How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

by David Brooks

“The mind is its own place,” the poet John Milton wrote, “and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”

The journalist Sally Brampton called depression a landscape that “is cold and black and empty. It is more terrifying and more horrible than anywhere I have ever been, even in my nightmares.”

When your oldest friend is battling his demons, it’s natural to wonder about your own.

I may never live in New York again, but I’ll never be able to completely live anywhere else. First I inhabited New York, and forever after it inhabits me, and I live with this semiconscious prejudice that if you’re not living in New York, you’re not really trying.

He studies medicine and philosophy, because he wants to close “the gap between what he’d experienced and what he was able to say.”