The Silent Patient

Remember, love that doesn’t include honesty doesn’t deserve to be called love.”

“A baby cannot hate the mother, without the mother first hating the baby.”

Brutal, yes—and unkind. I’m not proud of that phone call. But it seemed like the only honest action to take. I still don’t know what I could have done differently.

then, slowly, in the darkness, I realized something.

I didn’t want to die. Not yet; not when I hadn’t lived.

You become increasingly comfortable with madness—and not just the madness of others, but your own.

I mustn’t put strangeness where there’s nothing. I think that is the danger of keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything, you are on the lookout, and you continually stretch the truth.

That’s the truth. I didn’t kill Gabriel. He killed me.

All I did was pull the trigger.

Once you name something, it stops you seeing the whole of it, or why it matters. You focus on the word, which is just the tiniest part, really, the tip of an iceberg.

The aim of therapy is not to correct the past, but to enable the patient to confront his own history, and to grieve over it.

—ALICE MILLER

The aim of therapy is not to correct the past, but to enable the patient to confront his own history, and to grieve over it.

—ALICE MILLER