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
Calm
Notes
Rivers
Hughes
Cool
Note
Asked
River
Face
Kiss
Faces
Suicide
Kissing

More quotes by 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
It is true that I had wanted to die , but that is peculiarly different from regretting having been born. Overwhelmingly, I was enormously glad to have been born, grateful for life, and I couldn’t imagine not wanting to pass on life to someone else.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Image
I was bitterly resentful, but somehow greatly relieved. And I respected him enormously for his clarity of thought, his obvious caring, and his unwillingness to equivocate in delivering bad news.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Image
Conditions of thought, memory, and desire, persuaded by impulse and irrationality, are influenced as well by personal aesthetics and private meanings.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Image
Looking at suicide—the sheer numbers, the pain leading up to it, and the suffering left behind—is harrowing. For every moment of exuberance in the science, or in the success of governments, there is a matching and terrible reality of the deaths themselves: the young deaths, the violent deaths, the unnecessary deaths
Kay Redfield Jamison
Image
Once a restless or frayed mood has turned to anger, or violence, or psychosis, Richard, like most, finds it very difficult to see it as illness, rather than being willful, angry, irrational or simply tiresome.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Image
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
Image
There are relatively few things that kill people that are young other than car accidents and suicide.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Image
I look back over my shoulder and feel the presence of an intense young girl and then a volatile and disturbed young woman, both with high dreams and restless, romantic aspirations
Kay Redfield Jamison
Image
Look to the living, love them, and hold on.
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
I think people don't understand how intimately tied suicide is to mental illness, particularly to depressive illness and bipolar illness.
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
But, with time, one has encountered many of the monsters, and one is increasingly less terrified of those still to be met.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Image
I am by temperament an optimist, and I thought from the beginning that there was much to be written about suicide that was strangely heartening.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Image
I think that for thousands of years people have made the observation that there are certain kinds of extreme depressive states that seem to be more likely to produce philosophers, people in the arts, unusually brilliant scientists.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Image
One of the advantages of science is that one's work, ultimately, is either replicated or it is not.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Image
Exuberance is a gift of grace that allows us to move on, to seek, to love again.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Image
I had a terrible temper, after all, and though it rarely erupted, when it did it frightened me and anyone near its epicenter. It was the only crack, but a disturbing one, in the otherwise vacuum-sealed casing of my behavior.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Image
There is always a part of my mind that is preparing for the worst, and another part of my mind that believes if I prepare enough for it, the worst won’t happen.
Kay Redfield Jamison