Blood Test

To trust someone is to take the greatest risk of all. (180)

His experience and training should have taught him that families are the cauldrons in which violence is brewed. (144)

I'd been trained in the art of psychotherapy, the excavation of the past as a means of untangling the present and rendering it livable. It's detective work, of sorts, crouching stealthily in the blind alleys of the unconscious. (179)

A good chunk of my life had been spent sorting out the scrambled communications, festering hostilities, and frozen affections that characterized families in turmoil. (257)

I'd long thought that a surfeit of sensitivity could be a killing thing, too much insight malignant in its own right. The best survivors--there are studies that show it--are those blessed with an inordinate ability to deny. And keep on marching.

Icy people often freeze themselves in order to hold in check a volcanic stew of disturbing and conflictual feelings. Emotional hibernation, if you will. Crack the ice and the stuff inside comes pouring out with all the discipline of molten lava.

most precious thing in my life is us. Didn’t you once tell me that all the busy little things we do—career, achievement—are just trim around the edges? That what’s important is the intimacy we establish in our lifetime? I bought it. I really believe that.

I’d long thought that a surfeit of sensitivity could be a killing thing, too much insight malignant in its own right. The best survivors—there are studies that show it—are those blessed with an inordinate ability to deny. And keep on marching.

If the whole country ever got that industrious the Japanese wouldn’t stand a chance.

again. It had gotten colder, but no better.