Emotion and instinct were the basis of all our decisions, our actions, everything we valued, the way we saw the world. Reason and rationality were a thin coat of paint on a ragged surface.

I am the daughter of a psychologist. I know that the thing ostensibly being studied is rarely the thing being studied. (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, p. 99)

You can’t imagine the white-hot fury someone who can’t sleep has toward the beautiful dreamer beside him.

I didn't want a world in which I had to choose between blind human babies and tortured monkey ones. To be frank, that's the sort of choice I expect science to protect me from, not give me.

who knows you better than your own brother?

Maybe anosognosia, the inability to see your own disability, is the human condition and I'm the only one who doesn't suffer from it.

We call them feelings because we feel them.

We used to believe that memories were best retrieved in the same place that they were first laid down. Like everything else we think we know, that's not so clear anymore.

An "attack on SeaWorld" might mean a bomb, or it might mean graffiti and glitter and a cream pie in the face. The government doesn't always seem to distinguish between the two.

I admired her choices though I wouldn't have made them.

We are so excited that, in the strangely illuminating phrase my mother favours, we’re completely beside ourselves.

A pair of great heels was much more satisfying than a man. They lasted longer, and better yet, they didn’t leave me for someone prettier.

Quit waiting for others to give to you

In the course of a marriage, one accommodates the other.

From the time I started school, it was clear to everyone that I wasn't learning at the same pace as other kids.

The path to God is rarely a steady climb upward. We climb, we fall back, and we climb higher again.

I don't wear particular designers. I wear whoever fits me well.

Because all the sick do not recover, therefore medicine is not an art.

I come from a violent background. So I became hard. I realised that I had made myself that way to deal with a feeling of abandonment and shame.

For the time being, technologies are colonizing our body through implants. We started with human implants, but research leads us to microtechnological implants.

Democracy means that if the doorbell rings in the early hours, it is likely to be the milkman.