Kay Redfield Jamison citations

“No amount of love can cure madness or unblacken one's dark moods. Love can help, it can make the pain more tolerable, but, always, one is beholden to medication that may or may not always work and may or may not be bearable”

“I am tired of hiding, tired of misspent and knotted energies, tired of the hypocrisy, and tired of acting as though I have something to hide.”

“Which of my feelings are real? Which of the me's is me? The wild, impulsive, chaotic, energetic, and crazy one? Or the shy, withdrawn, desperate, suicidal, doomed, and tired one? Probably a bit of both, hopefully much that is neither.”

“Mother, who has an absolute belief that it is not the cards that one is dealt in life, it is how one plays them, is, by far, the highest card I was dealt.”

“Suicide is not a blot on anyone’s name; it is a tragedy”

“Love, like life, is much stranger and far more complicated than one is brought up to believe.”

“But money spent while manic doesn't fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you're given excellent reason to be even more so.”

“I look back over my shoulder and feel the presence of an intense young girl and then a volatile and disturbed young woman, both with high dreams and restless, romantic aspirations”

“We all move uneasily within our restraints.”

“Love has, at its best, made the inherent sadness of life bearable, and its beauty manifest.”

“Somehow, like so many people who get depressed, we felt our depressions were more complicated and existentially based than they actually were.”

“The awareness of the damage done by severe mental illness—to the individual himself and to others—and fears that it may return again play a decisive role in many suicides”

“But, with time, one has encountered many of the monsters, and one is increasingly less terrified of those still to be met.”

“Knowledge is marvelous, but wisdom is even better.”

“… Time does not heal,
It makes a half-stitched scar
That can be broken and again you feel
Grief as total as in its first hour.
-Elizabeth Jennings”

“Chaos and intensity are no substitute for lasting love, nor are they necessarily an improvement on real life.”

“One is what one is, and the dishonesty of hiding behind a degree, or a title, or any manner and collection of words, is still exactly that: dishonest.”

“There is always a part of my mind that is preparing for the worst, and another part of my mind that believes if I prepare enough for it, the worst won’t happen.”

“I had a terrible temper, after all, and though it rarely erupted, when it did it frightened me and anyone near its epicenter. It was the only crack, but a disturbing one, in the otherwise vacuum-sealed casing of my behavior.”

“It took me far too long to realize that lost years and relationships cannot be recovered. That damage done to oneself and others cannot always be put right again.”

“Suicide Note:
The calm,
Cool face of the river
Asked me for a kiss.
-Langston Hughes”

“Look to the living, love them, and hold on.”

“I realized that it was not that I didn’t want to go on without him. I did. It was just that I didn’t know why I wanted to go on”

“Time will pass; these mood will pass; and I will, eventually, be myself again. But then, at some unknown time, the electrifying carnival will come back into my mind.”

“I had been simply treating water, settling on surviving and avoiding pain rather than being actively involved in seeking out life.”

“The ancient dialogue between reason and the senses is almost always more interestingly and passionately resolved in favor of the senses.”

“Conditions of thought, memory, and desire, persuaded by impulse and irrationality, are influenced as well by personal aesthetics and private meanings.”

“You're frightened, and you're frightening, and you're 'not at all like yourself but you will be soon,' but you know you won't.”

“Moods are such an essential part of the substance of life, of one's notion of oneself, that even psychotic extremes in mood and behavior somehow can be seen as temporary, even understandable, reactions to what life has dealt.”