Lauren Slater > Quotes

“I was born from nothing and to nothing I will return. And yet, when i say the word nothing, when i admit, at last, 'I am nothing,' i feel mysteriously like something again, ground zero, genesis, the pull of possibilities.”
― Lauren Slater

“I record my life, sifting and trying to separate what is real from what I’ve dreamed. I have decided not to tell you what is fact versus what is unfact primarily because (a) I am giving you a portrait of the essence of me, and (b) because, living where I do, living in the chasm that cuts through thought, it is lonely… come with me, reader. I am toying with you, yes, but for a real reason. I am asking you to enter the confusion with me, to give up the ground with me, because sometimes that frightening floaty place is really the truest of all. Kierkegaard says, ‘The greatest lie of all is the feeling of firmness beneath our feet. We are most honest when we are lost.’ Enter that lostness with me. Live in the place I am, where the view is murky, where the connecting bridges and orienting maps have been surgically stripped away.”
― Lauren Slater, Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir

“those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it”
― Lauren Slater, Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century

“Everyone knows that a lot of memoirs have made-up scenes; it's obvious. And everyone knows that half the time at least fictions contain literal autobiographical truths. So how do we decide what's what, and does it even matter?”
― Lauren Slater, Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir

“But then, not long after, in another article, Loftus writes, "We live in a strange and precarious time that resembles at its heart the hysteria and superstitious fervor of the witch trials." She took rifle lessons and to this day keeps the firing instruction sheets and targets posted above her desk. In 1996, when Psychology Today interviewed her, she burst into tears twice within the first twenty minutes, labile, lubricated, theatrical, still whip smart, talking about the blurry boundaries between fact and fiction while she herself lived in another blurry boundary, between conviction and compulsion, passion and hyperbole. "The witch hunts," she said, but the analogy is wrong, and provides us with perhaps a more accurate window into Loftus's stretched psyche than into our own times, for the witch hunts were predicated on utter nonsense, and the abuse scandals were predicated on something all too real, which Loftus seemed to forget: Women are abused. Memories do matter. Talking to her, feeling her high-flying energy the zeal that burns up the center of her life, you have to wonder, why. You are forced to ask the very kind of question Loftus most abhors: did something bad happen to her? For she herself seems driven by dissociated demons, and so I ask. What happened to you? Turns out, a lot.
(refers to Dr. Elizabeth F. Loftus)”
― Lauren Slater, Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century

“Loftus grew up with a cold father who taught her nothing about love but everything about angles. A mathematician, he showed her the beauty of the triangle's strong tip, the circumference of the circle, the rigorous mission of calculus. Her mother was softer, more dramatic, prone to deep depressions. Loftus tells all this to me with little feeling "I have no feelings about this right now," she says, "but when I'm in the right space I could cry." I somehow don't believe her; she seems so far from real tears, from the original griefs, so immersed in the immersed in the operas of others. Loftus recalls her father asking her out to see a play, and in the car, coming home at night, the moon hanging above them like a stopwatch, tick tick, her father saying to her, "You know, there's something wrong with your mother. She'll never be well again. Her father was right. When Loftus was fourteen, her mother drowned in the family swimming pool. She was found floating face down in the deep end, in the summer. The sun was just coming up, the sky a mess of reds and bruise. Loftus recalls the shock, the siren, an oxygen mask clamped over her mouth as she screamed, "Mother mother mother," hysteria. That is a kind of drowning. "I loved her," Loftus says. "Was it suicide?" I ask. She says, "My father thinks so.
Every year when I go home for Christmas, my brothers and I think about it, but we'll never know," she says. Then she says, "It doesn't matter." "What doesn't matter?" I ask. "Whether it was or it wasn't," she says. "It doesn't matter because it's all going to be okay." Then I hear nothing on the line but some static. on the line but some static. "You there?" I say. "Oh I'm here," she says. "Tomorrow I'm going to Chicago, some guy on death row, I'm gonna save him. I gotta go testify. Thank God I have my work," she says. "You've always had your work," I say. "Without it," she says, "Where would I be?”
― Lauren Slater, Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century

“And I have the same heart in the same socket of chest, and it hammers the way it used to, and I find myself thinking the same words, safe again, trapped again. My palms sweat on the steering wheel. I remind myself: I am not that girl. I am not that girl. I've changed. I've grown. It's a long time ago.”
― Lauren Slater, Welcome to My Country: A Therapist's Memoir of Madness

“Well before she became famous — or infamous, depending on where you cast your vote — Loftus's findings on memory distortion were clearly commodifiable. In the 1970s and 1980s she provided assistance to defense attorneys eager to prove to juries that eyewitness accounts are not the same as camcorders. "I've helped a lot of people," she says. Some of those people: the Hillside Strangler, the Menendez brothers, Oliver North, Ted Bundy. "Ted Bundy?" I ask, when she tells this to me. Loftus laughs. "This was before we knew he was Bundy. He hadn't been accused of murder yet." "How can you be so confident the people you're representing are really innocent?" I ask. She doesn't directly answer. She says, "In court, I go by the evidence.... Outside of court, I'm human and entitled to my human feelings. "What, I wonder are her human feelings about the letter from a child-abuse survivor who wrote, "Let me tell you what false memory syndrome does to people like me, as if you care. It makes us into liars. False memory syndrome is so much more chic than child abuse.... But there are children who tonight while you sleep are being raped, and beaten. These children may never tell because 'no one will believe them.'" "Plenty of "Plenty of people will believe them," says Loftus. Pshaw! She has a raucous laugh and a voice with a bit of wheedle in it. She is strange, I think, a little loose inside. She veers between the professional and the personal with an alarming alacrity," she could easily have been talking about herself.”
― Lauren Slater, Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century

“Illness was a temporary respite, a release from the demands of an alienating world.”
― Lauren Slater, Prozac Diary

“Why doesn't passionate love last? how is it possible to see a person as beautiful on Monday, and 364 days later, on another Monday, to see that beauty as bland? surely the object of your affection could not have changed that much. she still has the same shaped eyes. her voice has always had that husky sound, but now it grates on you - she sounds like she needs an antibiotic.”
― Lauren Slater

“I felt a clot in my throat, something that wouldn't let language come. ... And there is also a dream I have over and over again, of opening up my mouth and finding my tongue studded with broken glass, so every word is a wound.”
― Lauren Slater, Welcome to My Country: A Therapist's Memoir of Madness

“I couldn’t reach her. I was never able to reach her. Maybe she moved at a pace too fast. Maybe she was too sad. She held herself stiff, a lacquered lady. I think because I couldn’t feel her, I couldn’t feel myself.”
― Lauren Slater, Prozac Diary

“William talks about there being two kinds of will. Will A and Will B, I call it. Will A is what we all learn, to hold your head high, stuff it down, swallow your sobs, work hard kind of will. Will B, while it seems a slacker thing, is actually harder to have. It's a willingness instead of a willfulness, an ability to take life on life's terms as opposed to putting up a big fight. It's about being bendable, not brittle, a person who is brave enough to try to ride the waves instead of trying to stop them. Will B is what you need in order to learn to fall. It's the kind of will my mother never taught me, and yours probably never taught you either. It's a secret greater than sex; it's a spiritual thing. Will B is not passive. It means an active acceptance, a say yes, and you have to have a voice and courage if you want to learn it.”
― Lauren Slater, Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir

“How do you describe emptiness? Is it the air inside a bubble, the darkness in a pocket, snow? I think, yes, I was six when or seven when I first felt it, the dwindling that is depression.”
― Lauren Slater, Prozac Diary

“To say I believe time is fluid, and so are the boundaries between human beings, the border separating helper from the one who hurts always blurry.”
― Lauren Slater, Welcome to My Country: A Therapist's Memoir of Madness

“All it takes is the right training, and we step out, over the boundaries of our bodies and their limitations.”
― Lauren Slater, Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century

“In real time, darkness might last eight hours, but in psychological time, it can go for vast stretches.”
― Lauren Slater, Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir

“Methylene blue was a kind of home run that disappeared from psychiatric use not because it was ineffective or barbaric but because, according to British psychopharmacologist David Healy, “patents had been obtained on newer agents and no drug company would market an old drug even if it worked.” In the case of methylene blue, then, “there were competing therapies or interest groups likely to make more money out of other therapies than they would from methylene blue.” In the 1970s, methylene blue reemerged as a means of treating manic depression, for which it was highly effective, but ultimately corporate profit-seeking interests rather than therapeutic outcomes won the day.”
― Lauren Slater, Blue Dreams: The Science and the Story of the Drugs that Changed Our Minds

“I had lots of books, most of them nonfiction, because I’d always felt that in nonfiction, specifically in the disciplines of psychology, philosophy, and theology, I might find clues about ways to live my life.”
― Lauren Slater, Prozac Diary

“I watch the sky progress through its morning paces, the light turning from rose to saffron as the sun ascends, its rays like ribbons tangling in the tops of trees.”
― Lauren Slater, Playing House: Notes of a Reluctant Mother

“It is a fundamental misperception," Fouts says to me, "to think human life has more value than any other life form.”
― Lauren Slater, The $60,000 Dog: My Life with Animals

“I never said to myself, I am longing; that feeling lived at a level below language.”
― Lauren Slater, The $60,000 Dog: My Life with Animals

“if there is no proof that a depressed person has a chemical imbalance, and you choose nevertheless to put that person on a medication that will alter neurotransmitter levels in his or her brain, then in effect you are causing a chemical imbalance rather than curing one. According to Steven Hyman, a neuroscientist and former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, all psychotropic drugs cause “perturbations in neurotransmitter functions.” And this is Whitaker’s main point. We are subjecting millions of brains to drugs that change natural neurotransmission, sometimes radically, disturbing and upsetting the complex interplay inside our heads, clogging neural pathways with excess chemicals, and sometimes causing the entire brain, which is intricately interlinked, to malfunction in ways we do not yet understand. An unmedicated depressed patient does not have a known chemical imbalance in his brain, but once he ingests Prozac, he will. The drug crosses the blood-brain barrier and gets to work, jamming serotonin into the synaptic cleft. Whitaker explains the result this way: “Several weeks later the serotonergic pathway is operating in a decidedly abnormal manner.”
― Lauren Slater, Blue Dreams: The Science and the Story of the Drugs that Changed Our Minds

“Wounds, I think, are never confined to a single skin but reach out to rasp us all.”
― Lauren Slater, Welcome to My Country: A Therapist's Memoir of Madness

“There is betrayal here, in what I do, but in betrayal I am finally camouflaged.”
― Lauren Slater, Welcome to My Country: A Therapist's Memoir of Madness

“I have said the word mother to myself so many times it is starting to lose its shock. [...] Repeat any word enough and it will cease to alarm you. Mother mother mother mother. Slowly, so slowly, I am growing used to its weight on the tip of my tongue, its echo and its shape.”
― Lauren Slater, Love Works Like This: Moving from One Kind of Life to Another

“Amelia, in other words, was not following me because she loved me; she followed me because some dumb drive urged her to do so, the drive itself as wild as wings or water.”
― Lauren Slater

“Not once has the instructor talked about parenting after the baby is born. Instead, we fetishize labor. We focus on it to the exclusion of each other, our children, our futures. Is this because it can be taught, and parenting can't? Because, Americans to the bitter end, we love a sport, grow bored by things more subtle?”
― Lauren Slater, Love Works Like This: Moving from One Kind of Life to Another

“I, too.”
― Lauren Slater, Welcome to My Country: A Therapist's Memoir of Madness

“I felt, for sure, a prayer come through my grandmother's hands, a language of pulse and palm lines, and the prayer said this: May you hold her, and in holding her, hold us, forever down the line.”
― Lauren Slater, Love Works Like This: Moving from One Kind of Life to Another