The ancient dialogue between reason and the senses is almost always more interestingly and passionately resolved in favor of the senses.
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...
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.
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.
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...
I was one of many who owed their lives to the black circles and squares in Schou’s family tree.
I was not only very ill when I first called for an appointment, I was also terrified and deeply embarrassed. I had never been to a psychiatrist or a psychologist before. I had no choice. I had complet...
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 have suffered from exuberance, from being scattered, a lack of focus, he says. Conflicting enthusiasms caused him to switch scientific fields several times, from high-energy astrophysics to space ph...
I have plotted Lombroso's findings in figure 4-3, and it can be seen that he found peaks of productivity in the late spring and early fall.
I have often asked myself whether, given the choice, I would choose to have manic-depressive illness. If lithium were not available to me, or didn’t work for me, the answer would be a simple no—and it...
I had gotten a Ph.D., and I was beginning to understand Bob Dylans lines Twenty years of schoolin’ and they put you on the day shift.
I had a horrible sense of loss for who I had been and where I had been. It was difficult to give up the high flights of mind and mood, even though the depressions that inevitably followed nearly cost...
I for many years after my initial diagnosis was reluctant to take my medications as prescribed. Why was I so unwilling? Why did it take having to go through more episodes of mania, followed by long su...
How odd to smile during Richard's funeral. He was dead and I was smiling to myself. Grief does that. Laughter lies close in with despair, numbness near by acuity and memory with forgetfulness. I would...
He, like my father, had a deep love for natural science, and he would discuss at length how physics, philosophy, and mathematics were, each in their own ways, jealous mistresses who required absolute...
He was not, it was clear, going to gaze meaningfully into my eyes over long dinners and fine wines, nor discuss literature and music over late-night coffee and port... Yet not once in the years we hav...
Guilford concluded that creative individuals were also far more likely to exhibit divergent rather than convergent thinking:In tests of convergent thinking there is almost always one conclusion or ans...
Grief said C.S. Lewis is like a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape. This is so. The lessons that come from grief come from its unexpected moves, from its shifting views o...