160 Quotes by Lori Gottlieb

If the queen had balls, she’d be the king.” If you go through life picking and choosing, if you don’t recognize that “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” you may deprive yourself of joy.

It isn’t that I haven’t been able to write at all. In fact, during the time I was supposed to be writing my book, I was crafting fabulously witty and flirtatious emails to Boyfriend, all while telling friends and family and even Boyfriend that I was busy writing my book. I was like the closet gambler who gets dressed for work and kisses his family goodbye each morning and then drives to the casino instead of the office.

Therapy elicits odd reactions because, in a way, it’s like pornography. Both involve a kind of nudity. Both have the potential to thrill. And both have millions of users, most of whom keep their use private.

Even as I no longer had the strength to exercise and inexplicably lost ten pounds – I felt sluggish and weighted down even as I became lighter – I assured myself it must be something benign, like, I don’t know, menopause.

In idiot compassion, you avoid rocking the boat to spare people’s feelings, even though the boat needs rocking and your compassion ends up being more harmful than your honesty.

Changing our relationship to the past is a staple of therapy. But we talk far less about how our relationship to the future informs the present too. Our notion of the future can be just as powerful a roadblock to change as our notion of the past. In.

I once heard creativity described as being the ability to grasp the essence of one thing and the essence of some very different thing and smash them together to create some entirely new thing. That’s what therapists do too. We take the essence of the initial snapshot and the essence of an imagined snapshot and smash them together to create an entirely new one.

Sometimes we are the cause of our difficulties. And if we can step out of our own way, something astonishing happens.

Sometimes in their pain, people believe that the agony will last forever. But feelings are actually more like weather systems – they blow in and they blow out. Just because you feel sad this minute or this hour or this day doesn’t mean you’ll feel that way in ten minutes or this afternoon or next week. Everything you feel – anxiety, elation, anguish – blows in and out again.