Exuberance is a gift of grace that allows us to move on, to seek, to love again.

It was as if my father had given me, by way of temperament, an impossibly wild, dark, and unbroken horse. It was a horse without a name, and a horse with no experience of a bit between its teeth. My mother taught me to gentle it; gave me the discipline and love to break it; and- as Alexander had known so intuitively with Bucephalus- she understood, and taught me, that the beast was best handled by turning it toward the sun.

There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness and terror involved in this kind of madness... It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.

Grief comes and goes, but depression is unremitting

The awareness of the damage done by severe mental illness—to the individual himself and to others—and fears that it may return again play a decisive role in many suicides

Love has, at its best, made the inherent sadness of life bearable, and its beauty manifest.

Somehow, like so many people who get depressed, we felt our depressions were more complicated and existentially based than they actually were.