Nothing Was the Same Quotes

“I realized that it was not that I didn’t want to go on without him. I did. It was just that I didn’t know why I wanted to go on”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, Nothing Was the Same

“Grief said C.S. Lewis is like "a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape." This is so. The lessons that come from grief come from its unexpected moves, from its shifting views of what had gone before and what is yet to come. Pain brought so often into one's consciousness cannot maintain the same capacity to wound. Grief, however creates strange sensitivity. The world is too intense to tolerate: a veil, a drink, another anaesthetic is required to blot out the ache of what remains. One sees too much and feels it, as Robert Lowell put it, "with one skin-layer missing."
Grief conspires to ensure that it will in time wear itself out. Unlike depression, it acts to preserve the self. Depression is malignant, indiscriminately destructive. Grief may bear resemblance to depression, but it is a distant kinship. In Grief, death occasions the pain. In depression, death is the solution to the pain. In Grief, one feels the absence of a life, not life itself. In depression, it is otherwise one cannot access the beat of life!”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, Nothing Was the Same

“Grief, however, creates a strange sensitivity. The world is too intense to tolerate: a veil, a drink, another anesthetic is required to blot out the ache of what remains. One sees too much and feels it, as Robert Lowell puts it, "with one skin-layer missing.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, Nothing Was the Same

“How odd to smile during Richard's funeral. He was dead and I was smiling to myself. Grief does that. Laughter lies close in with despair, numbness near by acuity and memory with forgetfulness. I would have got used to it, but I didn't know this at the time. All I knew, was that memory had given pleasure first, then cracking pain.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, Nothing Was the Same

“As a child I had been quiet and invisible when troubled; as an adult, I had hidden my mental illness behind an elaborate construction of laughter and work and dissembling.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, Nothing Was the Same

“It has been said that grief is a kind of madness. I disagree. There is a sanity to grief, in its just proportion of emotion to cause, that madness does not have. I know madness well, but I understood little of grief and I was not always certain which was grief and which was madness. Grief, as it transpires has its own territory.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, Nothing Was the Same

“Many wish to believe that the odd is not so odd, the bizarre not so bizarre, and there is little changing of minds once they are set. There are only so many ways to understand the strange and disordered. The Greeks imagined gods to explain what they themselves could not. It is human nature to invent reasons for why the mind shatters, hope plummets, or the will to live dies. Scientific explanations are complicated and, for many, less humanly satisfying than visionary or religious ones. They are also less interesting than explanations based on planetary misalignment, toxins, or childhoods gone awry. There is a disturbing gap between what scientists and doctors know about mental illness and what most people believe.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, Nothing Was the Same

“Grief is at the heart of the human condition. Much is lost with death, but not everything. Life is not let loose of lightly, nor is love. There is a grace in death. There is life.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, Nothing Was the Same

“We put our faith in things great and small. We assign to them meaning they may actually have, or meaning that we need for them to have in order to carry on.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, Nothing Was the Same

“There was a fine-tuning of Richard's and my temperaments during the years we lived with his heart disease, lymphoma, and lung cancer. Before, our differences had triggered sporadic tension; now our basic natures served us better. Our sensibilities and quirks evolved into something more shared and complex, more mingled.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, Nothing Was the Same