Top 60 Robert Kolker Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “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

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

— Robert Kolker

3. “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

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

— Robert Kolker

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

— Robert Kolker

6. “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

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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

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

— 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. “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

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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

16. “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

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

— Robert Kolker

18. “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

19. “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

20. “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

21. “Gottesman and Shields’s theory became known as the “diathesis-stress hypothesis” – nature, activated by nurture.”

— Robert Kolker

22. “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

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

— 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. “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

26. “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

27. “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

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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

31. “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

32. “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

33. “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

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

— Robert Kolker

35. “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

36. “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

37. “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

38. “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

39. “What would progress look like for schizophrenia? If the Galvin boys had been born a half century later or more – growing up today, let’s say, and not in the 1950s or 1960s – would their treatment be any different now? In some respects, little has changed. The market for new schizophrenia drugs remains sluggish.”

— Robert Kolker

40. “One meta-analysis, published in 2013, found that 7.2 percent of the general population has experienced hallucinations or delusions; another study in 2015 put the figure at 5.8 percent. A third of the people counted in the latter study only had one episode, while others had more persistent symptoms.”

— Robert Kolker

41. “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

42. “Without the inhibitory interneurons, we would end up processing the same information all over again – wasting time and effort, grinding our gears, becoming disoriented and, perhaps, anxious and paranoid and even delusional.”

— Robert Kolker

43. “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

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

— Robert Kolker

45. “Making Donald the brunt of their jokes gave them a sense of power over a situation they had no explanation for – and reassured them that whatever Donald was, he was not them.”

— Robert Kolker

46. “She still felt like the youngest – like everything the family went through flowed down to her. Part.”

— Robert Kolker

47. “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

48. “Beauty surrounded Mimi, even if she was in no mood to see it.”

— Robert Kolker

49. “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

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