Quotes from Ruby Wax

College atheletes used to get a degree in bringing your pencil.

Being a mother is hard and it wasn't a subject I ever studied.

Like any working mother I find it hard to have a social life. But my kids are so well adjusted. There isn't a brat bone in their body so I haven't done anything that bad.

I have to keep reminding myself that I am their mother. Sometimes we are sitting at home and I feel like we are waiting for our mom to come home.

Why, when you have a mental disease, is it always considered an act of imagination? Why is it that every organ in your body can get sick and you get sympathy except the brain?

1 in 5 people have dandruff. 1 in 4 people have mental health problems. I've had both.

This disease comes with a package: shame. When any other part of your body gets sick, you get sympathy.

College athletes used to get a degree in bringing your pencil.

I don't combine proteins and carbohydrates.

I'll say it again - mental illness is a physical illness. You wouldn't consider going up to someone suffering from Alzheimers to yell, Come on, get with it, you remember where you left your keys? Let us shout it from the rooftops until everyone gets the message; depression has and nothing to do with having a bad day or being sad, it's a killer if not taken seriously.

Why, when you have a mental disease, is it always considered an act of imagination? Why is it that every organ in your body can get sick and you get sympathy except the brain?

This disease comes with a package: shame. When any other part of your body gets sick, you get sympathy.

It's as though as a species we have no brakes, only breakdowns.

It's so common, it could be anyone. The trouble is, nobody wants to talk about it. And that makes everything worse.

1 in 5 people have dandruff. 1 in 4 people have mental health problems. I've had both.

Here's what I don't understand: if something called neuroplasticity is a hard, cold fact, why haven't we, the masses, heard much about it? Why are we left sitting here with a measly fourteen shades of grey, when, if we're talking about the brain, there are a trillion possible shades.

In my opinion, our downfall began when we started to think of ourselves as 'individuals'.

I've learnt that if you let out your anger on someone, it comes back to you like acid reflux and you've poisoned yourself and feel toxic and nauseated while the taxi driver probably just goes back to his home and wife and has a lovely life. I

The point is, we're all changing all the time. You once found it hard to tie a shoelace and now you don't even have to look. The change is so subtle; you think that whatever you feel like right now is how you always felt. Our brain can trick us into thinking life stands still. In the end this causes the human race the most heartache. Blinkered

The oxytocin doesn't just induce feelings of pleasure, it stimulates empathy and compassion, which are also contagious, and so we infect each other with kindness and that is when the human race is at its finest.

And as we get older, our lenses get more and more narrow and blurrier until we only see our own tiny pin-point view; this limited vision eventually makes bigots of us all. This is why so many marriages fall apart. You meet someone, think that you know them, marry them and then ten years later you divorce them because they turned out not to be who you thought they were. They never were.

It's amazing how we will suffer pain and abuse to keep our lives predictable. We'll let our inner voices brutalize us, rather than live with the possibility that we might be wrong about how we see things. We'll think, 'Well at least it's a pain that's familiar'. Uncertainty

Our brain has been shaped by evolutionary pressure over time to provide our bodies with ever more efficient ways of surviving and reproducing. It is designed to process all information for the purpose of living on, it doesn't care about happiness – it has things to do, places to go.

On the toilet no one is a star. Remember that and you will go far in life.