Top 60 Robert Kolker Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Life is merely the permanent roots your family knots around you.”

— Robert Kolker

2. “A schizophrenic,” a Philadelphia psychiatrist named John Rosen wrote, within a year of Fromm-Reichmann’s invention of the term schizophrenogenic mother, “is always one who is reared by a woman who suffers from a perversion of the maternal instinct.”

— Robert Kolker

3. “When you don’t find a sense of love and belonging where you are, you go searching for it somewhere else.”

— Robert Kolker

4. “We are, in some way, a product of the people who surround us – the people we’re forced to grow up with, and the people we choose to be with later. Our relationships can destroy us, but they can change us, too, and restore us, and without us ever seeing it happen, they define us.”

— Robert Kolker

5. “As she walked through the door of the house at Hidden Valley Road, she couldn’t help but recognize a perfect sample. This could be the most mentally ill family in America.”

— Robert Kolker

6. “Biology is destiny, to a point. We are more than just our genes. We are in some way a product of the people that surround us, the people we are forced to grow up with and the people we choose to be with later. Our relationships can destroy us, but they can change us too, and restore us, and without us ever seeing it happen, they define us. We are human because the people around us make us human.”

— Robert Kolker

7. “But there is another model for progress – the opposite of the polio model – one in which solutions are not the same as breakthroughs. Progress comes gradually, often painfully, in fits and starts, and only after many people spend their entire careers failing and quarreling and, finally, reconciling. Sooner or later, some ideas fall away as others take hold. And, perhaps only in hindsight, we can see how far we’ve come, and decide on a path forward.”

— Robert Kolker

8. “Practically every drug prescribed for psychosis, from Donald’s time until now, has been a variation on Thorazine or clozapine. Thorazine and its successors became known as “typical” neuroleptic drugs, while clozapine and its heirs were “atypical,” the Pepsi to Thorazine’s Coke.”

— Robert Kolker

9. “Our relationships can destroy us, but they can change us, too, and restore us, and without us ever seeing it happen, they define us.”

— Robert Kolker

10. “They taught me to embrace the cards you are dealt or it will eat you alive. If you go to the heart of your own matter, you will find only by loving and helping do you have peace from your own trauma.”

— Robert Kolker

11. “In 1948, Chestnut Lodge admitted a teenage girl named Joanne Greenberg, who would go on to bring Fromm-Reichmann a measure of immortality. Greenberg’s 1964 best-seller, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden – a fictionalized memoir, she later called it – was the story of a teenage girl named Deborah Blau who is trapped in the delusional kingdom of Yr. Deborah believes herself to be possessed by an outside force, much the way Daniel Paul Schreber felt that he had been, a half century earlier.”

— Robert Kolker

12. “At the end of the conversation, Lindsay posed a question to her sister: Were they willing to accept each other for who they were? Or were they going to continue down the path of thinking the other person was somehow damaged, and impossible to be close with? After.”

— Robert Kolker

13. “Schizophrenia is not about multiple personalities. It is about walling oneself off from consciousness, first slowly and then all at once, until you are no longer accessing anything that others accept as real.”

— Robert Kolker

14. “To be a member of the Galvin family is to never stop tripping on land mines of family history, buried in odd places, stashed away out of shame.”

— Robert Kolker

15. “We are human because the people around us make us human.”

— Robert Kolker

16. “But Lindsay understood now how we are more than just our genes. We are, in some way, a product of the people who surround us – the people we’re forced to grow up with, and the people we choose to be with later.”

— Robert Kolker

17. “Here was the real reason, he thought, why big pharma could afford to be fickle about finding new drugs for schizophrenia – why decades come and go without anyone even finding new drug targets. These patients, he realized, can’t advocate for themselves.”

— Robert Kolker

18. “For decades, doctors have been treating schizophrenia pharmacologically without a clear understanding of the biology of the illness.”

— Robert Kolker

19. “Our culture looks at diseases as problems to solve. We imagine every ailment to be like polio: hopelessly incurable, until a miracle drug comes along that can wipe it off the face of the earth.”

— Robert Kolker

20. “The National Institute of Mental Health spends only $4.3 million on fetal prevention research, all of it for studies in mice, from its yearly $1.4 billion budget,” Freedman noted recently. “Yet half of young school shooters have symptoms of developing schizophrenia.”

— Robert Kolker

21. “There is no way of knowing how life might have been different for the Galvin brothers if the culture of mental illness had been less rigid, less inclined to cut people off from mainstream society, more proactive about intervening when warning signs first appeared. But there is, perhaps, reason to hope that for people like the Galvins born fifty years from now, things could be different, even transformed.”

— Robert Kolker

22. “When asked about his marital status, he said, “I divorced the United States.”

— Robert Kolker

23. “That same year, the Finnish psychiatrist Martti Olavi Siirala wrote that people with schizophrenia were almost like prophets with special insight into our society’s neuroses – our collective unconscious’s shared mental illness.”

— Robert Kolker

24. “But then, quite unexpectedly, part of her found Jim’s ability to disappear from her life to be utterly wrenching. She tried to ignore that feeling, but there was no mistaking it. She was heartbroken. Some part of her had truly believed, as a child does, that this was love.”

— Robert Kolker

25. “It was “mainly” this sort of mother, she wrote, who was responsible for the “severe early warp and rejection” that rendered a schizophrenia patient “painfully distrustful and resentful of other people.”

— Robert Kolker

26. “Children, Silvern explained, rely on the adults around them to interpret what’s happening to them. They use their parents’ constructed systems: This is good and that is bad; this person is untrustworthy, and that person is somebody you can count on. Shame and guilt are ways that children usually process those traumas when the grown-ups around them have failed them.”

— Robert Kolker

27. “I’ll work myself to the bone and not ask for help,” Lindsay said, “and then I’ll be resentful.”

— Robert Kolker

28. “The metaphor I use is that years ago, clinicians used to look at ‘fever’ as one disease,” said John McGrath, an epidemiologist with Australia’s Queensland Centre for Mental Health Research and one of the world’s authorities on quantifying populations of mentally ill people. “Then they split it into different types of fevers. And then they realized it’s just a nonspecific reaction to various illnesses. Psychosis is just what the brain does when it’s not working very well.”

— Robert Kolker

29. “For a family, schizophrenia is, primarily, a felt experience, as if the foundation of the family is permanently tilted in the direction of the sick family member. Even if just one child has schizophrenia, everything about the internal logic of that family changes.”

— Robert Kolker

30. “At the heart of Jung’s objection was the question of the nature of delusional mental illness: Is schizophrenia something you’re born with, a physical affliction of the brain? Or is it acquired in life, after one has become scarred somehow by the world?”

— Robert Kolker

31. “They will see what we call ‘schizophrenia’ was one of the forms in which, often through quite ordinary people, the light began to break through the cracks in our all-too-closed minds.”

— Robert Kolker

32. “What if he could isolate the gene irregularity that caused people to react this way to the double-click test? If he could do that, and if those people were indeed diagnosed with schizophrenia, then he would have proven the existence of a gene related to the illness and opened the door to a genetic remedy.”

— Robert Kolker

33. “The military and the church supplied two sets of rules to follow: America’s and God’s.”

— Robert Kolker

34. “Schizophrenia, he concluded, simply can’t be imposed or inflicted on someone who is not genetically predisposed to develop the condition. Rosenthal thought.”

— Robert Kolker

35. “The double-click test was not testing for schizophrenia itself. It was testing sensory gating, which was one potential aspect of schizophrenia. What made this result so exciting was that a sensory gating deficiency might well be genetic – and therefore could be traced through generations.”

— Robert Kolker

36. “A child’s independence is too big a risk for the shaky balance of some parents.”

— Robert Kolker

37. “Sherry Leonard, Gary O. Zerbe, and Robert Freedman, “Perinatal Phosphatidylcholine.”

— Robert Kolker

38. “In Silvern’s experience, it was sometimes a matter of luck that a person has the right temperament to absorb trauma in a way that still allows them to be open to new experiences, to go through life with armor.”

— Robert Kolker

39. “That story is about children, now grown, investigating the mysteries of their own childhood – reconstituting the fragments of their parents’ dream, and shaping it into something new. It is about rediscovering the humanity in their own brothers, people who most of the world had decided were all but worthless. It is about, even after the worst has happened in virtually every imaginable way, finding a new way to understand what it means to be a family.”

— Robert Kolker

40. “He’d seen, and his double-click tests had affirmed, how that process requires not just neurons, or brain cells, to bring in sensory information, but the inhibitory interneurons that erase the brain’s whiteboard of situational information instantaneously.”

— Robert Kolker

41. “John Clausen and Melvin Kohn from the National Institute of Mental Health described the schizophrenogenic mother as “cold,” “perfectionistic,” “anxious,” “overcontrolling,” and “restrictive.”

— Robert Kolker

42. “If you’ve left town, like John, you can hold on to your truth. To come home is to run the risk of being contradicted. Even the people who leave, like John, can feel almost rejected.”

— Robert Kolker

43. “I could just act like I’m a multimillionaire like my brother Richard. Or I could move to Boise like John, or I could play classical guitar all day like Michael. It’s, like, we all just do. Just respecting that about each other. We all survived somehow. Everyone’s different way needs to be okay.”

— Robert Kolker

44. “She had served everyone else, she said, enumerating the great sacrifices she had made to do so.”

— Robert Kolker

45. “And so I was crushed,” Mimi said. “Because I thought I was such a good mother. I baked a cake and a pie every night. Or at least had Jell-O with whipped cream.”

— Robert Kolker

46. “It’s the way of scientific progress – if you aren’t among the rare few who are immortalized, you are merely part of the great procession of research, a player in a larger drama.”

— Robert Kolker

47. “Yet half of young school shooters have symptoms of developing schizophrenia.”

— Robert Kolker

48. “Mimi was in charge, they both knew that. But even if what her father said went nowhere, it meant something to Mary that he said it. At least he spoke up, making the case for the well children over the sick ones.”

— Robert Kolker

49. “What if the problem with schizophrenia patients wasn’t that they lacked the ability to respond to so much stimuli, but that they lacked the ability not to? What if their brains weren’t overloaded, but lacked inhibition – forced to reckon with everything that was coming their way, every second of every day?”

— Robert Kolker

50. “Schizophrenia’s inaccessibility may be the most destructive thing about it – the thing that keeps so many people from connecting to the people with the illness.”

— Robert Kolker