For someone with my cast of mind and mood, medication is an integral element of this wall: without it, I would be constantly beholden to the crushing movements of a mental sea; I would, unquestionably...
Feeling normal for any extended period of time raises hopes that turn out, almost invariably, to be writ on water. I
Exuberance, Cheng makes clear, is an indispensable part of his scientific life. It keeps me alive. I like to have fun, I don't like boredom. Exuberance is necessary, you have to have enthusiasm. Any k...
Exuberance draws people together and primes them to act boldly; it warrants that the immediate world is safe for exploration and enjoyment and creates a vivifying climate in which a group can rekindle...
Conditions of thought, memory, and desire, persuaded by impulse and irrationality, are influenced as well by personal aesthetics and private meanings.
Cocaine, hashish, opium, Ecstacy: all seduce with the promise of rapture or exuberance-and then they collect.
But then as night inevitably goes after the day, my mood would crash, and my mind again would grind to a halt.
But it has been precisely that persevering steadiness of my mother, her belief in seeing things through, and her great ability to love and learn, listen and change, that helped keep me alive through a...
Americans really believe that the past is past, he writes. They do not care to know that the past soaks the present like the light of a distant star. Things that are over do not end. They come inside...
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 seduced into losing sight of the overall...
Time does not heal,It makes a half-stitched scarThat can be broken and again you feelGrief as total as in its first hour.-Elizabeth Jennings
It is of no little interest and irony that Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin and proponent of selective breeding in humans in order to obtain a highly gifted race of man, was himself subject...
كبرت بسرعة خلال تلك الشهور, كما يجب علي الشخص الذي يفقد ذاته, و يكون قريبا هكذا من الموت و من الحفرة الأخيرة
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 treasur...
Before you can conquer a beast you first must make it beautiful. In some strange way, I have tried to do that with manic-depressive illness. It has been a fascinating, albeit deadly, enemy and compani...
When energy is profoundly dissipated, the ability to think is clearly eroded, and the capacity to actively engage in the efforts and pleasures of life is fundamentally altered, then depression becomes...
Then, suddenly, I was unpredictably and uncontrollably irrational and destructive. This was not something that could be overcome by protocol or etiquette. God, conspicuously, was nowhere to be found.
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...
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...