much in them, to overindulge your casual gift for the study of character. It is all there, in full force, charged waves...

And the definition of that person, when he has rejected the mythos, is "insane." To

When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.

He doesn't talk to me, he behaves as if the act of talking physically pains him and

It was my fifth lie to the police. I was just starting.

Amy's basically exploiting the sociopath's most reliable maxim. The bigger the lie, the more they believe it.

It was a strange creative experience that deserves to be explained, even just because we know from now on how insatiable and corrosive the habit of writing is for children who want to become writers...

Bad luck doesn't have any chinks in it," he said with deep bitterness. "I was born a son of a bitch and I'm going to die a son of a bitch.

I discovered there was an endless source of robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists.

It's always easier to learn something than to use what you've learned. . . . You're alone when you're learning. But you always use it on other people. It's different when there are other people...

One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.

But I remember one thing: it wasn't me that started acting deaf, it was people that first started acting like I was too dumb to hear or see or say anything at all.

He's the sort of guy that gets a laugh out of people.

Most of the psychological differences between men and women seem to come from differences in their reproductive system

Psychological motivation is the desire to change relations between two points, and so psychology is the study of equations with two unbound variables. {"America: Three Audiences"}

It is not the universal and the regular that characterize the individual, but rather the unique. He is not to be understood as a recurrent unit but as something unique and singular which in the last...