28 Quotes About Manic-depression

Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.

I know the empathy borne of despair; I know the fluidity of thought, the expansive, even beautiful, mind that hypomania brings, and I know this is quicksilver and precious and often it's poison. There has always existed a sort of psychic butcher who works the scales of transcendence, who weighs out the bloody cost of true art.

When you are mad, mad like this, you don't know it. Reality is what you see. When what you see shifts, departing from anyone else's reality, it's still reality to you.

I have never seen battles quite as terrifyingly beautiful as the ones I fight when my mind splinters and races, to swallow me into my own madness, again.

I don’t existmetal pressed to pagesspilling blood, inkin vein each thought ragesSunlight shootingthrough a forest of pinesblack top windingand yellow dotted linesI am not hereonly a deep aching,a lightning flashand a tree trunk breakingSheets once alive covered in a deep redmark the presentbut I am not yet deadNothing is hereonly the rain and mistfresh air and soilI do not need to exist.

It's difficult. I take a low dose of lithium nightly. I take an antidepressant for my darkness because prayer isn't enough. My therapist hears confession twice a month, my shrink delivers the host, and I can stand in the woods and see the world spark.

I now know for certain that my mind and emotions, my fix on the real and my family's well-being, depend on just a few grams of salt. But treatment's the easy part. Without honesty, without a true family reckoning, that salt's next to worthless.

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.

I am the moon, and sometimes I shine full in my dark,and sometimes I shine half in my dark,and sometimes I am the darkness myself.