Quotes from Kay Redfield Jamison

seemed to myself to be dull, boring, inadequate, thick brained, unlit, unresponsive, chill skinned, bloodless, and sparrow drab.

T]he seductiveness of these unbridled and intense moods is powerful; and the ancient dialogue between reason and the senses is almost always more interestingly and passionately resolved in favor of the senses.

I long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. And I am, by nature, too mercurial to be anything but deeply wary of the grave unnaturalness involved in any attempt to exert too much control over essentially uncontrollable forces. There will be propelling, disturbing elements, and they will be there until, as Lowell put it, the watch is taken from the wrist.

he slowly put down the hamburger he was eating, stared straight into my eyes, and, without missing a beat, said rather dryly, "That explains a lot.

What in the hell are you doing running around the parking lot at this hour?" he asked. A not unreasonable question.

manic-depressive illness, we proposed to the executive director of the Philharmonic a program based on the lives and music of several composers who had suffered from the illness, including Robert Schumann, Hector Berlioz, and Hugo Wolf.

Part of my stubbornness can be put down to human nature. It is hard for anyone with an illness, chronic or acute, to take medications absolutely as prescribed. Once symptoms of an illness go away, it becomes even more difficult.

freedom from the control imposed by medication loses its meaning when the only alternatives are death and insanity.

knew better than to assume a straight shot at happiness: If we see a light at the end of the tunnel, he said, it's the light of an oncoming train.

Manic-depression distorts moods and thoughts, incites dreadful behaviors, destroys the basis of rational thought, and too often erodes the desire and will to live. It is an illness that is biological in its origins, yet one that feels psychological in the experience of it; an illness that is unique in conferring advantage and pleasure, yet one that brings in its wake almost unendurable suffering and, not infrequently, suicide.

Then, suddenly, I was unpredictably and uncontrollably irrational and destructive. This was not something that could be overcome by protocol or etiquette. God, conspicuously, was nowhere to be found.

But it has been precisely that persevering steadiness of my mother, her belief in seeing things through, and her great ability to love and learn, listen and change, that helped keep me alive through all of the years of pain and nightmare that were to come.

It was a tribute to my ability to present an image so at variance with what I felt that few noticed I was in any way different.

I focused on the questions and stopped seeing the body. As has been true a thousand times since, my curiosity and temperament had taken me to places I was not really able to handle emotionally, but the same curiosity, and the scientific side of my mind, generated enough distance and structure to allow me to manage, deflect, reflect, and move on.

My mind was flying high that day, courtesy of whatever witches' brew of neurotransmitters God had programmed into my genes...

We are all, as Byron put it, differently organized.

It has been said that grief is a kind of madness. I disagree. There is a sanity to grief, in its just proportion of emotion to cause, that madness does not have. I know madness well, but I understood little of grief and I was not always certain which was grief and which was madness. Grief, as it transpires has its own territory.

It is the history of our kindnesses that alone makes this world tolerable," wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. "If it were not for that, for the effect of kind words, kind looks, kind letters Ã¢â'¬Â¦ I should be inclined to think our life a practical jest in the worst possible spirit.

Others would say to me, It is only temporary, it will pass, you will get over it, but of course they had no idea how I felt, although they were certain that they did. Over and over and over I would say to myself, If I can't feel, if I can't move, if I can't think, and I can't care, then what conceivable point is there in living?

I remain acutely and painfully aware of how difficult it is to control or understand such behaviors, much less explain them to others. I have, in my psychotic, seizure-like attacks—my black, agitated manias—destroyed things I cherish, pushed to the utter edge people I love, and survived to think I could never recover from the shame.

Melancholic, although often sardonic, mixtures of emoitions-foreboding, aloneness, regret, and a dark sense of lost destiny and ill-used passions-are woven throughout Byron's most autobiographical poems, especially Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Lara, and Manfred. Perturbed and constant motion, coupled with a brooding awareness of life's impermanence, also mark the transient and often bleak nature of Byron's work.

I have seen the breadth and depth and width of my mind and heart and seen how frail they both are, and how ultimately unknowable they both are.

posthumous Piano Sonata in B-flat, D. 960. Its haunting

Manic-depression is a disease that both kills and gives life. Fire, by its nature, both creates and destroys.