Keith Ablow Quotes & Sayings

We are, all of us, crippled and twisted. Most of us strive desperately to keep our grotesqueries out of sight and mind. Our suffering is transformed by an alchemy of the soul into addiction, ulcers, strokes, hatred, even war. — Keith Ablow

The roots of any evil deed can be traced to the perpetrator's refusal to experience pain. — Keith Ablow

A jealous husband is an ugly thing. — Keith Ablow

The irrational thoughts were the ones with the power to burn holes in your gut. — Keith Ablow

That's what a little victory in psychiatry looks like. You slip into the shadows, dodging the mind's defense mechanisms, glad enough to take a half-step toward the truth. Behind the next word or the next glance may lurk the demon you seek, all in flames, desperate to be held, but set to flee. (8) — Keith Ablow

Deep down, everyone wants the truth. — Keith Ablow

Watching her, he saw again how she teetered between adolescence and adulthood, with a raw sensuality that had to deposit her in a kind of no-man's land
too much a woman for boys her own age, too young for fully adult men. — Keith Ablow

Human empathy, while not found on any chart of human anatomy, is the reason we instinctively hurt for our children ... it is the reason that one human being's intensely personal tests and triumphs can be harnessed to the good of countless others. — Keith Ablow

Relationships are never chance events. — Keith Ablow

The horrific fact that our lives and those of the people we love are impermanent and exquisitely fragile, that any of us can cease to exist without warning, that loving anyone, anywhere, at any time, leaves you infinitely vulnerable at every single moment. (20) — Keith Ablow

He started to feel for himself, which is the only way to start feeling for others. (24) — Keith Ablow

Maybe the trying is the thing. Maybe it doesn't get better than that. Maybe you never quite get there. And maybe that's okay. — Keith Ablow

If you're going to have 19 children, you should supervise them well. — Keith Ablow

Most children would rather preserve the fantasy of a loving connection with their fathers and mothers, at all costs, even if it costs them their self-esteem. When you're three or seven years old, it's less frightening to think of yourself as an unlovable, disappointing screwup than to recognize the fact that you're living with a monster. — Keith Ablow

Like most of the connections that explain the pain in our hearts, he couldn't bring it to mind. He couldn't see the truth because it was too big and it was right in front of him. — Keith Ablow

Plenty of people who survive tragedies end up ambivalent about danger
frightened by it, yet strangely drawn to it. — Keith Ablow

If you take the teachings of Jesus, whether you consider yourself saved or you don't, those teachings are pristine. They're wonderful guides for life. And there's nothing in them that says hurt other people. — Keith Ablow

The bad things don't seem to happen to bad people.'
That's because they already did. There's no original evil left in the world. — Keith Ablow

Because depression is so thematically powerful and so dark, when it's very severe, it can make people feel not only as if they've lost a loving connection, but as if the whole world is devoid of love, so if we wonder how somebody could take 149 people with him when he commits suicide, one answer can be that depression, when it's most severe, can make people feel that life is completely without value, not just for them but for anyone. — Keith Ablow

Most of you guys can't see the potential in a nervous breakdown. A real collapse. There's more chance of finding yourself in a major depression than there is in a bottle Prozac. — Keith Ablow

You've got to think of every talent you have, every gift you could give the world around you. And you've got to take the chance of giving it. (246) — Keith Ablow

Loving anyone, anywhere, at any time, leaves you infinitely vulnerable at every single moment. — Keith Ablow

I think men should be able to veto women's abortions if they're willing to care for the child after it's born. — Keith Ablow

The truth will set you free. Unless you're guilty. — Keith Ablow

Nothing overdone, nothing racy, which made her all the more alluring. — Keith Ablow

For a psychiatrist to be any good, he has to be willing to corner you, close off the easy exits, even when it hurts. It's supposed to. (46) — Keith Ablow

Woody Allen once said that 90 percent of life is about showing up. Ninety percent of healing people in psychological pain is shutting up - at least long enough to let them bleed the truth. That sounds easy, but it isn't. (68) — Keith Ablow

A man like Kappler might become angriest, most detached, even sickest at those times his psychiatrist edges closest to the truths about his life. The rage and even the psychosis has to be seen for what it is: the flamethrower of a fortress under siege. Pleasantries, humor, and easy exchanges might be clues that no real work is being done.
There can be no retreat on the psychiatrist's part. One patient with a psychotic illness has written: "the doctor has to feel sure he has the right to break into the illness, just as a parent knows he has the right to walk into a baby's room, no matter what the baby feels about it. The doctor has to know he's doing the right thing ... some people go through life with vomit on their lips. You can feel their terrible hunger but they defy you to feed them." (95, The Strange Case of Dr. Kappler) — Keith Ablow

Some people hurt so much they can't take what they need, even when someone wants to give it to them. (106) — Keith Ablow

Everything terrible is something that needs our love. - Rilke (231) — Keith Ablow

People blush when one of their core truths is revealed. — Keith Ablow

It is a terrible and exquisitely human irony that children inadequately nurtured almost never give up on the breast. The thirst for love from a mother or father who cannot provide it is seemingly unquenchable. I have treated sixty- and seventy-year-old business executives, politicians, and physicians still desperate for approval from shriveled, emotionally barren men and women in their eighties and nineties. (257) — Keith Ablow

But insight doesn't necessarily produce self-control. Sometimes you just see your destructiveness more clearly. — Keith Ablow

There's no original evil left in the world. Everyone's just recycling pain. (257) — Keith Ablow

Sometimes when you push someone, you find out who that person really is. — Keith Ablow

What about my rights? What about a person's privacy? Did all that just go to hell after 9/11? — Keith Ablow

I figured anybody who talked about church as much as she did was using it a little like cocaine anyhow. — Keith Ablow

People react predictably, especially when they don't have time to think. — Keith Ablow

I shook my head at all the things that can happen to break a man as he grows up and away from the pure potential of infancy, all the things that had fractured inside me. And I prayed silently that this infant, born into chaos, might meet with kindness, experience joy and find passion in life. Every one of us ought to be able to count on that much. (308) — Keith Ablow

My throat tightened, but I held back the tears and reminded myself that withdrawing from a woman is no different than kicking a drug; you feel shaky and you want it, but eventually the need passes, and you feel restored. — Keith Ablow

Everyone - rich or poor, black or white, educated or not - is in emotional turmoil, in some sort of pain. (51) — Keith Ablow

God is not attracted to mountaintops or church steeples. God is drawn to suffering, and the dark places it surfaces, which is why sharing pain freely feels very much like love, and may be the same thing. (207) — Keith Ablow

Maybe learning to be human was about learning to live in pain, not trying to figure out how to live pain-free. (156) — Keith Ablow

When people can do something simple to avoid conflict
say, hit a button or unlock a latch
they'll generally do it. — Keith Ablow

But that's the hardest part of healing.'
What?'
Realizing there's no one to hate. — Keith Ablow

The good guys had to operate on a higher level than the killers
just for society to keep track of who was who. — Keith Ablow

What was it about not knowing a person that allowed you to wonder whether she might be the answer to all your problems? — Keith Ablow