Top 200 Kay Redfield Jamison Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Fire, by its nature, both creates and destroys.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

152. “Try not to let the fact that you can’t read without effort annoy you. Be philosophical. Even if you could read, you probably wouldn’t remember most of it anyway.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

153. “So we would get together at some ungodly hour, I would be secretly and inexpressibly grateful, and he somehow would have finessed it so that I didn’t feel like I was too huge a burden to him. It was a rare gift of friendship.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

154. “He was low-key, I was intense; things that cut me to the quick he was able to sail by with scarcely a notice; he was slow to anger, I quick; the world registered gently upon him, sometimes not at all, whereas I was fast to feel both pleasure and pain.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

155. “Even in my blackest depressions, I never regretted having been born. It is true that I had wanted to die, but that is peculiarly different from regretting having been born.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

156. “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

157. “I continue to have concerns about my decision to be public about my illness, but one of the advantages of having had manic-depressive illness for more than thirty years is that very little seems insurmountably difficult. 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

158. “It is devastating to have the illness and aggravating to have to pay for medications, blood tests, and psychotherapy. They, at least, are partially deductible. 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

159. “Having heard so often, and so believably, John Donne’s bell tolling softly that “Thou must die,” one turns more sharply to life, with an immediacy and appreciation that would not otherwise exist.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

160. “Reading, which had been at the heart of my intellectual and emotional existence, was suddenly beyond my grasp. I was used to reading three or four books a week; now it was impossible. I did not read a serious work of literature or nonfiction, cover to cover, for more than ten years. The frustration and pain of this were immeasurable.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

161. “My mind was flying high that day, courtesy of whatever witches’ brew of neurotransmitters God had programmed into my genes...”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

162. “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

163. “It goes on and on, and finally there are only others’ recollections of your behavior – your bizarre, frenetic, aimless behaviors – for mania has at least some grace in partially obliterating memories.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

164. “Later, after Christmas carols and a nightcap of mulled ale in front of the fire, Mole reflects on how much he has missed the warmth and security of what he once had known, all of those “friendly things which had long been unconsciously a part of him.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

165. “The endless questioning finally ended. My psychiatrist looked at me, there was no uncertainty in his voice. “Manic-depressive illness.” I admired his bluntness. I wished him locusts on his lands and a pox upon his house. Silent, unbelievable rage. I smiled pleasantly. He smiled back. The war had just begun.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

166. “Morbidly afraid of water, he then drowned himself in his swimming pool. Not too far away, consistent with a lifetime of dark humor, he left out a copy of the book Don’t Go Near the Water.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

167. “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

168. “Far more important, they took me and my interests very seriously. They never tried to discourage me from becoming a doctor, even though it was an era that breathed, If woman, be a nurse.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

169. “His wife maintains she can tell whether or not Jim is in the house simply by the amount of energy she feels in the air. But.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

170. “It did the kind of lasting damage that only something that cuts so quick and deep to the heart can do.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

171. “Mania is a strange and driving force, a destroyer, a fire in the blood.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

172. “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

173. “Yet however genuinely dreadful these moods and memories have been, they have always been offset by the elation and vitality of others; and whenever a mild and gentlish wave of brilliant and bubbling manic enthusiasm comes over me, I am transported by its exuberance – as surely as one is transported by a pungent scent into a world of profound recollection – to earlier, more intense and passionate times.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

174. “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

175. “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

176. “No pill can help me deal with the problem of not wanting to take pills; likewise, no amount of psychotherapy alone can prevent my manias and depressions.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

177. “Eventually, the depression went away of its own accord, but only long enough for it to regroup and mobilize for the next attack.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

178. “College, for many people I know, was the best time of their lives. This is inconceivable to me. College was, for the most part, a terrible struggle, a recurring nightmare of violent and dreadful moods spelled only now and again by weeks, sometimes months, of great fun, passion, high enthusiasms, and long runs of very hard but enjoyable work.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

179. “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

180. “There is, for me, a mixture of longings for an earlier age; this is inevitable, perhaps, in any life, but there is an extra twist of almost painful nostalgia brought about by having lived a life particularly intense in moods. This makes it even harder to leave the past behind, and life, on occasion, becomes a kind of elegy for lost moods.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

181. “You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

182. “Decreased sleep is both a symptom of mania and a cause, but I didn’t know that at the time, and it probably would not have made any difference to me if I had.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

183. “He was a psychiatrist, as well as a warm, whimsical, and witty man who had a mind like a cluttered attic.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

184. “With his capacity for flight came grimmer moods, and the blackness of his depressions filled the air as pervasively as music did in his better periods. Within a year or so of moving to California, my father’s moods were further blackening, and I felt helpless to affect them.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

185. “In a state of exuberance, judgment is put on hold-but is not turned off completely. In hypomania judgment is napping, but still wakes up periodically to check things out. In mania, judgment is out like a light.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

186. “For as long as I can remember, I was frighteningly, although often wonderfully, beholden to moods.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

187. “Humor and absorption on friends’faces are replaced by fear and concern.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

188. “It was true that much got done during the days and weeks of flying high, but it was also true that one generated new projects and made new commitments, which then had to be completed during the grayer times. I was constantly chasing the tail of my own brain, recovering from, or delving into, new moods and new experiences.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

189. “There were, however, definite advantages to studying invertebrate zoology. For starters, unlike in psychology, you could eat your subjects. The lobsters – fresh from the sea and delicious – were especially popular.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

190. “Named for his smooth and slithery essence, the Oyster was a senior professor: he was patronizing, smug, and had all of the intellectual and emotional complexity of, as one might expect, a small mollusk. He thought of women in terms of breasts, not minds, and it always seemed to irritate him that most women had both.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

191. “This polarization of two clinical states flies in the face of everything that we know about the cauldronous, fluctuating nature of manic-depressive illness; it ignores the question of whether mania is, ultimately, simply an extreme form of depression; and it minimizes the importance of mixed manic-and-depressive states, conditions that are common, extremely important clinically, and lie at the heart of many of the critical theoretical issues underlying this particular disease.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

192. “Within psychiatric circles, if you kill yourself, you earn the right to be considered a “successful” suicide. This is a success one can live without.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

193. “My thinking, far from being clearer than a crystal, was tortuous. I would read the same passage over and over again only to realize that I had no memory at all for what I had just read. Each book or poem I picked up was the same way. Incomprehensible. Nothing made sense.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

194. “The humor, however, was a bit more in the recounting than in the actual living through it. Unfortunately, this resistance to taking lithium is played out in the lives of tens of thousands of patients every year.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

195. “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

196. “It was like going on an archaeological dig through earlier ages of one’s mind. There was a bill from a taxidermist in The Plains, Virginia, for example, for a stuffed fox that I for some reason had felt I desperately needed.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

197. “Somehow, like so many people who get depressed, we felt our depressions were more complicated and existentially based than they actually were. Antidepressants might be indicated for psychiatric patients, for those of weaker stock, but not for us. It was a costly attitude; our upbringing and pride held us hostage.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

198. “For as long as I can remember I was frighteningly, although often wonderfully, beholden to moods. Intensely emotional as a child, mercurial as a young girl, first severely depressed as an adolescent, and then unrelentingly caught up in the cycles of manic-depressive illness by the time I began my professional life, I became, both by necessity and intellectual inclination, a student of moods.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

199. “He was not, it was clear, going to gaze meaningfully into my eyes over long dinners and fine wines, nor discuss literature and music over late-night coffee and port... Yet not once in the years we have been together have I doubted Richard’s love for me, nor mine for him. Love, like life, is much stranger and far more complicated than one is brought up to believe.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison

200. “My thoughts were so fast that I couldn’t remember the beginning of a sentence halfway through.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison