Olivia > Olivia's Quotes

“I’m aware of the incredible elasticity of life, how the buckled can become straight, the broken mended. Watch what is on the ground; watch what you step on, for it could contain hidden powers and, in a rage, fly up all emerald and scarlet to sting your face.”
― Lauren Slater, Welcome to My Country: A Therapist's Memoir of Madness

“But the reflections came clear to me then, come still in quiet moments when past meets present so smoothly the seams disappear and time itself turns fluid. Sometimes I wish time stayed solid, in separable chunks as distinct as the sound of the ticking clock on my mantel. In truth, though, we break all boundaries, hurtling forward through hope and backward on the trail made by memory.”
― Lauren Slater, Welcome to My Country: A Therapist's Memoir of Madness

“I will go in, go down, go back.”
― Lauren Slater

“To say I believe time is fluid, and so are the boundaries between human beings, the border separating helper from the one who hurts always blurry.”
― Lauren Slater, Welcome to My Country: A Therapist's Memoir of Madness

“When you die, there’s that much less breath to the world, and across continents someone supposedly separate gasps for air. When Marie, Joseph, peter, Moxi, Oscar, when I weep for you, don’t forget I weep as well for me.”
― Lauren Slater, Welcome to My Country: A Therapist's Memoir of Madness

“One…two…three…getting closer, my heart hammering half with fear, half with relief. Safe again. Trapped again.”
― Lauren Slater, Welcome to My Country: A Therapist's Memoir of Madness

“And I have the same heart in the same socket of chest, and it hammers the way it used to, and I find myself thinking the same words, Safe again, trapped again. My pals sweat on the steering wheel. I remind myself: I am not that girl. I’ve changed. I’ve grown. It’s a long time ago.”
― Lauren Slater, Welcome to My Country: A Therapist's Memoir of Madness

“I found some way to recovery. But I know, have always known, that I could go back. Mysterious neurons collide and break. The brain bruises. Memories you thought were buried rise up.”
― Lauren Slater, Welcome to My Country: A Therapist's Memoir of Madness

“There is betrayal here, in what I do, but in betrayal I am finally camouflaged.”
― Lauren Slater, Welcome to My Country: A Therapist's Memoir of Madness

“Things are screaming inside me and my eyes feel hot.”
― Lauren Slater, Welcome to My Country: A Therapist's Memoir of Madness

“I have not healed so much as learned to sit still and wait while pain does its dancing work, trying not to panic or twist in ways that make the blades tear deeper, finally infecting the wounds.”
― Lauren Slater, Welcome to My Country: A Therapist's Memoir of Madness

“I believe my strength has something to do with memory, with that concept of fluid time. For while I recall with clarity the terror of abuse, I also recall the green and lovely dream of childhood, the moist membrane of a leaf against my nose, the toads that peeled a golden pool in the palm of my hand. Pleasures, pleasures, the recollections of which have injected me with a firm and unshakable faith. I believe Dostoevski when he wrote, “If one had only one good memory left in one’s heart, even that may be the means of saving us.” I have gone by memory.”
― Lauren Slater, Welcome to My Country: A Therapist's Memoir of Madness

“Bless those people, for they are a part of my faith’s firmness. Bless the stories my foster mother read to me, the stories of mine she later listened to, her thin blond hair hanging down a single sheet. The house, old and shingled, with niches and culverts I loved to crawl in, where the rain pinged on a leaky roof and out in the puddled yard a beautiful German shepherd, who licked my face and offered me his paw, barked and played in the water. Bless the night there, the hallway light they left on for me, burning a soft yellow wedge that I turned into a wing, a woman, an entire army of angels who, I learned to imagine, knew just how to sing me to sleep.”
― Lauren Slater, Welcome to My Country: A Therapist's Memoir of Madness

“How do you describe emptiness? Is it the air inside a bubble, the darkness in a pocket, snow? I think, yes, I was six when or seven when I first felt it, the dwindling that is depression.”
― Lauren Slater, Prozac Diary

“I couldn’t reach her. I was never able to reach her. Maybe she moved at a pace too fast. Maybe she was too sad. She held herself stiff, a lacquered lady. I think because I couldn’t feel her, I couldn’t feel myself.”
― Lauren Slater, Prozac Diary

“When I was a girl I loved fevers and flus and the muzzy feeling of a head cold, all these states carrying with them the special accoutrements of illness, the thermometer with its lovely line of red mercury, the coolness of ice chips pressed to a sweaty forehead, and best of all, a distant mother coming to your bedside with tea.”
― Lauren Slater, Prozac Diary

“In illness, the world went wonderfully warped, high temperatures turning your pillow to a dune of snow and bringing the night sky, with its daisy-sized stars, so close to your bed you could touch it, and taste the moon.”
― Lauren Slater, Prozac Diary

“Illness was a temporary respite, a release from the demands of an alienating world.”
― Lauren Slater, Prozac Diary

“Getting better was a grief. One morning you woke up and your fever had fled. Your throat felt depressingly fine.”
― Lauren Slater, Prozac Diary

“Prozac, too made me want to weep. Prozac, too, was grief, because it returned me to the regular world with consequences I never expected.”
― Lauren Slater, Prozac Diary

“All the same, all different. What was it?”
― Lauren Slater, Prozac Diary

“A piano tuner used to come over to our house when I was young. He was a blind man, his eyes burnt-out holes in his head, his body all bent. I remember how strange he looked against the grandeur of our lives, how he stooped over that massive multitoothed instrument and tweaked its tones. The piano never looked any different after he’d worked on it, but when I pressed a C key or the black bar of an F minor, the note sprung out richer, as though chocolate and spices had been added to a flat sound. This was what was different. It was as though I’d been visited by a blind piano tuner who had crept into my apartment at night, who had tweaked the ivory bones of my body, the taut strings in my skull, and now, when I pressed on myself, the same notes but with a mellower, fuller sound sprang out.”
― Lauren Slater, Prozac Diary

“But what happens if such a patient, say myself, for instance, has rarely if ever experienced a normal state of functioning? What happens if such a patient has spent much of her life in mental hospitals, both pursuing and being pursued by one’s illness after another? What happens if “regular life” to such a person has always meant cutting one’s arms, or gagging?”
― Lauren Slater, Prozac Diary

“If this is the case, then the “normal state” Prozac ushers in is an experience in the surreal, Dali’s dripping clock, a disorientation so deep and sweet you spin. Thus Prozac, make no mistake about it, blissed me out and freaked me out and later on, when the full force of health hit me, sometimes stunned me with grief.”
― Lauren Slater, Prozac Diary

“I had lots of books, most of them nonfiction, because I’d always felt that in nonfiction, specifically in the disciplines of psychology, philosophy, and theology, I might find clues about ways to live my life.”
― Lauren Slater, Prozac Diary

“I had lived my life by these kinds of banners, only now, searching the sentence, I found little in it that resonated deep in my bones. I had a cerebral sort of appreciation for the sentence, or perhaps, an appreciation based in memory, the way one remembers with fondness a past partner whom one no longer loves.”
― Lauren Slater, Prozac Diary

“It should come as no surprise that this was so, that after years of illness my remission on that first drugged day – confusing, yes, portending loss, yes – was also a blessing, pure and simple. No, not a blessing, a redemption, both bright and blinding, heaven opening me up, letting me in. Good morning.”
― Lauren Slater, Prozac Diary

“I love you as only a lover can. Less depressed, less obsessed, I am better than ever able to love your hair, which has blond lights in it, and your remarkable eyes, the blue of my Nana’s chipped china. I love the smell of your skin, impossible to describe except to say it’s a confluence of many pungent things, and I love your chest with the disks of your nipples, and your thighs striated with sweat, and your back and your breath while you are above me.”
― Lauren Slater, Prozac Diary

“In real time, darkness might last eight hours, but in psychological time, it can go for vast stretches.”
― Lauren Slater, Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir

“If you have been sick for long, long time, Prozac may make you high. It probably won't make you high the way pot and acid do; it will make you high by returning you to a world you've forgotten or never quite managed to be a part of, but a world nevertheless, that you at first fit into with the precision of a key to a lock or a neurotransmitter to its receptor.”
― Lauren Slater, Prozac Diary