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

Manic depression distorts moods and thoughts, incites dreadful behaviors, destroys the basis of rational thought, and too often erodes the desire and will to live.

An ardent temperament makes one very vulnerable to dreamkillers.

Suicide carries in its aftermath a level of confusion and devastation that is, for the most part, beyond description.

I am by temperament an optimist, and I thought from the beginning that there was much to be written about suicide that was strangely heartening.

I long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. And I am, by nature, too mercurial to be anything but deeply wary of the grave unnaturalness involved in any attempt to exert too much control over essentially uncontrollable forces. There will always be propelling, disturbing elements, and they will be there until, as Lowell put it, the watch is taken from the wrist.

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.