The Silent Patient

Remember, love that doesn’t include honesty doesn’t deserve to be called love.”

“A baby cannot hate the mother, without the mother first hating the baby.”

I mustn’t put strangeness where there’s nothing. I think that is the danger of keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything, you are on the lookout, and you continually stretch the truth.

That’s the truth. I didn’t kill Gabriel. He killed me.

All I did was pull the trigger.

Once you name something, it stops you seeing the whole of it, or why it matters. You focus on the word, which is just the tiniest part, really, the tip of an iceberg.

The aim of therapy is not to correct the past, but to enable the patient to confront his own history, and to grieve over it.

As Winnicott put it, “A baby cannot hate the mother, without the mother first hating the baby.”

We’re all crazy, I believe, just in different ways.

About how we often mistake love for fireworks—for drama and dysfunction. But real love is very quiet, very still. It’s boring, if seen from the perspective of high drama. Love is deep and calm—and constant.

That’s the terrible irony: I did all this to keep Kathy—and I’ve lost her anyway