Quotes from Lauren Slater

If you have been sick for a long, long time, Prozac may make you high. It probably won't make you, never quite managed to be a part of, but a world, nevertheless, that you at first fit into with the precision of a key to a lock or a neurotransmitter to its receptor.

I had lived my life by these kinds of banners, only now, searching the sentence, I found little in it that resonated deep in my bones. I had a cerebral sort of appreciation for the sentence, or perhaps, an appreciation based in memory, the way one remembers with fondness a past partner whom one no longer loves.

It should come as no surprise that this was so, that after years of illness my remission on that first drugged day – confusing, yes, portending loss, yes – was also a blessing, pure and simple. No, not a blessing, a redemption, both bright and blinding, heaven opening me up, letting me in. Good morning.

I love you as only a lover can. Less depressed, less obsessed, I am better than ever able to love your hair, which has blond lights in it, and your remarkable eyes, the blue of my Nana's chipped china. I love the smell of your skin, impossible to describe except to say it's a confluence of many pungent things, and I love your chest with the disks of your nipples, and your thighs striated with sweat, and your back and your breath while you are above me.

So," says my sister. "Do you feel like a mother yet?" I surprise myself by saying yes. "Cool," says my sister. "When did this happen?" "I don't know," I say. "Last Tuesday maybe?" I want to chart love, to code it or encrypt it. Love = proximity + time. Love = oxytocin + night feedings. But in the end, I'm no closer to understanding it, even when I feel it.

Progesterone is not a minimalist hormone. It leans toward excess, toward velvet, toward a thickening of the blood. Under its spell, the womb's endometrial mat goes from a thin brown covering to a thick crimson pile, a wild, expensive carpet, bedding fit for a king. No amount of money could buy a mattress with the thickness, the precision, the pure comfort that progesterone produces; here is where you started your first perfect sleep. Shhh.

OH THAT I COULD GO TO THE SKY WHERE I MIGHT FIND A CLEAR KNOWING.

If you have been sick for long, long time, Prozac may make you high. It probably won't make you high the way pot and acid do; it will make you high by returning you to a world you've forgotten or never quite managed to be a part of, but a world nevertheless, that you at first fit into with the precision of a key to a lock or a neurotransmitter to its receptor.

Your pathology report shows that your tumor is consistent with hepatoma, which is, uh, which is liver cancer." Already I am struggling: Does "consistent with" mean they think that but they don't really know it? No, those are just scientific weasel words they use in pathology reports. (A pathologist, I will learn, would look at your nose and report that it is consistent with a breathing apparatus.) 248 Marjorie Williams

Once, in the hospital, a social worker drew her a geneagram, a tree with every family member's name and diagnosis boxed in its branches, and the tree went on and on, out and out in flaring illness, and she laughed and said, "The simplest cure might be to just cut it down.

Essay writing is not about facts, although the essay may contain facts. Essay writing is about transcribing the often convoluted process of thought, leaving your own brand of breadcrumbs in the forest so that those who want to can find their way to your door. xvii The essayist often brings to the writing table an odd mix of shame and showmanship and it may well be that the tension thererin is what propels the work. xx

I was born from nothing and to nothing I will return. And yet, when i say the word nothing, when i admit, at last, 'I am nothing,' i feel mysteriously like something again, ground zero, genesis, the pull of possibilities.

Everyone knows that a lot of memoirs have made-up scenes; it's obvious. And everyone knows that half the time at least fictions contain literal autobiographical truths. So how do we decide what's what, and does it even matter?

And I have the same heart in the same socket of chest, and it hammers the way it used to, and I find myself thinking the same words, safe again, trapped again. My palms sweat on the steering wheel. I remind myself: I am not that girl. I am not that girl. I've changed. I've grown. It's a long time ago.

Why doesn't passionate love last? how is it possible to see a person as beautiful on Monday, and 364 days later, on another Monday, to see that beauty as bland? surely the object of your affection could not have changed that much. she still has the same shaped eyes. her voice has always had that husky sound, but now it grates on you - she sounds like she needs an antibiotic.

Illness was a temporary respite, a release from the demands of an alienating world.

I never said to myself, I am longing; that feeling lived at a level below language.

It is a fundamental misperception," Fouts says to me, "to think human life has more value than any other life form.

To say I believe time is fluid, and so are the boundaries between human beings, the border separating helper from the one who hurts always blurry.

There is betrayal here, in what I do, but in betrayal I am finally camouflaged.

How do you describe emptiness? Is it the air inside a bubble, the darkness in a pocket, snow? I think, yes, I was six when or seven when I first felt it, the dwindling that is depression.

I couldn't reach her. I was never able to reach her. Maybe she moved at a pace too fast. Maybe she was too sad. She held herself stiff, a lacquered lady. I think because I couldn't feel her, I couldn't feel myself.

I had lots of books, most of them nonfiction, because I'd always felt that in nonfiction, specifically in the disciplines of psychology, philosophy, and theology, I might find clues about ways to live my life.

Wounds, I think, are never confined to a single skin but reach out to rasp us all.