7 Quotes by Esmé Weijun Wang

When an artist dies, the art that never was is often mourned with as much grief as—if not more grief than—the individual themself. The individual, after all, was flesh and blood. It’s the art that’s immortal.

The line between insanity and mysticism is thin; the line between reality and unreality is thin. Liminality as a spiritual concept is all about the porousness of boundaries.

...I am afraid, but I am conscious enough to know that there is no hope even of death in perdition, only more of the same awful suffering. It stands apart from loss, injury, or perhaps even grief, all of which are terrible, and yet are still beautiful to the dead woman, who sees them as remarkably human, and alive.

Someday, we'll be able to trace all mental illnesses to autoimmune disorders. But we're not there yet.

The psychiatric hierarchy decrees who can and cannot be high-functioning and “gifted.” A much-liked meme on Facebook once circulated on my feed, in which a chart listed so-called advantages to various mental illnesses. Depression bestows sensitivity and empathy; attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder allows people to hold large amounts of information at once; anxiety creates useful caution. I knew immediately that schizophrenia wouldn’t make an appearance.

In the language of cancer, people describe a thing that “invades” them so that they can then “battle” the cancer. No one ever says that a person is cancer, or that they have become cancer, but they do say that a person is manic-depressive or schizophrenic, once those illnesses have taken hold.

Some people dislike diagnoses, disagreeably calling them, boxes and labels, but I've always found comfort in preexisting conditions; I like to know that I'm not pioneering an inexplicable experience.