Jonathan Kellerman > Quotes

“Life is like a prism. What you see depends on how you turn the glass.”
― Jonathan Kellerman

“To trust someone is to take the greatest risk of all. (180)”
― Jonathan Kellerman, Blood Test

“His experience and training should have taught him that families are the cauldrons in which violence is brewed. (144)”
― Jonathan Kellerman, Blood Test

“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.”
― Jonathan Kellerman, Blood Test

“Therapist’s dilemma: those who need help the most, run the farthest from it.”
― Jonathan Kellerman, Time Bomb

“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)”
― Jonathan Kellerman, Blood Test

“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)”
― Jonathan Kellerman, Blood Test

“The science of psychotherapy is knowing what to say, the art is knowing when to say it. (36)”
― Jonathan Kellerman, Over The Edge

“Creighton tried to smile again. The result fit him like panty hose on a mastiff.”
― Jonathan Kellerman, Deception

“The key to excellent report writing' he said between chews, 'is to take every bit of passion out of it. Use an extra heaping portion of superflously extraneous tautological redundancies in order to make it mind-numbingly boring. So that when one's superior officers read it, they zone out and start skimming and maybe don't notice the fact that one has been spinning one's wheels since the body turned up and hasn't solved a goddamn thing.”
― Jonathan Kellerman, Private Eyes

“The stress of grad school can drive anyone temporarily mad.”
― Jonathan Kellerman, Devil's Waltz

“All of us are like locks. No matter how strong the bolt, there’s always a key out there that opens it.”
― Jonathan Kellerman, Self-Defense

“-a Jew had to have two synagogues. One that he went to, one that he rejected.
The Butcher's Theater”
― Jonathan Kellerman, The Butcher's Theater

“Just because others have it worse doesn’t mean you have to suffer in silence.”
― Jonathan Kellerman, Self-Defense

“Sleep. The ultimate resistance”
― Jonathan Kellerman, Self-Defense

“Optimism is denial for chumps with no life experience".
"What's pessimism?" I said.
"Religion without God.”
― Jonathan Kellerman