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Loving this book

I am using this to fall asleep at night, it is amazingly effective.

I put this off for a while because I don’t have my priorities in order but it is delightful and, esp. after Infinite Jest, a very east read.

This is insanely good. It should be required reading, like the first book anyone has to read, in therapy school.

What would it be like to be enslaved by Southern plantation Nazi Fascists during the Christian Reformation? This seems to be the question she is trying to answer. Dead, doom, rape, and pain on every page for the last hundred pages or so. I am hoping this goes somewhere at some point....

Christmas night...destruction and inferno silhouetting my sadness and longing. Self-pity is a trap but shen you’re already trapped, it can be a comfort.

Get ready: the truth is too valuable to put safety first
Get set: No amount of exposure is unbearable unless you let it be
Go: If you get caught with your pants down, take ‘em off.

I will never know the right balance in art between painful truths and painful silences.

You’re going to have to force yourself to go out and enjoy yourself, playacting until you give up the ghost, because from here on out it’s just one melancholy circle after another and going forward means coming back, that’s right progressus ad originem equals regressus ad futurum and your brain is nothing but a hydrolic press of compacted thought.

I, who had constantly read books in search of a sign, never received a word from the heavens, while she, who had always hated books, became what she was meant to be, the kind of person people write about...

I can live by myself because I am never lonely, I’m simply alone, living in my heavily populated solitude, a harum-scarum of infinity and eternity, and Infinity and Eternity seem to take a liking to the likes of me.

It now lately sometimes seemed like some black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe.

“Boo,...I believe the only real monsters might be the type of liar where there’s simply no way to tell. The ones who give nothing away.’
‘But then how do you know they’re monsters, then?’
‘That’s the monstrosity right there, Boo, I’m starting to think.’
‘Golly Ned.’
‘That they walk among us. Teach our children. Inscrutable. Brass-faced.’

We’re a lot more i tuts out our lovers’ families than we are about our own families, she knew.

Mrs. Incadenza never punished and refused to act as if she believed lying was even a possibility as far as her children were concerned, and treated an exploded lie as an insoluble cosmic mystery instead of an exploded lie.

“Randy Lenz up at the northeast corner likes to raise his can of tonic and say Don’s food is the kind of food that really helps you appreciate whatever you’re drinking along with it.”

“‘Getting In Touch With Your Feelings’ is another quilted-sampler-type cliché that ends up masking something ghastly deep and real, it turns out.”

“You’re ordering me to pray? Because I allegedly have a disease? I dismantle my life and career and enter nine months if low-income treatment for a disease and I’m prescribed prayer? Does the word retrograde signify? Am I in a sociohistorical era I don’t know about? What exactly is the story here?”

“Even then, of course, the bulk of US consumers remained verifiably reluctant to leave home and teleputer and to interface personally, though this phenomenon’s endurance can’t be attributed to the videophony-fad per se, and anyway the new panagoraphobia served to open huge new entrepreneurial teleputerized markets for home-shopping and delivery, and didn’t cause much industry concern.” P151. Nailed it

“Once a person was asked to step into this brutal century, anything could happen”

God, I love this book. I can’t remember the last time anything made me laugh from my belly.

I can’t remember the last time I was so excited by writing. I can’t believe he wrote this at 15.

"By seeking to realize that which has no concrete existence by means of behavior based on the concept of "concreteness," one becomes like a hungry she-wolf that stretches out unsupported into the void."

"The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia's life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal."

"Her Grave" is the first gem in this collection, and brings me to tears, but nearly the poems so far stand on their own as brilliant. Her talent and skill is remarkable.

May I be blessed to read this book for the rest of my life. Round three, here we go.

This basically answers the question, "can therapy really change my life?" With a resounding, "yes" using scientific language and neuroscience research.

I'm pretty sure this is going to end up in the top ten psych books I've read. About every other page I fantasize about who I can give a copy to because they will benefit so much from the presentation of information.

I've made it through the first two chapters and was amazed by how motivating they are. I have such low regard for "self help" but Grotzgi does a great job of addressing the irrational fears and distressed feelings that get in the way of *caring* for my business. Once it was put in relational terms- I had a 180 shift.

Oh, this is so much more interesting than The Mindful Therapist. I've gotten through three chapters just today. His explanation and research findings on attachment are the best I have ever read