It wasn't a question of deceit. Just the opposite; he wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt.

...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.

I couldn't see where the collection of Burger King figurines fit in, but I supposed there was no reason why psychopaths shouldn't have unrelated hobbies.

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...

Sit down, Nancy. Did I do something wrong?

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...

He would deny this is confronted, citing evasively his affection for Dante and Giotto, but anything overtly religious filled him with a pagan alarm; and I believe that like Pliny, whom he resembled in...

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.

Are you surprised by anything anymore?

Fear is the little death, daughter. It kills in tiny pieces.

I was not sure if, having been told such lies as children, they could not differentiate between truth and lies, or whether it was a survival method they had mastered.

It's a rare person to face who they truly are and not run from it -- not be broken by it. That's what the Ouroboros shows all who look into it: who they are, every despicable and unholy inch. Some...

I wonder if men find it easier than women do to consider people not as bodies, as lives, but as numbers, figures, toys of the mind to be pushed about a battleground of the mind. This disembodiment...

The doctor was not, he thought, really sure that anyone else existed, and wanted to prove they did by helping them.