In depression, your capacity to feel just flattens and disappears and what you feel is pain and a kind of pain that you can't describe to anybody. So it's an isolating pain, a completely isolating pain.

I wish I could explain it so someone could understand it. I'm afraid it's something I can't put into words. There's just this heavy, overwhelming despair - dreading everything. Dreading life. Empty inside, to the point of numbness. It's like there's something already dead inside. My whole being has been pulling back into that void for months. (81)

One of things so bad about depression and bipolar disorder is that if you don't have prior awareness, you don't have any idea what hit you.

Every seventeen minutes in America, someone commits suicide. Mostly, I have been impressed by how little value our society puts on saving the lives of those who are in such despair as to want to end them. It is a societal illusion that suicide is rare. It is not.

Mother, who has an absolute belief that it is not the cards that one is dealt in life, it is how one plays them, is, by far, the highest card I was dealt.

Without science, there would be no such hope.

Curiosity, wonder, and passion are defining qualities of imaginative minds and great teachers...Restlessness and discontent are vital things... Intense experience and suffering instruct us in ways less intense emotions can never do.