Quote

Suicide Note: The calm, Cool face of the river Asked me for a kiss. -Langston Hughes

Kay Redfield Jamison

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Kay Redfield Jamison
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: June 22
Essayist
Psychologist
Rivers
Hughes
Cool
Note
Asked
River
Face
Kiss
Faces
Suicide
Kissing
Calm
Notes

More quotes by Kay Redfield Jamison

Image
Look to the living, love them, and hold on.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Image
The assumption that rigidly rejecting words and phrases that have existed for centuries will have much impact on public attitudes is rather dubious.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Image
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
Image
The complexities of what we are given in life are vast and beyond comprehension.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Image
From a public health point of view, still the overwhelming problem is that people are not treated enough for depression depression remains under treated.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Image
An ardent temperament makes one very vulnerable to dreamkillers.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Image
Love, like life, is much stranger and far more complicated than one is brought up to believe.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Image
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
Image
The quickness and flexibility of a well mind, a belief or hope that things will eventually sort themselves out-these are the resources lost to a person when the brain is ill.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Image
There are relatively few things that kill people that are young other than car accidents and suicide.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Image
I think that when you're depressed, you can't concentrate long enough and well enough to read for the most part some people can, but by and large people - that's one of the first things that goes, is the capacity to read meaningful literature. With grief, that's not true. For a while you can't read, but then you really are amenable to solace.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Image
I think wanting to write is a fundamental sign of disease and discomfort. I don't think people who are comfortable want to write.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Image
I think you have waves of awareness and one of the things that I found with grief was actually - I was well prepared for it by the cyclicality of my manic depressive illness because I was used to things coming and going and so forth.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Image
Everything previously moving with the grain is now against - you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Image
Never once, during any of my bouts of depression, had I been inclined or able to pick up a telephone and ask a friend for help. It wasn't in me.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Image
Anybody who's had to contend with mental illness - whether it's depression, bipolar illness or severe anxiety, whatever - actually has a fair amount of resilience in the sense that they've had to deal with suffering already, personal suffering.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Image
Everyone has good cause for suicide, or at least it seems that way to those who search for it. (74)
Kay Redfield Jamison
Image
Mood disorders are terribly painful illnesses, and they are isolating illnesses. And they make people feel terrible about themselves when, in fact, they can be treated.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Image
I am reminded of the importance of small kindnesses.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Image
Manic depression distorts moods and thoughts, incites dreadful behaviors, destroys the basis of rational thought, and too often erodes the desire and will to live.
Kay Redfield Jamison