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Which of my feelings are real? Which of the me's is me? The wild, impulsive, chaotic, energetic, and crazy one? Or the shy, withdrawn, desperate, suicidal, doomed, and tired one? Probably a bit of both, hopefully much that is neither.

Kay Redfield Jamison

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Kay Redfield Jamison
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: June 22
Essayist
Psychologist
Real
Wild
Withdrawn
Much
Hopefully
Impulsive
Neither
Suicidal
Tired
Energetic
Crazy
Chaotic
Bits
Shy
Probably
Doomed
Feelings
Desperate

More quotes by Kay Redfield Jamison

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Look to the living, love them, and hold on.
Kay Redfield Jamison
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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
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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.
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Suicide Note: The calm, Cool face of the river Asked me for a kiss. -Langston Hughes
Kay Redfield Jamison
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People talk about grief as if it's kind of an unremittingly awful thing, and it is. It is painful, but it's a very, very interesting sort of thing to go through and it really helps you out.
Kay Redfield Jamison
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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
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Love, like life, is much stranger and far more complicated than one is brought up to believe.
Kay Redfield Jamison
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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
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Conditions of thought, memory, and desire, persuaded by impulse and irrationality, are influenced as well by personal aesthetics and private meanings.
Kay Redfield Jamison
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I think people don't understand how intimately tied suicide is to mental illness, particularly to depressive illness and bipolar illness.
Kay Redfield Jamison
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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
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Moods are such an essential part of the substance of life, of one's notion of oneself, that even psychotic extremes in mood and behavior somehow can be seen as temporary, even understandable, reactions to what life has dealt.
Kay Redfield Jamison
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Grief comes and goes, but depression is unremitting
Kay Redfield Jamison
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I am reminded of the importance of small kindnesses.
Kay Redfield Jamison
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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
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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
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The ancient dialogue between reason and the senses is almost always more interestingly and passionately resolved in favor of the senses.
Kay Redfield Jamison
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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
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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
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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