Quotes from Kay Redfield Jamison

An ardent temperament makes one very vulnerable to dreamkillers, and I was more lucky than I knew in having been brought up around enthusiasts, and lovers of enthusiasts.

character building, no doubt, but I was beginning to tire of all the opportunities to build character at the expense of peace, predictability, and a normal life.

before you can conquer a beast you first must make it beautiful.

I can't think, I can't calm this murderous cauldron, my grand ideas of an hour ago seem absurd and pathetic, my life is in ruins and - worse still - ruinous; my body is uninhabitable. It is raging and weeping and full of destruction and wild energy gone amok. In the mirror I see a creature I don't know but must live with and share my mind with. I understand why Jekyll killed himself before Hyde had taken over completely.

So we would get together at some ungodly hour, I would be secretly and inexpressibly grateful, and he somehow would have finessed it so that I didn't feel like I was too huge a burden to him. It was a rare gift of friendship.

It did the kind of lasting damage that only something that cuts so quick and deep to the heart can do.

I kneeled without ecstasy, prayed without belief, and felt as a stranger.

Parents also seriously underestimate the extent of depression in their adolescent children.

For several weeks, I drank vodka in my orange juice before setting off for school in the mornings, and I thought obsessively about killing myself.

It took my year in England to make me realize how much I had been simply treading water, settling on surviving and avoiding pain rather than being actively involved in and seeking out life.

But if love is not the cure, it certainly can act as a very strong medicine. As John Donne has written, it is not so pure and abstract as one might once have thought and wished, but it does endure, and it does grow

Much like crossing the Bay Bridge when there is a storm over the Chesapeake, one may be terrified to go forward, but there is no question of going back.

But then as night inevitably goes after the day, my mood would crash, and my mind again would grind to a halt.

Morbidly afraid of water, he then drowned himself in his swimming pool. Not too far away, consistent with a lifetime of dark humor, he left out a copy of the book Don't Go Near the Water.

My mind was flying high that day, courtesy of whatever witches' brew of neurotransmitters God had programmed into my genes, and I filled page after page with what I am sure, thinking back on it, were very strange responses.

These comings and goings, this grace and godlessness, have become such a part of my life that the wild colors and sounds now have become less strange and less strong; and the blacks and greys that inevitably follow are, likewise, less dark and frightening...But, with time, one has encountered many of the monsters, and one is increasingly less terrified of those still to be met.

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. Madness, on the other hand, most certainly can, and often does, kill love through its mistrustfulness, unrelenting pessimism, discontents, erratic behavior, and, especially, through its savage moods. The

be sure," wrote Hugo Wolf, "I appear at times merry and in good heart, talk, too, before others quite reasonably, and it looks as if I felt, too, God knows how well within my skin. Yet the soul maintains its deathly sleep and the heart bleeds from a thousand wounds.

Try not to let the fact that you can't read without effort annoy you. Be philosophical. Even if you could read, you probably wouldn't remember most of it anyway.

It goes on and on, and finally there are only others' recollections of your behavior—your bizarre, frenetic, aimless behaviors—for mania has at least some grace in partially obliterating memories.

I did not wake up one day to find myself mad. Life should be so simple.

It was true that much got done during the days and weeks of flying high, but it was also true that one generated new projects and made new commitments, which then had to be completed during the grayer times. I was constantly chasing the tail of my own brain, recovering from, or delving into, new moods and new experiences.

You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.

This polarization of two clinical states flies in the face of everything that we know about the cauldronous, fluctuating nature of manic-depressive illness; it ignores the question of whether mania is, ultimately, simply an extreme form of depression; and it minimizes the importance of mixed manic-and-depressive states, conditions that are common, extremely important clinically, and lie at the heart of many of the critical theoretical issues underlying this particular disease.