For Jarrod: “Unhappiness in a lawyer seemed to be the norm, nothing worth getting upset about.”

“And that’s when it hit me: I had been going about it all wrong. It was futile to try to deny the existence of ugliness—either in the world, or in myself. God made light, and God made monsters, and there must have been a reason for that. As Saint Augustine said, ‘Even monsters are divine creatures and in some way they too belong to the providential order of nature.’ Without the darkness, how can we ever hope to understand the light? I started to cry. True beauty, I realized, is not the absence of ugliness, but the acceptance of it. And I knew then what I had refused to admit all along: that I was indeed mentally ill.”

“I don’t know how to explain. I only know that my greatest victories have always been surrenders.”

“Manic epiphanies are like shooting stars: flashes of brilliance that are gone in an instant.”

“I bought a dozen plus two more for luck, because you never know when a kite might come in handy. Fitting fourteen kites inside my car was a bit tricky, but the service station guys gave me a hand.”

“What I didn’t spend on the Inn, I spent elsewhere, on anything that struck my fancy or satisfied my manic taste, which it turns out was very bad. I bought a dozen assorted garden gnomes, for example, even though I had no garden.”

“But suicide requires movement, and depression weighs a thousand tons… Mania doesn’t just give you the desire for extremes, it gives you the energy to pursue them.”

“But manic depression is just too crazy for most people to identify with, or have comforting platitudes for. There’s a certain liberation in being so out there, beyond the norm.”

“But it took several more episodes before I really began to comprehend the mixed state’s awesome power of destruction. Few things are strong enough to survive that deadly clash of mania and depression. Certainly not love. Love is far too fragile: it is a picture window, just begging to be shattered.”

“Hypomania breaks down that invisible wall that exists between well-mannered strangers. There are no strangers anymore, only unknown friends, waiting to tell me their stories.”

“After so many years of not knowing what fresh hell was next, how I adored boring and a trifle routine.”