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I know that when I talk to my parents and my friends, there's a strong feeling of the world out of control and damaged.

We had some wonderful people raising us, but they still weren't our parents. As you get older, it gets distorted and convoluted, complicated, and, of course, you start looking for attention, affection, affinity in all the wrong places and in all the wrong ways.

It is only when parental feelings are ineffective or too ambivalent or when the mother's emotions are temporarily engaged elsewhere that children feel lost.

Negative emotions like loneliness, envy, and guilt have an important role to play in a happy life; they're big, flashing signs that something needs to change.

Most of us have unhealthy thoughts and emotions that have either developed as a result of trauma or hardships in their childhood, or the way they were raised.

I'm one of those introverted people who simply feels a lot better after spending time alone thinking through ideas and emotions. This is a sign, I've come to think, of a kind of emotional disturbance - a reaction to inner fragility. I wish I were more able to just act and do, rather than constantly have to retreat and examine and think.

It's one thing for other people to see potential in you, and it's quite another for you to understand that and see it in yourself.

I think that we all have within us the potential for almost anything. If we play close attention to our lives, then we can get at it somehow.

Social connection is such a basic feature of human experience that when we are deprived of it, we suffer.

Being alone & actually sitting with our own thoughts can lead to such growth and realizations that are rare in our everyday busy lives.