Top 200 Kay Redfield Jamison Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “The great imaginative artists have always sailed “in the wind’s eye,” and brought back with them words or sounds or images to “counterbalance human woes.” That they themselves were subject to more than their fair share of these woes deserves our appreciation, understanding, and very careful thought.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

102. “Knowledge is marvelous, but wisdom is even better.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

103. “Profound melancholia is a day-in, day-out, night-in, night-out, almost arterial level of agony.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

104. “The simultaneous existence and shared residence of such opposite moods and feelings is well-illustrated by Franz Schubert’s assertion that whenever he sat down to write songs of love he wrote songs of pain, and whenever he sat down to write songs of pain he wrote songs of love.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

105. “While she might not have opted for this illness, neither does she entirely regret it; she prefers, as she writes so movingly, a life ofpassionate turbulence to one of tedious calm.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

106. “I had a horrible sense of loss for who I had been and where I had been. It was difficult to give up the high flights of mind and mood, even though the depressions that inevitably followed nearly cost me my life.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

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

— Kay Redfield Jamison

108. “Then, suddenly, I was unpredictably and uncontrollably irrational and destructive. This was not something that could be overcome by protocol or etiquette. God, conspicuously, was nowhere to be found.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

109. “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

110. “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

111. “Slowly the darkness began to weave its way into my mind, and before long I was hopelessly out of control. I could not follow the path of my own thoughts. Sentences flew around in my head and fragmented first into phrases and then words; finally, only sounds remained.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

112. “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

113. “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

114. “Most people don’t have the advantage of being able to evaluate their doctor in advance.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

115. “Given that, it turned out to be unnervingly easy to keep my friends and family at psychological bay: “To be sure,” wrote Hugo Wolf, “I appear at times merry and in good heart, talk, too, before others quite reasonably, and it looks as if I felt, too, God knows how well within my skin. Yet the soul maintains its deathly sleep and the heart bleeds from a thousand wounds.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

116. “Others, the subject of this book, are likewise privy to their unconscious streams of thought, but they must contend with unusually tumultuous and unpredictable emotions as well. The integration of these deeper, truly irrational sources with more logical processes can be a tortuous task, but, if successful, the resulting work often bears a unique stamp, a “touch of fire,” for what it has been through.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

117. “Melancholic, although often sardonic, mixtures of emoitions-foreboding, aloneness, regret, and a dark sense of lost destiny and ill-used passions-are woven throughout Byron’s most autobiographical poems, especially Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Lara, and Manfred. Perturbed and constant motion, coupled with a brooding awareness of life’s impermanence, also mark the transient and often bleak nature of Byron’s work.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

118. “Parents also seriously underestimate the extent of depression in their adolescent children.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

119. “Nothing good comes out of depression.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

120. “Grief, however, creates a strange sensitivity. The world is too intense to tolerate: a veil, a drink, another anesthetic is required to blot out the ache of what remains. One sees too much and feels it, as Robert Lowell puts it, “with one skin-layer missing.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

121. “We each move within the restraints of our temperament and live up only partially to its possibilities.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

122. “Fire, by its nature, both creates and destroys.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

123. “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

124. “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. It is an illness that is biological in its origins, yet one that feels psychological in the experience of it, an illness that is unique in conferring advantage and pleasure, yet one that brings in its wake almost unendurable suffering and, not infrequently, suicide.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

125. “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

126. “Much like crossing the Bay Bridge when there is a storm over the Chesapeake, one may be terrified to go forward, but there is no question of going back.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

127. “Now I had no choice but to live in the broken world that my mind had forced upon me.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

128. “But if love is not the cure, it certainly can act as a very strong medicine. As John Donne has written; it is not so pure and abstract as one might once have thought and wished, but it does endure and it does grow.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

129. “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

130. “Like my father, I looked up rather more than I looked out.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

131. “I learned how marvelously the mind can heal, given half a chance, and how patience and gentleness can put back together the pieces of a horribly shattered world. What God had put asunder, an elemental salt, a first-rank psychiatrist, and a man’s kindness and love could put almost right again.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

132. “For someone with my cast of mind and mood, medication is an integral element of this wall: without it, I would be constantly beholden to the crushing movements of a mental sea; I would, unquestionably, be dead or insane.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

133. “Manic-depression is a disease that both kills and gives life. Fire, by its nature, both creates and destroys.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

134. “I did not wake up one day to find myself mad. Life should be so simple.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

135. “He, like my father, had a deep love for natural science, and he would discuss at length how physics, philosophy, and mathematics were, each in their own ways, jealous mistresses who required absolute passion and attention.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

136. “I focused on the questions and stopped seeing the body. As has been true a thousand times since, my curiosity and temperament had taken me to places I was not really able to handle emotionally, but the same curiosity, and the scientific side of my mind, generated enough distance and structure to allow me to manage, deflect, reflect, and move on.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

137. “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. 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.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

138. “These comings and goings, this grace and godlessness, have become such a part of my life that the wild colors and sounds now have become less strange and less strong; and the blacks and greys that inevitably follow are, likewise, less dark and frightening... 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

139. “It took my year in England to make me realize how much I had been simply treading water, settling on surviving and avoiding pain rather than being actively involved in and seeking out life.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

140. “I was used to my mind being my best friend; of carrying on endless conversations within my head; of having a built-in source of laughter or analytic thought to rescue me from boring or painful surroundings. Now, all of a sudden, my mind had turned on me: it mocked me for my vapid enthusiasms; it laughed at all my foolish plans; it no longer found anything interesting or enjoyable or worthwhile.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

141. “But it has been precisely that persevering steadiness of my mother, her belief in seeing things through, and her great ability to love and learn, listen and change, that helped keep me alive through all of the years of pain and nightmare that were to come.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

142. “But, as I well knew, an understanding at an abstract level does not necessarily translate into an understanding at a day-to-day level. I have become fundamentally and deeply skeptical that anyone who does not have this illness can truly understand it.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

143. “My manias, at least in their early and mild forms, were absolutely intoxicating states that gave rise to great personal pleasure, an incomparable flow of thoughts, and a ceaseless energy that allowed the translation of new ideas into papers and projects. Medications not only cut into these fast-flowing times, they also brought with them seemingly intolerable side effects.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

144. “I was one of many who owed their lives to the black circles and squares in Schou’s family tree.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

145. “I kneeled without ecstasy, prayed without belief, and felt as a stranger.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

146. “We are all, as Byron put it, differently organized.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

147. “People say, when I complain of being less lively, less energetic, less high-spirited, “Well, now you’re just like the rest of us,” meaning, among other things, to be reassuring. But I compare myself with my former self, not with others.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

148. “An ardent temperament makes one very vulnerable to dreamkillers, and I was more lucky than I knew in having been brought up around enthusiasts, and lovers of enthusiasts.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

149. “Navy Cotillion was where officers’ children were supposed to learn the fine points of manners, dancing, white gloves, and other unrealities of life. It also was where children were supposed to learn, as if the preceding fourteen or fifteen years hadn’t already made it painfully clear, that generals outrank colonels who, in turn, outrank majors and captains and lieutenants, and everyone, but everyone, outranks children. Within the ranks of children, boys always outrank girls.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

150. “Pills cannot, do not, ease one back into reality; they only bring one back headlong, careening, and faster than can be endured at times. Psychotherapy is a sanctuary; it is a battleground; it is a place I have been psychotic, neurotic, elated, confused, and despairing beyond belief.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison