The Silent Patient

“A baby cannot hate the mother, without the mother first hating the baby.”

Remember, love that doesn’t include honesty doesn’t deserve to be called love.”

I mustn’t put strangeness where there’s nothing. I think that is the danger of keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything, you are on the lookout, and you continually stretch the truth.

That’s the truth. I didn’t kill Gabriel. He killed me.

All I did was pull the trigger.

Once you name something, it stops you seeing the whole of it, or why it matters. You focus on the word, which is just the tiniest part, really, the tip of an iceberg.

ALICIA BERENSON WAS THIRTY-THREE YEARS OLD when she killed her husband.

painting was a self-portrait. She titled it in the bottom left-hand corner of the canvas, in light blue Greek lettering.

One word:

Alcestis.

He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may

convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret.

If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips;

betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.

—SIGMUND FREUD, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis

Remember, love that doesn’t include honesty doesn’t deserve to be called love.”

I felt an unfamiliar happiness just being in her company, as though a secret door had been opened, and Kathy had beckoned me across the threshold—into a magical world of warmth and light and color, and hundreds of orchids in a dazzling confetti of blues and reds and yellows.