"Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has eve known me. That's when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no one's memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?"
— Irvin D. Yalom (Love's Executioner: & Other Tales of Psychotherapy)

"Only the wounded healer can truly heal. (97)"
— Irvin D. Yalom (Lying on the Couch: A Novel)

"What? 'Borderline patients play games'? That what you said? Ernest, you'll never be a real therapist if you think like that. That's exactly what I meant earlier when I talked about the dangers of diagnosis. There are borderlines and there are borderlines. Labels do violence to people. You can't treat the label; you have to treat the person behind the label. (17)"
— Irvin D. Yalom (Lying on the Couch: A Novel)