Top 150 Lori Gottlieb Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “During an initial burst of pain, people tend to lash out either at others or at themselves, to turn the anger outward or inward.”

— Lori Gottlieb

102. “I once told Wendell that I’m a terrible decision maker, that often what I think I want doesn’t turn out the way I’d imagined. But there were two notable exceptions, and both proved to be the best decisions of my life. In each case, I was nearly forty. One was my decision to have a baby. The other was my decision to become a therapist.”

— Lori Gottlieb

103. “Insight is the booby prize of therapy“ is my favorite maxim of the trade, meaning that you can have all the insight in the world, but if you don’t change when you’re out in the world, the insight and the therapy is worthless. Insight allows you to ask yourself, “Is this something that’s being done to me or am I doing it to myself?“. The answer gives you choices, but it’s up to you to make them.”

— Lori Gottlieb

104. “I remember reading a divorced woman’s experience of getting to know a new lover after her decades-long marriage ended: “I will never lock eyes in the delivery room with David,” she wrote. “I’ve never met his mother.”

— Lori Gottlieb

105. “The three words women most want to hear from a man are, “You lost weight””

— Lori Gottlieb

106. “You know what I love about Rosie?” he says. “She’s the only one who doesn’t ask things of me. The only one who isn’t, in one way or another, disappointed with me – or at least, she wasn’t before she bit me! Who wouldn’t love that?” He laughs loudly, like we’re at a bar and he’s just tossed out a breezy one-liner.”

— Lori Gottlieb

107. “The second people felt alone, I noticed, usually in the space between things – leaving a therapy session, at a red light, standing in a checkout line, riding the elevator – they picked up devices and ran away from that feeling. In a state of perpetual distraction, they seemed to be losing the ability to be with others and losing their ability to be with themselves.”

— Lori Gottlieb

108. “Our training has taught us theories and tools and techniques, but whirring beneath our hard-earned expertise is the fact that we know just how hard it is to be a person. Which is to say, we still come to work each day as ourselves – with our own sets of vulnerabilities, our own longings and insecurities, and our own histories. Of all my credentials as a therapist, my most significant is that I’m a card-carrying member of the human race.”

— Lori Gottlieb

109. “Typically, a patient might have a difficult session about a childhood trauma, then come in the next week and announce that therapy is no longer needed.”

— Lori Gottlieb

110. “Certainly we all have our deal-breakers. But when patients repeatedly engage in this kind of analysis, sometimes I’ll say, “If the queen had balls, she’d be the king.” If you go through life picking and choosing, if you don’t recognize that “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” you may deprive yourself of joy.”

— Lori Gottlieb

111. “The inability to say yes, however – to intimacy, a job opportunity, an alcohol program – is more about lack of trust in oneself. Will I mess this up? Will this turn out badly? Isn’t it safer to stay where I am?”

— Lori Gottlieb

112. “One foot, then the other. Don’t look at all five feet at once. Just take a step. And when you’ve taken that step, take one more. Eventually you’ll make it to the shower. And you’ll make it to tomorrow and next year too. One step.”

— Lori Gottlieb

113. “But Wendell told me that by diminishing my problems, I was judging myself and everyone else whose problems I had placed lower down on the hierarchy of pain. You can’t get through your pain by diminishing it, he reminded me. You get through your pain by accepting it and figuring out what to do with it. You can’t change what you’re denying or minimizing. And, of course, often what seem like trivial worries are manifestations of deeper ones.”

— Lori Gottlieb

114. “The First Confession Allow me to get defensive for a minute. You see, when I told Wendell that everything was just fine until the breakup, I was telling the absolute truth. Or, rather, the truth as I knew it. Which is to say, the truth as I wanted to see it.”

— Lori Gottlieb

115. “John lowers himself onto the couch, kicks off his shoes, then stretches out, lies down, and adjusts his head on the pillows. Usually he sits cross-legged on the sofa, so this is a first. I notice, too, that there’s no food today. “Okay, you win,” he begins with a sigh. “Win what?” I ask. “The pleasure of my company,” he deadpans. I raise my eyebrows.”

— Lori Gottlieb

116. “Which all boils down to: Happiness equals reality minus expectations.”

— Lori Gottlieb

117. “I remember a quote from Einstein: “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”

— Lori Gottlieb

118. “The things we protest against the most are often the very things we need to look at.”

— Lori Gottlieb

119. “Is Boyfriend unhappy with something in the relationship that he’s afraid to tell me about? I ask him calmly, my voice softer now, because I’m mindful of the fact that Very Angry People aren’t Very Approachable.”

— Lori Gottlieb

120. “You didn’t fall in love with me before our first date, when I told you I had a six-year-old,” I say. “You knew what to do then, didn’t you?” More suffocating silence. As you’ve probably guessed, this conversation goes nowhere.”

— Lori Gottlieb

121. “Your feelings don’t have to mesh with what you think they should be,” he explained. “They’ll be there regardless, so you might as well welcome them because they hold important clues.” How many times had I said something similar to my own patients? But here I feel as if I’m hearing this for the first time. Don’t judge your feelings; notice them. Use them as your map. Don’t be afraid of the truth.”

— Lori Gottlieb

122. “Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith and experience something before its meaning becomes apparent. It’s one thing to talk about leaving behind a restrictive mindset. It’s another to stop being so restrictive.”

— Lori Gottlieb

123. “So many of our destructive behaviors take root in an emotional void, an emptiness that calls out for something to fill it.”

— Lori Gottlieb

124. “Did I tell you that she created a shared Google calendar to make sure I won’t forget things that are ‘important’” – with his free hand, John does an air quote as he says the word important – “so now I’m even more stressed because my calendar is filled with Margo’s things and I’ve already got a packed schedule!”

— Lori Gottlieb

125. “Even as I no longer had the strength to exercise and inexplicably lost ten pounds – I felt sluggish and weighted down even as I became lighter – I assured myself it must be something benign, like, I don’t know, menopause.”

— Lori Gottlieb

126. “When the present falls apart, so does the future we had associated with it. And having the future taken away is the mother of all plot twists. But if we spend the present trying to fix the past or control the future, we remain stuck in place, in perpetual regret. By Google-stalking Boyfriend, I’ve been watching his future unfold while I stay frozen in the past. But if I live in the present, I’ll have to accept the loss of my future.”

— Lori Gottlieb

127. “She must have seen my hesitation. “Please,” she said. “I know it’s not a picnic, but I can’t go to those cancer people. It’s like a cult. They call everyone ‘brave,’ but what choice do we have, and besides, I’m terrified and still cringe at the sight of the needles like I did as a kid getting my shots. I’m not brave and I’m not a warrior fighting a battle. I’m just an ordinary college professor.” She leaned forward on the couch. “They have affirmations on their walls. So, please?”

— Lori Gottlieb

128. “I’m smiling, Sherlock, because I know exactly what’s bothering my wife!” “Ah!” I reply. “So – ” “Wait, wait. I’m getting to the best part,” he interrupts. “So, like I said, I really do know what’s wrong, but I’m not that interested in hearing another complaint. So this time, instead of asking, I decide I’m going to –.”

— Lori Gottlieb

129. “Half my life is over, I would say, seemingly out of nowhere, in our very first session – and Wendell would jump right on this. He was picking up where my internship supervisor had left off years earlier. You won’t get today back. And the days were flying by.”

— Lori Gottlieb

130. “Yalom wrote in Existential Psychotherapy, our awareness of death helps us live more fully – and with less, not more, anxiety.”

— Lori Gottlieb

131. “She can’t concentrate because trying not to cry is taking all of her focus. She looked up the symptoms of depression and ticked off all the boxes.”

— Lori Gottlieb

132. “He wasn’t doing anything fancy; he just seemed wholly at home in his skin.”

— Lori Gottlieb

133. “Nor, as happened to me, do you want to run into a former patient in the bra section of a department store as the salesperson announces loudly, “Good news, ma’am! I was able to find the Miracle Bra in the thirty-four A.”

— Lori Gottlieb

134. “Therapy elicits odd reactions because, in a way, it’s like pornography. Both involve a kind of nudity.”

— Lori Gottlieb

135. “To be sure, these comments are meant to comfort, but they’re also a way of protecting the speakers from the uncomfortable feelings that somebody else’s bad situation stirs up. Platitudes like these make a terrible circumstance more palatable for the person saying the words but leave the person experiencing the adversity feeling angry and alone.”

— Lori Gottlieb

136. “Modern man thinks he loses something – time – when he does not do things quickly; yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains except kill it.” Fromm was right; people didn’t use extra time earned to relax or connect with friends or family. Instead, they tried to cram more in.”

— Lori Gottlieb

137. “And when that happens, the only control you have is how you deal with that stick – your way, not the way others say you should.”

— Lori Gottlieb

138. “I remember saying that there was a difference between examining and dwelling, and if we’re cut off from our feelings, just skating on the surface, we don’t get peace or joy – we get deadness.”

— Lori Gottlieb

139. “It isn’t that I haven’t been able to write at all. In fact, during the time I was supposed to be writing my book, I was crafting fabulously witty and flirtatious emails to Boyfriend, all while telling friends and family and even Boyfriend that I was busy writing my book. I was like the closet gambler who gets dressed for work and kisses his family goodbye each morning and then drives to the casino instead of the office.”

— Lori Gottlieb

140. “What parents needed, I believed, wasn’t another book about how they had to calm down and take a break. What they needed was an actual break from the deluge of parenting books.”

— Lori Gottlieb

141. “It looks amazing! Stunning. Gorgeous. The office, I mean. The office looks gorgeous. “Did you use a decorator?” I ask, and he says he did. I figured. If the earlier furniture was his doing, he clearly needed a professional for this. Still, it fits Wendell perfectly. The new Wendell. The spruced-up but still unpretentious Wendell.”

— Lori Gottlieb

142. “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”

— Lori Gottlieb

143. “Perhaps men apologize preemptively, by holding their tears back.”

— Lori Gottlieb

144. “Our notion of the future can be just as powerful a roadblock to change as our notion of the past.”

— Lori Gottlieb

145. “Even in the best possible relationship, you’re going to get hurt sometimes, and no matter how much you love somebody, you will at times hurt that person, not because you want to, but because you’re human.”

— Lori Gottlieb

146. “I’ll bet you could name five truly difficult people off the top of your head right now – some you assiduously avoid, others you would assiduously avoid if they didn’t share your last name. But sometimes – more often than we tend to realize – those difficult people are us. That’s right – sometimes hell is us. Sometimes we are the cause of our difficulties. And if we can step out of our own way, something astonishing happens.”

— Lori Gottlieb

147. “There’s an unspoken irony to all of this. People wanted a speedy solution to their problems, but what id their moods had been driven down in the first place by the hurried pace of their lives? They imagined they were rushing now in order to save their lives later, but so often, later never came.”

— Lori Gottlieb

148. “Fireflies love the dark too. There’s beauty in those places.”

— Lori Gottlieb

149. “I think about how it’s not knowing that torments all of us. At a certain point, we all have to come to terms with the unknown and the unknowable. Sometimes we’ll never know why.”

— Lori Gottlieb

150. “Why do parents do this? Often, they envy their children’s childhoods – the opportunities they have; the financial or emotional stability that the parents provide; the fact that their children have their whole lives ahead of them, a stretch of time that’s now in the parents’ pasts. They strive to give their children all the things they themselves didn’t have, but they sometimes end up, without even realizing it, resenting the kids for their good fortune.”

— Lori Gottlieb