Melanie Thernstrom > Quotes

“It was like sawdust, the unhappiness: it infiltrated everything, everything was a problem, everything made her cry -- school, homework, boyfriends, the future, the lack of future, the uncertainty of future, fear of future, fear in general -- but it was so hard to say exactly what the problem was in the first place.”
― Melanie Thernstrom, The Dead Girl

“He's like a lake. You assume it has great depths, pure undisturbed undiscoverable depths. You assume depths must be there because the surface is so flat--pretty and flat and utterly unrevealing. Boring almost, you might say, if you didn't know about the depths, that is, if you didn't believe they were there.”
― Melanie Thernstrom, The Dead Girl

“Like all chronic disease, chronic pain involves a bifurcation,” he said. “There is the normal state, where you used to live, and you are conditioned to that state. Then you face a debilitating circumstance that lasts for months or years. When you’re in that second state, you hold on to expectations of that first life: you mourn that first life—you want it and want it a million times over. But people have to let themselves die and lose their old expectations. If they let it die, they can rise like a phoenix from the ashes and can have a new life. The doctor has to help them die and be reborn with a vital, rich life.”
― Melanie Thernstrom, The Pain Chronicles: Cures, Myths, Mysteries, Prayers, Diaries, Brain Scans, Healing, and the Science of Suffering

“He mentioned a grim truism in analgesia research known as the “30 rule”—that the existing pain drugs generally reduce pain by 30 percent in 30 percent of people—“and before we start treating them, we have no idea who is going to respond or not.”
― Melanie Thernstrom, The Pain Chronicles: Cures, Myths, Mysteries, Prayers, Diaries, Brain Scans, Healing, and the Science of Suffering