I had been simply treating water, settling on surviving and avoiding pain rather than being actively involved in seeking out life. — Kay Redfield Jamison Copy Share Image
“We all build internal sea walls to keep at bay the sadnesses of life and the often overwhelming forces within our minds...… — Kay Redfield Jamison Copy Share Image
“When I first thought about writing this book, I conceived of it as a book about moods, and an illness of moods,… — Kay Redfield Jamison Copy Share Image
St. Andrews provided a gentle forgetfulness over the preceding painful years of my life. It remains a haunting and lovely time to… — Kay Redfield Jamison Copy Share Image
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… — Kay Redfield Jamison Copy Share Image
Love has, at its best, made the inherent sadness of life bearable, and its beauty manifest. — Kay Redfield Jamison Copy Share Image
You become aware of an illness by understanding yourself and understanding the meaning that that illness has in your own life, symbolically… — Kay Redfield Jamison Copy Share Image
It is true that I had wanted to die , but that is peculiarly different from regretting having been born. Overwhelmingly, I… — Kay Redfield Jamison Copy Share Image
The complexities of what we are given in life are vast and beyond comprehension. — Kay Redfield Jamison Copy Share Image
“In its severe forms, depression paralyzes all of the otherwise vital forces that make us human, leaving instead a bleak, despairing, desperate,… — Kay Redfield Jamison Copy Share Image
“...even though [my psychiatrist] understood mor than anyone how much I felt I was losing--in energy, vivacity, and originality--by taking medication, he never was… — Kay Redfield Jamison Copy Share Image
When people are suicidal, their thinking is paralyzed, their options appear spare or nonexistent, their mood is despairing, and hopelessness permeates their entire mental… — Kay Redfield Jamison Copy Share Image
It's more common than not that bipolar illness will start in the teens. One of the reasons I spend a lot of time on… — Kay Redfield Jamison Copy Share Image
I think that for thousands of years people have made the observation that there are certain kinds of extreme depressive states that seem to… — Kay Redfield Jamison Copy Share Image
Every seventeen minutes in America, someone commits suicide. Mostly, I have been impressed by how little value our society puts on saving the lives… — Kay Redfield Jamison Copy Share Image
Mother, who has an absolute belief that it is not the cards that one is dealt in life, it is how one plays them,… — Kay Redfield Jamison Copy Share Image
“I decided early in graduate school that I needed to do something about my moods. It quickly came down to a choice between seeing… — Kay Redfield Jamison Copy Share Image
When I'm talking about depression, I'm talking about the more severe forms of depression, and I think that conceptualising as a form of grief… — Kay Redfield Jamison Copy Share Image
An ardent temperament makes one very vulnerable to dreamkillers. — Kay Redfield Jamison Copy Share Image
the intensity, glory, and absolute assuredness if my mind's flight made it very difficult for me to believe once i was better, that the… — Kay Redfield Jamison Copy Share Image
I wish I could explain it so someone could understand it. I'm afraid it's something I can't put into words. There's just this heavy,… — Kay Redfield Jamison Copy Share Image
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… — Kay Redfield Jamison Copy Share Image
