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

The ancient dialogue between reason and the senses is almost always more interestingly and passionately resolved in favor of the senses.

I think wanting to write is a fundamental sign of disease and discomfort. I don't think people who are comfortable want to write.

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.

Which of my feelings are real? Which of the me's is me? The wild, impulsive, chaotic, energetic, and crazy one? Or the shy, withdrawn, desperate, suicidal, doomed, and tired one? Probably a bit of both, hopefully much that is neither.

I was late to understand that chaos and intensity are no subsitute for lasting love, nor are they necessarily an improvement on real life. Normal people are not always boring. On the contrary. Volatility and passion, although often more romantic and enticing, are not intrinsically preferable to a steadiness of experience and feeling about another person.

Suicide is a particularly awful way to die: the mental suffering leading up to it is usually prolonged, intense and unpalliated. There is no morphine equivalent to ease the acute pain, and death, not uncommonly, is violent and grisly. The suffering of a suicidal is private and inexpressible, leaving family members, friends and colleagues to deal with an almost unfathomable kind of loss, as well as guilt. Suicide carries in its aftermath a level of confusion and devastation that is, for the most part, beyond description.