An exuberant temperature by no means leads inevitably, or even usually, to shallowness, but the potential is there. Subtleties and sustained thought can be lost in a swirl of vivacious moods and energ...
Vincent van Gogh, for one, wrote that his exuberant mood propelled not just his art but his speech: There are moments, he said, when I am twisted by enthusiasm or madness or prophecy, like a Greek ora...
لو قلتم لي في تلك الأيام التي بدت بسيطة و غير معقدة و ذات القفازات البيضاء و القبعات الواسعة, إنني خلال سنتين سوف أكون ذهانية و أتمني فقط الموت, لضحكت و تعجبت, وواصلت الحياة,و لكني كنت سأضحك كثيرا بكل...
الناس لا يطيقون أن يكونوا حولك عندما تكون مكتئبا، قد يعتقدون أنه واجب عليهم وقد يحاولون أيضا .. ولكنك تعرف وهم يعرفون أيضا أنك مضجر بدرجة لا يمكن تصورها، أنت سريع الانفعال ومتجهم وفاقد للحيوية وانتقاد...
إن المرء يخرج دائمًا من هذه التجاري بإحساس يحيطه بصورةٍ أكبر عن ماهية الموت و الحياة.
أي من مشاعري حقيقي؟ أي أنا هي أنا؟ الفتاة الشاردة المتهورة, والفوضوية, والنشيطة, والمجنونة؟ أو الخجولة, والمنعزلة, واليائسة, والانتحارية, والهالكة, والمنهكة؟ على الأرجح صفات قليلة من كليهما, وآمل ألا...
Manic-depressive illness, we proposed to the executive director of the Philharmonic a program based on the lives and music of several composers who had suffered from the illness, including Robert Schu...
Here is, for me, a mixture of longings for an earlier age; this is inevitable, perhaps, in any life, but there is an extra twist of almost painful nostalgia brought about by having lived a life partic...
Who would not want an illness that has among its symptoms elevated and expansive mood, inflated self-esteem, abundance of energy, less need for sleep, intensified sexuality, and- most germane to our a...
While she might not have opted for this illness, neither does she entirely regret it; she prefers, as she writes so movingly, a life ofpassionate turbulence to one of tedious calm.
When people are suicidal, their thinking is paralyzed, their options appear spare or nonexistent, their mood is despairing, and hopelessness permeates their entire mental domain. The future cannot be...
When I first thought about writing this book, I conceived of it as a book about moods, and an illness of moods, in the context of an individual life. As I have written it, however, it has somehow turn...
Prolonged cocaine use, which diminishes dopamine functioning, gives support to the general rule that external sources of exuberance are ultimately overruled by the brain's inclination to seek out equi...
Now and again she would break in with Yes, yes, that’s very interesting, Of course you can, or Had you thought of …? Never, but never, was there an I don’t think that’s very practical or Why don’t you...
No pill can help me deal with the problem of not wanting to take pills; likewise, no amount of psychotherapy alone can prevent my manias and depressions. I need both. It is an odd thing, owing life to...
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, overwhelming despair - dreading everything. Dreading life. Empty in...
I long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. And I am, by natu...
Each way to suicide is its own: intensely private, unknowable, and terrible. Suicide will have seemed to its perpetrator the last and best of bad possibilities, and any attempt by the living to chart...
As best I could make out, having never heard the term until I arrived in California, being a WASP meant being mossbacked, lockjawed, rigid, humorless, cold, charmless, insipid, less than penetratingly...