Top 150 Lori Gottlieb Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “The things we protest against the most are often the very things we need to look at.”

— Lori Gottlieb

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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;.”

— Lori Gottlieb

105. “Might it feel safer to stay in jail?”

— Lori Gottlieb

106. “Our younger selves think in terms of a beginning, middle, and some kind of resolution. But somewhere along the way – perhaps in that middle – we realize that everyone lives with things that may not get worked out. That the middle has to be the resolution, and how we make meaning of it becomes our task.”

— Lori Gottlieb

107. “Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not. – Ralph Waldo Emerson.”

— Lori Gottlieb

108. “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

109. “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

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

— Lori Gottlieb

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

115. “With aging comes the potential to accrue many losses: health, family, friends, work, and purpose.”

— Lori Gottlieb

116. “But I got a second chance too. Wendell once pointed out that we talk to ourselves more than we’ll talk to any other person over the course of our lives but that our words aren’t always kind or true or helpful – or even respectful. Most of what we say to ourselves we’d never say to people we love or care about, like our friends or children. In therapy, we learn to pay close attention to those voices in our heads so that we can learn a better way to communicate with ourselves.”

— Lori Gottlieb

117. “Sometimes the changes you want in another person aren’t on that person’s agenda.”

— Lori Gottlieb

118. “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.”

— Lori Gottlieb

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

— Lori Gottlieb

120. “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

121. “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

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

— Lori Gottlieb

123. “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

124. “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

125. “Sitting with Rita, I was reminded that the heart is just as fragile at seventy as it is at seventeen. The vulnerability, the longing, the passion – they’re all there in full force. Falling in love never gets old.”

— Lori Gottlieb

126. “So much of what I’m doing to help him relies on our in-the-room interaction. Say what you will about the wonders of technology, but screen-to-screen is, as a colleague once said, “like doing therapy with a condom on.”

— Lori Gottlieb

127. “I think of a Flannery O’Connor quote: “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”

— Lori Gottlieb

128. “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

129. “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

130. “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

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

— Lori Gottlieb

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

135. “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

136. “Your misery doesn’t change their situation. You can’t lessen their misery by carrying it for them inside you.”

— Lori Gottlieb

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

— Lori Gottlieb

138. “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

139. “The more you welcome your vulnerability,” Wendell had said, “the less afraid you’ll feel.” This isn’t how we tend to view life when we’re younger. Our younger selves think in terms of a beginning, middle, and some kind of resolution. But somewhere along the way – perhaps in that middle – we realize that everyone lives with things that may not get worked out. That the middle has to be the resolution, and how we make meaning of it becomes our task.”

— Lori Gottlieb

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

— Lori Gottlieb

141. “Because life happens and therapy helps us confront our demons when they pay a visit. And visit they will, because everyone has demons – big, small, old, new, quiet, loud.”

— Lori Gottlieb

142. “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

143. “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

144. “The price of loving so deeply is feeling so deeply – but it’s also a gift, the gift of being alive. If we no longer feel, we should be grieving our own deaths.”

— Lori Gottlieb

145. “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

146. “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

147. “Often people talk about suicide not because they want to be dead but because they want to end their pain.”

— Lori Gottlieb

148. “For many people, going into the depths of their thoughts and feelings is like going into a dark alley – they don’t want to go there alone.”

— Lori Gottlieb

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

— Lori Gottlieb

150. “There is something likable in everyone. And to my great surprise, I found that she was right. It’s impossible to get to know people deeply and not to come to like them.”

— Lori Gottlieb