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Exuberance is a gift of grace that allows us to move on, to seek, to love again.

Kay Redfield Jamison

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Kay Redfield Jamison
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: June 22
Essayist
Psychologist
Move
Grace
Passion
Moving
Love
Exuberance
Allows
Gift
Seek

More quotes by Kay Redfield Jamison

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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
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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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We all move uneasily within our restraints.
Kay Redfield Jamison
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Others would say to me, 'It is only temporary, it will pass, you will get over it,' but of course they had no idea how I felt, although they were certain that they did. Over and over and over I would say to myself, If I can't feel, if I can't move, if I can't think, and I can't care, then what conceivable point is there in living?
Kay Redfield Jamison
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I decided early in graduate school that I needed to do something about my moods. It quickly came down to a choice between seeing a psychiatrist or buying a horse. Since almost everyone I knew was seeing a psychiatrist, and since I had an absolute belief that I should be able to handle my own problems, I naturally bought a horse.
Kay Redfield Jamison
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The complexities of what we are given in life are vast and beyond comprehension.
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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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 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
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In some cases, some people do get depressed in the middle of their grief and they really need to be treated for depression.
Kay Redfield Jamison
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I am reminded of the importance of small kindnesses.
Kay Redfield Jamison
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Anyone who suggests that coming back from suicidal despair is a straightforward journey has never taken it.
Kay Redfield Jamison
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One of the advantages of science is that one's work, ultimately, is either replicated or it is not.
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.
Kay Redfield Jamison
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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
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Everyone has good cause for suicide, or at least it seems that way to those who search for it. (74)
Kay Redfield Jamison
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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
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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
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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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Curiosity, wonder, and passion are defining qualities of imaginative minds and great teachers...Restlessness and discontent are vital things... Intense experience and suffering instruct us in ways less intense emotions can never do.
Kay Redfield Jamison