Lauren Slater Quotes & Sayings

They cleared swiftly, dramatically, like a stage set or a movie; we went from black to stunning blue, the day emerging at once wet and crisp, the trees dripping jewels, the flowers drunk on drinking, their heads lolling with dizzy delight, rivulets etched into our earth, showing us which way the rain ran, downhill, of course, heading, all water, straight for our yet-to-be-pond. — Lauren Slater

I had lots of books, most of them nonfiction, because I'd always felt that in nonfiction, specifically in the disciplines of psychology, philosophy, and theology, I might find clues about ways to live my life. — Lauren Slater

There is betrayal here, in what I do, but in betrayal I am finally camouflaged. — Lauren Slater

Getting better was a grief. One morning you woke up and your fever had fled. Your throat felt depressingly fine. — Lauren Slater

Depression is a death within, a knowledge - terrifying - that you cannot resurrect yourself. Depression is loss of the vision that lets leaves breathe and fall, that lets the air smell of seed and soil. And there must be rage, yes I think there is rage toward such a severing, such a ragged-deep rupture with the world. — Lauren Slater

When I was a girl I loved fevers and flus and the muzzy feeling of a head cold, all these states carrying with them the special accoutrements of illness, the thermometer with its lovely line of red mercury, the coolness of ice chips pressed to a sweaty forehead, and best of all, a distant mother coming to your bedside with tea. — Lauren Slater

I was born from nothing and to nothing I will return. And yet, when i say the word nothing, when i admit, at last, 'I am nothing,' i feel mysteriously like something again, ground zero, genesis, the pull of possibilities. — Lauren Slater

When you die, there's that much less breath to the world, and across continents someone supposedly separate gasps for air. When Marie, Joseph, peter, Moxi, Oscar, when I weep for you, don't forget I weep as well for me. — Lauren Slater

Illness was a temporary respite, a release from the demands of an alienating world. — Lauren Slater

I had lived my life by these kinds of banners, only now, searching the sentence, I found little in it that resonated deep in my bones. I had a cerebral sort of appreciation for the sentence, or perhaps, an appreciation based in memory, the way one remembers with fondness a past partner whom one no longer loves. — Lauren Slater

I couldn't reach her. I was never able to reach her. Maybe she moved at a pace too fast. Maybe she was too sad. She held herself stiff, a lacquered lady. I think because I couldn't feel her, I couldn't feel myself. — Lauren Slater

It is a fundamental misperception," Fouts says to me, "to think human life has more value than any other life form. — Lauren Slater

I believe my strength has something to do with memory, with that concept of fluid time. For while I recall with clarity the terror of abuse, I also recall the green and lovely dream of childhood, the moist membrane of a leaf against my nose, the toads that peeled a golden pool in the palm of my hand. Pleasures, pleasures, the recollections of which have injected me with a firm and unshakable faith. I believe Dostoevski when he wrote, "If one had only one good memory left in one's heart, even that may be the means of saving us." I have gone by memory. — Lauren Slater

Are psychiatric crises so overwhelming to the mind that they inhibit the presence of ethics? Is depression at root an amoral phenomenon, its focus on the self preventing any other from really counting? Perhaps. Sometimes. Sometimes, even when we are two we are really only one; we can feel nothing but our own bones, our own difficult breaths. — Lauren Slater

I never said to myself, I am longing; that feeling lived at a level below language. — Lauren Slater

Bless those people, for they are a part of my faith's firmness. Bless the stories my foster mother read to me, the stories of mine she later listened to, her thin blond hair hanging down a single sheet. The house, old and shingled, with niches and culverts I loved to crawl in, where the rain pinged on a leaky roof and out in the puddled yard a beautiful German shepherd, who licked my face and offered me his paw, barked and played in the water. Bless the night there, the hallway light they left on for me, burning a soft yellow wedge that I turned into a wing, a woman, an entire army of angels who, I learned to imagine, knew just how to sing me to sleep. — Lauren Slater

And I have the same heart in the same socket of chest, and it hammers the way it used to, and I find myself thinking the same words, safe again, trapped again. My palms sweat on the steering wheel. I remind myself: I am not that girl. I am not that girl. I've changed. I've grown. It's a long time ago. — Lauren Slater

I will go in, go down, go back. — Lauren Slater

Things are screaming inside me and my eyes feel hot. — Lauren Slater

The most miraculous moments of my life were not when my daughter and son were born, but when the second or third Prozac pill shot down my throat and catapulted me into a world called sane. — Lauren Slater

OH THAT I COULD GO TO THE SKY WHERE I MIGHT FIND A CLEAR KNOWING. — Lauren Slater

Wounds, I think, are never confined to a single skin but reach out to rasp us all. — Lauren Slater

But what happens if such a patient, say myself, for instance, has rarely if ever experienced a normal state of functioning? What happens if such a patient has spent much of her life in mental hospitals, both pursuing and being pursued by one's illness after another? What happens if "regular life" to such a person has always meant cutting one's arms, or gagging? — Lauren Slater

To say I believe time is fluid, and so are the boundaries between human beings, the border separating helper from the one who hurts always blurry. — Lauren Slater

All it takes is the right training, and we step out, over the boundaries of our bodies and their limitations. — Lauren Slater

I found some way to recovery. But I know, have always known, that I could go back. Mysterious neurons collide and break. The brain bruises. Memories you thought were buried rise up. — Lauren Slater

Prozac, too made me want to weep. Prozac, too, was grief, because it returned me to the regular world with consequences I never expected. — Lauren Slater

I have not healed so much as learned to sit still and wait while pain does its dancing work, trying not to panic or twist in ways that make the blades tear deeper, finally infecting the wounds. — Lauren Slater

Sickness is the natural state in which we humans reside. We occasionally fall into brief brackets of health, only to return to our fevers, our infections, our rapid, minute mutations, which take us toward death even as they evolve us, as a species, into some ill-defined future. — Lauren Slater

Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it — Lauren Slater

Finally the dawn came, the sky fringed with pink, and the sun bright as a coin in a spill of rising red. — Lauren Slater

I felt a clot in my throat, something that wouldn't let language come ... And there is also a dream I have over and over again, of opening up my mouth and finding my tongue studded with broken glass, so every word is a wound. — Lauren Slater

I watch the sky progress through its morning paces, the light turning from rose to saffron as the sun ascends, its rays like ribbons tangling in the tops of trees. — Lauren Slater

Much has been said about the meanings we make of illness, but what about the meanings we make out of cure? Cure is complex, disorienting, a revisioning of the self, either subtle or stark. Cure is the new, strange planet, pressing in. The doctor could not have known. And that made me, as it does every patient, only more alone. — Lauren Slater

Everyone knows that a lot of memoirs have made-up scenes; it's obvious. And everyone knows that half the time at least fictions contain literal autobiographical truths. So how do we decide what's what, and does it even matter? — Lauren Slater

I didn't know then that the mind, like the earth, has several layers: a crust, a mantle, a boiling core. — Lauren Slater

If you have been sick for a long, long time, Prozac may make you high. It probably won't make you, never quite managed to be a part of, but a world, nevertheless, that you at first fit into with the precision of a key to a lock or a neurotransmitter to its receptor. — Lauren Slater

How do you describe emptiness? Is it the air inside a bubble, the darkness in a pocket, snow? I think, yes, I was six when or seven when I first felt it, the dwindling that is depression. — Lauren Slater

Tethered to the ground by quotidian conversation.
... the window rosy with anemic November light. — Lauren Slater

Mistrust is the fuel for so much mental pain, so many mental disorders. I am not talking here about the suspicions we sometimes have of one another, the distant but lurking sense that perhaps our lover lies to us, our best friend whispers behind our back. I am talking about a belief that betrayal inundates the atoms of the universe, is so woven into the workings of the world that every step is treacherous, and that below the rich mud lies a mine. — Lauren Slater

A piano tuner used to come over to our house when I was young. He was a blind man, his eyes burnt-out holes in his head, his body all bent. I remember how strange he looked against the grandeur of our lives, how he stooped over that massive multitoothed instrument and tweaked its tones. The piano never looked any different after he'd worked on it, but when I pressed a C key or the black bar of an F minor, the note sprung out richer, as though chocolate and spices had been added to a flat sound. This was what was different. It was as though I'd been visited by a blind piano tuner who had crept into my apartment at night, who had tweaked the ivory bones of my body, the taut strings in my skull, and now, when I pressed on myself, the same notes but with a mellower, fuller sound sprang out. — Lauren Slater

If this is the case, then the "normal state" Prozac ushers in is an experience in the surreal, Dali's dripping clock, a disorientation so deep and sweet you spin. Thus Prozac, make no mistake about it, blissed me out and freaked me out and later on, when the full force of health hit me, sometimes stunned me with grief. — Lauren Slater

In illness, the world went wonderfully warped, high temperatures turning your pillow to a dune of snow and bringing the night sky, with its daisy-sized stars, so close to your bed you could touch it, and taste the moon. — Lauren Slater

And I saw ans still see everything that I do have, but no matter what, there is always the itch of what gets lost. — Lauren Slater

Instead of spelling stories you spread silence, which was outside the alphabet. — Lauren Slater

All the same, all different. What was it? — Lauren Slater

The clear water the color of deeply steeped tea, surrounded by cattails and gracile grasses. — Lauren Slater

I love you as only a lover can. Less depressed, less obsessed, I am better than ever able to love your hair, which has blond lights in it, and your remarkable eyes, the blue of my Nana's chipped china. I love the smell of your skin, impossible to describe except to say it's a confluence of many pungent things, and I love your chest with the disks of your nipples, and your thighs striated with sweat, and your back and your breath while you are above me. — Lauren Slater

Why doesn't passionate love last? how is it possible to see a person as beautiful on Monday, and 364 days later, on another Monday, to see that beauty as bland? surely the object of your affection could not have changed that much. she still has the same shaped eyes. her voice has always had that husky sound, but now it grates on you - she sounds like she needs an antibiotic. — Lauren Slater

I looked up "skin" in the encyclopedia and confirmed that, sure enough, it is the human body's largest organ, a fact that suggests our surfaces are critical to who we are, not just the gateway to physical or spiritual depths but a profoundly important web of cells that, in protecting us, gives us form and function. — Lauren Slater