The great imaginative artists have always sailed in the wind's eye, and brought back with them words or sounds or images to counterbalance human woes. That they themselves were subject to more than th...
The ancient dialogue between reason and the senses is almost always more interestingly and passionately resolved in favor of the senses.
Suicide Note:The calm,Cool face of the riverAsked me for a kiss.-Langston Hughes
Reading, which had been at the heart of my intellectual and emotional existence, was suddenly beyond my grasp. I was used to reading three or four books a week; now it was impossible. I did not read a...
Pills cannot, do not, ease one back into reality; they only bring one back headlong, careening, and faster than can be endured at times. Psychotherapy is a sanctuary; it is a battleground; it is a pla...
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...
One is what one is, and the dishonesty of hiding behind a degree, or a title, or any manner and collection of words, is still exactly that: dishonest.
On occasion, these periods of total despair would be made even worse by terrible agitation. My mind would race from subject to subject, but instead of being filled with the exuberant and cosmic though...
Now I had no choice but to live in the broken world that my mind had forced upon me.
Normal people are not always boring. On the contrary. Volatility and passion, although often more romantic and enticing, are not intrinsically preferable to a steadiness of experience and feeling abou...
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 poe...
Manic-depression is a disease that both kills and gives life. Fire, by its nature, both creates and destroys.
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....
It was one of those still, clear moments when you realize that you haven’t understood anything at all, that you have had no real comprehension of the other person’s world.
It was like going on an archaeological dig through earlier ages of one’s mind. There was a bill from a taxidermist in The Plains, Virginia, for example, for a stuffed fox that I for some reason had fe...
It took me far too long to realize that lost years and relationships cannot be recovered, that damage done to oneself and others cannot always be put right again, and that freedom from the control imp...
Ironically, it is usually the doctors who are the most competent and conscientious who feel the most sense of failure and pain.
I was late to understand that chaos and intensity are no substitute for lasting love, nor are they necessarily an improvement on real life... Volatility and passion, although often more romantic and e...
I was late to understand that chaos and intensity are no subsitute for lasting love, nor are they necessarily an improvement on real life. Normal people are not always boring. On the contrary. Volatil...
I lost a great innocence when I understood that I and my mind were not going to be on good terms for the rest of my life. I can’t tell you how tired I am of character-building experiences. But I treas...