Home > Work > When the Bough Breaks (Alex Delaware, #1)
1 " There were nights when I left the sessions physically and emotionally drained after hearing the anguish pour out like blood from a gaping wound. Don’t let anyone ever tell you different – psychotherapy is one of the most taxing endeavors known to mankind; I’ve done all sorts of work, from picking carrots in the scorching sun to sitting on national committees in paneled board rooms, and there’s nothing that compares to confronting human misery hour after hour and bearing the responsibility for easing that misery using only one’s mind and mouth. At its best it’s tremendously uplifting as you watch the patient open up, breathe, let go of the pain. At its worst is like surfing in a cesspool struggling for balance while being slapped with wave after putrid wave. "
― Jonathan Kellerman , When the Bough Breaks (Alex Delaware, #1)
2 " Pessimism is not good for the soul.""I sold my soul years ago.""To whom?""The bitch goddess Success. She cut town before paying off. "
3 " Assholes are like weeds, a bitch to get rid of and when you do another one grows back in its place. "
4 " It was shaping up as a beautiful morning. The last thing I wanted to hear about was murder. "
5 " Sometimes things don’t fall into place just because you do a good job. "
6 " Zeigarnik. She was a Russian psychologist who discovered that people develop tension for unfinished business. They named it after her. The Zeigarnik effect. Like most overachievers I’ve got a big one. "
7 " made out a shape at the other end of the greenhouse, "
8 " that’s the mark of an intellectual, in my view, becoming cognizant of one’s own insignificance in relation to the accumulated mass of human knowledge. "
9 " I explained to her that hypnosis wasn’t magic, simply a combination of focused concentration and deep relaxation, that people tended to remember things more clearly when they were relaxed and that was why the police used it for witnesses. "
10 " It was bizarre, getting to know for the first time a woman whose body I’d entered. In the scrambled word game of contemporary mating rituals, there was greater intimacy in her tales of woe than there had been in the opening of her thighs. "
11 " I looked over and saw the palsied children battling with their food. No amount of exposure to the members of the privileged class was going to bring them membership in the Yacht Club, an invitation to the Blue Ribbon Upper Crust Debutante Ball of San Marino, or a Mercedes in the garage. "
12 " Alex, you can break your ass trying to achieve Nirvana Through Inertia, but it won’t work. It’s like that Woody Allen line—you mellow too much, you ripen and rot. "
