Top 200 Kay Redfield Jamison Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The ancient dialogue between reason and the senses is almost always more interestingly and passionately resolved in favor of the senses.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

52. “Anyone who suggests that coming back from suicidal despair is a straightforward journey has never taken it.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

53. “We have given sorrow many words, but a passion for life few.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

54. “There is an assumption, in attaching Puritan concepts such as ‘successful’ and ‘unsuccessful’ to the awful, final act of suicide, that those who ‘fail’ at killing themselves not only are weak, but incompetent, incapable even of getting their dying quite right.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

55. “I am reminded of the importance of small kindnesses.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

56. “Mental exhaustion had taken a long, terrible toll, but, strangely, it was only in feeling well, energetic, and high-spirited again that I had any true sense of the toll taken.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

57. “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

58. “Patient reluctant to be with people when depressed because she feels her depression is such an intolerable burden on others”;.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

59. “I understood very little of what was going on, and I felt as though only dying would release me from the overwhelming sense of inadequacy and blackness that surrounded me.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

60. “The complexities of what we are given in life are vast and beyond comprehension.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

61. “There are relatively few things that kill people that are young other than car accidents and suicide.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

62. “Often, people want both to live and to die; ambivalence saturates the suicidal act.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

63. “As a child I had been quiet and invisible when troubled; as an adult, I had hidden my mental illness behind an elaborate construction of laughter and work and dissembling.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

64. “Depression affects not only mood but the nature and content of thought as well. Thinking processes almost always slow down, and decisiveness is replaced by indecision and rumination. The ability to concentrate is usually greatly impaired and willful action and thought become difficult if not impossible.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

65. “God only knew what ran underneath the fierce self-discipline and emotional control that had come with my upbringing. But the cracks were there, I knew it, and they frightened me.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

66. “There is no easy way to tell other people that you have manic-depressive illness; if there is, I haven’t found it.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

67. “Because the privacy of my nightmare had been of my own designing, no one close to me had any real idea of the psychological company I had been keeping.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

68. “It was a tribute to my ability to present an image so at variance with what I felt that few noticed I was in any way different.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

69. “Feeling normal for any extended period of time raises hopes that turn out, almost invariably, to be writ on water.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

70. “Prolonged cocaine use, which diminishes dopamine functioning, gives support to the general rule that external sources of exuberance are ultimately overruled by the brain’s inclination to seek out equilibrium.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

71. “When energy is profoundly dissipated, the ability to think is clearly eroded, and the capacity to actively engage in the efforts and pleasures of life is fundamentally altered, then depression becomes an illness rather than a temporary or existential state.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

72. “We all move uneasily within our restraints.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

73. “People are more impulsive and they get slightly less impulsive as they get older and the impulsiveness interacting with the depression is particularly devastating and lethal, potentially lethal.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

74. “Thank you for a lovely weekend. They tell me it rained.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

75. “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

76. “I am a huge advocate of prescription drugs given wisely and for the right reasons and the right diagnosis and also psychotherapy.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

77. “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

78. “Chaos and intensity are no substitute for lasting love, nor are they necessarily an improvement on real life.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

79. “Love, like life, is much stranger and far more complicated than one is brought up to believe.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

80. “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

81. “When both she and I had to deal with our respective demons, my sister saw the darkness as being within and part of herself, the family and the world. I, instead, saw it as a stranger; however lodged within my mind and soul the darkness became, it almost always seemed an outside force that was at war with my natural self.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

82. “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

83. “I don’t think grief of grief in a medical way at all. I think that I and many of my colleagues, are very concerned when grief becomes pathological, that there is no question that grief can trigger depression in vulnerable people and there is no question that depression can make grief worse.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

84. “That such a final, tragic, and awful thing is suicide can exist in the midst of remarkable beauty is one of the vastly contradictory and paradoxical aspects of life and art.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

85. “Madness is easy to overdramatize and thereby underestimate; it is less easy to convey its capacity to erode identity, disfigure love, and violate trust. The real horror of madness is more subtle and corrosive than its caricature.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

86. “The Chinese believe that before you can conquer a beast you first must make it beautiful. In some strange way, I have tried to do that with manic-depressive illness. It has been a fascinating, albeit deadly, enemy and companion; I have found it to be seductively complicated, a distillation both of what is finest in our natures, and of what is most dangerous.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

87. “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

88. “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

89. “When I am high I couldn’t worry about money of I tried. So I don’t. The money will come from from somewhere; I am entitled; God will provide. Credit cards are disastrous, personal checks worse. Unfortunately, for manics anyway, mania is a natural extension of the economy.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

90. “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

91. “Conditions of thought, memory, and desire, persuaded by impulse and irrationality, are influenced as well by personal aesthetics and private meanings.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

92. “The disease that has, on several occasions, nearly killed me does kill tens of thousands of people every year: most are young, most die unnecessarily, and many are among the most imaginative and gifted that we as a society have.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

93. “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

94. “During the Renaissance there was a renewed interest in the relationship between genius, melancholia, and madness. A stronger distinction was made between sane melancholies of high achievement and individuals whose insanity prevented them from using their ability. The eighteenth century witnessed a sharp change in attitude; balance and rational thought, rather than “inspiration” and emotional extremes, were seen as the primary components of genius.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

95. “Part of my stubbornness can be put down to human nature. It is hard for anyone with an illness, chronic or acute, to take medications absolutely as prescribed. Once symptoms of an illness go away, it becomes even more difficult.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

96. “I had been simply treating water, settling on surviving and avoiding pain rather than being actively involved in seeking out life.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

97. “As best I could make out, having never heard the term until I arrived in California, being a WASP meant being mossbacked, lockjawed, rigid, humorless, cold, charmless, insipid, less than penetratingly bright, but otherwise – and inexplicably – to be envied.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

98. “One of the advantages of science is that one’s work, ultimately, is either replicated or it is not.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

99. “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

100. “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