Keith Ablow

The roots of any evil deed can be traced to the perpetrator's refusal to experience pain.

The bad things don't seem to happen to bad people.'That's because they already did. There's no original evil left in the world.

The irrational thoughts were the ones with the power to burn holes in your gut.

We are, all of us, crippled and twisted. Most of us strive desperately to keep our grotesqueries out of sight and mind. Our suffering is transformed by an alchemy of the soul into addiction, ulcers, strokes, hatred, even war.

Human empathy, while not found on any chart of human anatomy, is the reason we instinctively hurt for our children_ it is the reason that one human being__ intensely personal tests and triumphs can be harnessed to the good of countless others.

Most of you guys can't see the potential in a nervous breakdown. A real collapse. There's more chance of finding yourself in a major depression than there is in a bottle Prozac.

Deep down, everyone wants the truth.

The truth will set you free. Unless you're guilty.

Nothing overdone, nothing racy, which made her all the more alluring.

Maybe the trying is the thing. Maybe it doesn't get better than that. Maybe you never quite get there. And maybe that's okay.

Plenty of people who survive tragedies end up ambivalent about danger--frightened by it, yet strangely drawn to it.

God is not attracted to mountaintops or church steeples. God is drawn to suffering, and the dark places it surfaces.

I figured anybody who talked about church as much as she did was using it a little like cocaine anyhow.

What about my rights? What about a person's privacy? Did all that just go to hell after 9/11?

A jealous husband is an ugly thing.

My throat tightened, but I held back the tears and reminded myself that withdrawing from a woman is no different than kicking a drug; you feel shaky and you want it, but eventually the need passes, and you feel restored.

Watching her, he saw again how she teetered between adolescence and adulthood, with a raw sensuality that had to deposit her in a kind of no-man's land--too much a woman for boys her own age, too young for fully adult men.

What was it about not knowing a person that allowed you to wonder whether she might be the answer to all your problems?