Top 200 Kay Redfield Jamison Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Children need the freedom and time to play. Play is not a luxury; the time spent engaged in it is not time that could be better spent in more formal educational pursuits. Play is a necessity.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

2. “We all build internal sea walls to keep at bay the sadnesses of life and the often overwhelming forces within our minds. In whatever way we do this – through love, work, family, faith, friends, denial, alcohol, drugs, or medication, we build these walls, stone by stone, over a lifetime.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

3. “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

4. “Love has, at its best, made the inherent sadness of life bearable, and its beauty manifest.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

5. “I have had manic-depressive illness, also known as bipolar disorder, since I was 18 years old. It is an illness that ensures that those who have it will experience a frightening, chaotic and emotional ride. It is not a gentle or easy disease.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

6. “One of things so bad about depression and bipolar disorder is that if you don’t have prior awareness, you don’t have any idea what hit you.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

7. “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

8. “Look to the living, love them, and hold on.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

9. “Suicide carries in its aftermath a level of confusion and devastation that is, for the most part, beyond description.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

10. “I think people don’t understand how intimately tied suicide is to mental illness, particularly to depressive illness and bipolar illness.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

11. “Each way to suicide is its own: intensely private, unknowable, and terrible. Suicide will have seemed to its perpetrator the last and best of bad possibilities, and any attempt by the living to chart this final terrain of life can be only a sketch, maddeningly incomplete.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

12. “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

13. “Every seventeen minutes in America, someone commits suicide. Mostly, I have been impressed by how little value our society puts on saving the lives of those who are in such despair as to want to end them. It is a societal illusion that suicide is rare. It is not.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

14. “If people can talk about having breast cancer, why can’t people who have mental illness talk about mental illness? Until we’re able to do that, we’re not going to be treated with the same kind of respect for our diseases as other people.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

15. “One is what one is, and the dishonesty of hiding behind a degree, or a title, or any manner and collection of words, is still exactly that: dishonest.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

16. “I am tired of hiding, tired of misspent and knotted energies, tired of the hypocrisy, and tired of acting as though I have something to hide.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

17. “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

18. “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

19. “Confidentiality is an ancient and well-warranted social value.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

20. “No amount of love can cure madness or unblacken one’s dark moods. Love can help, it can make the pain more tolerable, but, always, one is beholden to medication that may or may not always work and may or may not be bearable.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

21. “I lost a great innocence when I understood that I and my mind were not going to be on good terms for the rest of my life. I can’t tell you how tired I am of character-building experiences. But I treasure this part of me; whoever loves me loves me with this in it.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

22. “Mania can be as terrifying as it gets. It is certainly as insane as one gets and so it’s frightening when it gets out of control, but there are periods of mania when it can be extremely attractive.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

23. “Suicide is not a blot on anyone’s name; it is a tragedy.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

24. “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

25. “Mother, who has an absolute belief that it is not the cards that one is dealt in life, it is how one plays them, is, by far, the highest card I was dealt.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

26. “I compare myself with my former self, not with others. Not only that, I tend to compare my current self with the best I have been, which is when I have been midly manic. When I am my present “normal” self, I am far removed from when I have been my liveliest, most productive, most intense, most outgoing and effervescent. In short, for myself, I am a hard act to follow.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

27. “In depression, your capacity to feel just flattens and disappears and what you feel is pain and a kind of pain that you can’t describe to anybody. So it’s an isolating pain, a completely isolating pain.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

28. “I think psychotherapy saves lives and is hugely meaningful and I think that one of the unfortunate aspects of prescription drugs working well is that people tend to think that’s enough.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

29. “When people are suicidal, their thinking is paralyzed, their options appear spare or nonexistent, their mood is despairing, and hopelessness permeates their entire mental domain. The future cannot be separated from the present, and the present is painful beyond solace. ‘This is my last experiment,’ wrote a young chemist in his suicide note. ‘If there is any eternal torment worse than mine I’ll have to be shown.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

30. “Moods are by nature compelling, contagious, and profoundly interpersonal, and disorders of mood alter the perceptions and behaviors not only of those who have them but also of those who are related or closely associated. Manic-depressive illness – marked as it is by extraordinary and confusing fluctuations in mood, personality, thinking, and behavior – inevitably has powerful and often painful effects on relationships.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

31. “The Chinese believe that before you can conquer a beast you first must make it beautiful.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

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

— Kay Redfield Jamison

33. “But if love is not the cure, it certainly can act as a very strong medicine.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

34. “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

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

— Kay Redfield Jamison

36. “It took me far too long to realize that lost years and relationships cannot be recovered. That damage done to oneself and others cannot always be put right again.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

37. “Grief comes and goes, but depression is unremitting.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

38. “Americans really believe that the past is past,” he writes. “They do not care to know that the past soaks the present like the light of a distant star. Things that are over do not end. They come inside us, and seek sanctuary in subjectivity. And there they live on, in the consciousness of individuals and communities.” The forward thrust of exuberance, like closure, risks leaving behind an essential past.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

39. “The pursuit of knowledge is an intoxicant, a lure that scientists and explorers have known from ancient times; indeed, exhilaration in the pursuit of knowledge is part of what has kept our species so adaptive.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

40. “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

41. “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

42. “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

43. “The awareness of the damage done by severe mental illness – to the individual himself and to others – and fears that it may return again play a decisive role in many suicides.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

44. “Madness, on the other hand, most certainly can, and often does, kill love through its mistrustfulness, unrelenting pessimism, discontents, erratic behavior, and, especially, through its savage moods. The sadder, sleepier, slower, and less volatile depressions are more intuitively understood and more easily taken in stride. A quiet melancholy is neither threatening nor beyond ordinary comprehension; an angry, violent, vexatious despair is both.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

45. “An ardent temperament makes one very vulnerable to dreamkillers.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

46. “It is the history of our kindnesses that alone makes this world tolerable,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. “If.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

47. “Without science, there would be no such hope.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

48. “You become aware of an illness by understanding yourself and understanding the meaning that that illness has in your own life, symbolically and, more importantly, quite literally.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

49. “In fact, many features of hypomania – such as outgoingness, increased energy, intensified sexuality, increased risk-taking, persuasiveness, self-confidence, and heightened productivity – have been linked with increased achievement and accomplishment.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

50. “No amount of love can cure madness or unblacken one’s dark moods.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison