Intertextual1 > Intertextual1's Quotes

“I compare myself with my former self, not with others. Not only that, I tend to compare my current self with the best I have been, which is when I have been midly manic. When I am my present "normal" self, I am far removed from when I have been my liveliest, most productive, most intense, most outgoing and effervescent. In short, for myself, I am a hard act to follow.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“When I am high I couldn’t worry about money if I tried. So I don’t. The money will come from somewhere; I am entitled; God will provide. Credit cards are disastrous, personal checks worse. Unfortunately, for manics anyway, mania is a natural extension of the economy. What with credit cards and bank accounts there is little beyond reach. So I bought twelve snakebite kits, with a sense of urgency and importance. I bought precious stones, elegant and unnecessary furniture, three watches within an hour of one another (in the Rolex rather than Timex class: champagne tastes bubble to the surface, are the surface, in mania), and totally inappropriate sirenlike clothes. During one spree in London I spent several hundred pounds on books having titles or covers that somehow caught my fancy: books on the natural history of the mole, twenty sundry Penguin books because I thought it could be nice if the penguins could form a colony. Once I think I shoplifted a blouse because I could not wait a minute longer for the woman-with-molasses feet in front of me in line. Or maybe I just thought about shoplifting, I don’t remember, I was totally confused. I imagine I must have spent far more than thirty thousand dollars during my two major manic episodes, and God only knows how much more during my frequent milder manias.
But then back on lithium and rotating on the planet at the same pace as everyone else, you find your credit is decimated, your mortification complete: mania is not a luxury one can easily afford. It is devastating to have the illness and aggravating to have to pay for medications, blood tests, and psychotherapy. They, at least, are partially deductible. But money spent while manic doesn’t fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you’re given excellent reason to be even more so.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“Somehow, like so many people who get depressed, we felt our depressions were more complicated and existentially based than they actually were.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“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 nature, too mercurial to be anything but deeply wary of the grave unnaturalness involved in any attempt to exert too much control over essentially uncontrollable forces. There will always be propelling, disturbing elements, and they will be there until, as Lowell put it, the watch is taken from the wrist.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“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 argument here-"sharpened and unusually creative thinking" and "increased productivity"?”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament

“Time will pass; these mood will pass; and I will, eventually, be myself again. But then, at some unknown time, the electrifying carnival will come back into my mind.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“You're frightened, and you're frightening, and you're 'not at all like yourself but you will be soon,' but you know you won't.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“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. Volatility and passion, although often more romantic and enticing, are not intrinsically preferable to a steadiness of experience and feeling about another person.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“Some part of me instinctively reached out, and in an odd way understood this pain, never imagining that I would someday look in the mirror and see their sadness and insanity in my own eyes.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“I never again looked at the sky and saw only vastness and beauty. From that afternoon on I saw that death was also and always there.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“It took me far too long to realize that lost years and relationships cannot be recovered, that damage done to oneself and others cannot always be put right again, and that freedom from the control imposed by medication loses its meaning when the only alternatives are death and insanity.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind

“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 turned out to be very much a book about love as well: love as sustainer, as renewer, and as protector. After each seeming death within my mind or heart, love has returned to recreate hope and restore life. It has, at its best, made the inherent sadness of life bearable, and its beauty manifest. It has, inexplicably and savingly, provided not only cloak but lantern for the darker seasons and grimmer weather.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“They used to treat sheep carcasses with Lithium so if the Coyotes went after the herd and bit on the treated carcasses, the got so sick they kept their teeth to themselves.”
― Kay Jamison

“Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job or broken up with someone. But these experiences carry feelings. Depression, instead, is flat,hollow and unendurable. It is also tiresome. People cannot abide being around you when you are depressed. They might think that they ought to, but you know and they know that you are tedious beyond belief: you are irritable and paranoid and humourless and lifeless and critical and demanding and no reassurance is ever enough. You're frightened and frightening and you're "Not at all like yourself but will be soon," but you know you won't.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“Feeling normal for any extended period of time raises hopes that turn out, almost invariably, to be writ on water.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness