Jamison Quotes & Sayings

Guess your feelings is like charming a cobra with a stethoscope, a boyfriend told me once. Meaning what? Meaning that pain turned me venomous, that diagnosing me required a specialised kind of enchantment, that I flaunted feelings and withheld their origins at once. — Leslie Jamison

I compare myself with my former self, not with others. Not only that, I tend to compare my current self with the best I have been, which is when I have been midly manic. When I am my present "normal" self, I am far removed from when I have been my liveliest, most productive, most intense, most outgoing and effervescent. In sort, for myself, I am a hard act to follow. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Childbirth shapes women as a horizon of anticipation. Women come into consciousness, she speculated, imagining a future pain toward which their bodies inevitably propel them. — Leslie Jamison

Whenever I've been stuck on a project, it's always brought me solace to the return to books that moved me in the past. It's a nice way to get outside my own head; and it brings me back to one of the most important reasons I write at all: to bring some pleasure to readers, to make them think or feel. — Leslie Jamison

It took me far too long to realize that lost years and relationships cannot be recovered. That damage done to oneself and others cannot always be put right again. — Kay Redfield Jamison

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 (nor are they incompatible). These are beliefs, of course, that one has intuitively about friendships and family; they become less obvious when caught up in a romantic life that mirrors, magnifies, and perpetuates one's own mercurial emotional life and temperament. It has been with my pleasure, and not-inconsiderable pain, that I have learned about the possibilities of love - its steadiness and its growth - from my husband, the man with whom I had lived for almost a decade. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Every woman's pretty intimidating when you only look at her accomplishments. — Rebecca H. Jamison

This is the grand fiction of tourism, that bringing our bodies somewhere draws that place closer to us, or we to it. It's a quick fix of empathy. — Leslie Jamison

I look back over my shoulder and feel the presence of an intense young girl and then a volatile and disturbed young woman, both with high dreams and restless, romantic aspirations — Kay Redfield Jamison

I like thinking of the writer as a kind of curator; the collection as curiosity cabinet - in a non-demeaning, non-objectifying sense - but an array, a set of offerings. — Leslie Jamison

The neglect here is almost unimaginable - and it's not just neglect from the Beckley staff but from the world itself - the world that has carried on with its daily business while keeping all these men invisibly deposited elsewhere, in a slew of the nation's most obscure corners. On the outside, you can think about prison for a moment and then you can think about something else. — Leslie Jamison

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) — Kay Redfield Jamison

When people ask what kind of nonfiction I write, I say 'all kinds,' but really I mean I don't write any kind at all: I'm trying to dissolve the borders between memoir and journalism and criticism by weaving them together. — Leslie Jamison

Facts are aligned on shelves as well, necessarily chosen and arranged, assigned value by explanations neatly stuck where prices might have been. — Leslie Jamison

Moods are complicated and very much a part of who we are. People would be very boring without them. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I'm in the habit of employing either sharks or mice. — Erin Jamison

We all build internal sea walls to keep at bay the sadnesses of life and the often overwhelming forces within our minds. In whatever way we do this
through love, work, family, faith, friends, denial, alcohol, drugs, or medication, we build these walls, stone by stone, over a lifetime. — Kay Redfield Jamison

We watch a character define himself entirely through what he will not claim. If I could choose one item from my entire apartment, what would I disown? It might be my trash can full of ripped paper packets, which might mean that this pile of packets is my most honest expression of self. — Leslie Jamison

I realized that it was not that I didn't want to go on without him. I did. It was just that I didn't know why I wanted to go on — Kay Redfield Jamison

It is important to value intellect and discipline, of course, but it is also important to recognize the power of irrationality, enthusiasm and vast energy. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I have had manic-depressive illness, also known as bipolar disorder, since I was 18 years old. It is an illness that ensures that those who have it will experience a frightening, chaotic and emotional ride. It is not a gentle or easy disease. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I read it as if it had been written by someone else, although it was my own experience being recounted.

The endless questioning finally ended. My psychiatrist looked at me, there was no uncertainty in his voice. "Maniac-depressive illness." I admired his bluntness. I wished him locusts in his land and a pox upon his house. Silent, unbelievable rage. I smiled pleasantly. He smiled back. The war had just begun, — Kay Redfield Jamison

I've always treasured empathy as the particular privilege of the invisible, the observers who are shy precisely because they sense so much--because it is overwhelming to say even a single word when you're sensitive to every last flicker of nuance in the room. — Leslie Jamison

lost a great innocence when I understood that I and my mind were not going to be on good terms for the rest of my life. I can't tell you how tired I am of character-building experiences. But I treasure this part of me; whoever loves me loves me with this in it. — Kay Redfield Jamison

There is no common standard for education about diagnosis. Distinguishing between bipolar depression and major depressive disorder, for example, can be difficult, and mistakes are common. Misdiagnosis can be lethal. Medications that work well for some forms of depression induce agitation in others. — Kay Redfield Jamison

As best I could make out, having never heard the term until I arrived in California, being a WASP meant being mossbacked, lockjawed, rigid, humorless, cold, charmless, insipid, less than penetratingly bright, but otherwise
and inexplicably
to be envied. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Fanfiction is the madwoman in mainstream culture's attic, but the attic won't contain it forever. Writing and reading fanfiction isn't just something you do; it's a way of thinking critically about the media you consume, of being aware of all the implicit assumptions that a canonical work carries with it, and of considering the possibility that those assumptions might not be the only way things have to be. — Anne Jamison

Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. — Leslie Jamison

Violence, especially if you are a woman, is not something spoken about with ease. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Empathy is a kind of care but it's not the only kind of care, and it's not always enough. — Leslie Jamison

Imagining someone else's pain with too much surety can be as damaging as failing to imagine it. — Leslie Jamison

The mistakes we make everyday is to remind us that we are human. — Tai Jamison

But money spent while manic doesn't fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you're given excellent reason to be even more so. — Kay Redfield Jamison

In its severe forms, depression paralyzes all of the otherwise vital forces that make us human, leaving instead a bleak, despairing, desperate, and deadened state ... Life is bloodless, pulseless, and yet present enough to allow a suffocating horror and pain. All bearings are lost; all things are dark and drained of feeling. The slippage into futility is first gradual, then utter. Thought, which is as pervasively affected by depression as mood, is morbid, confused, and stuporous. It is also vacillating, ruminative, indecisive, and self-castigating. The body is bone-weary; there is no will; nothing is that is not an effort, and nothing at all seems worth it. Sleep is fragmented, elusive, or all-consuming. Like an unstable, gas, an irritable exhaustion seeps into every crevice of thought and action. — Kay Redfield Jamison

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

So many people dwell on negativity and I've survived by ignoring it: it dims your light and it's harder each time to turn the power up again. — Judith Jamison

Because I teach and write about depression and bipolar illness, I am often asked what is the most important factor in treating bipolar disorder. My answer is competence. Empathy is important, but competence is essential. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Everyone has good cause for suicide, or at least it seems that way to those who search for it. (74) — Kay Redfield Jamison

'An Unquiet Mind' wasn't hard to write in terms of the actual writing of it. — Kay Redfield Jamison

In his theory of the sublime, eighteenth-century philosopher Edmund Burke proposes the notion of "negative pain": the idea that a feeling of fear - paired with a sense of safety, and the ability to look away - can produce a feeling of delight. One woman can sit on her couch with a glass of Chardonnay and watch another woman drink away her life. — Leslie Jamison

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. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I haven't had a family, but I don't think of that as a sacrifice: my dancers are my family. — Judith Jamison

Now Pastor owns a small corner of the hood - or perhaps, more to the point, he owns a moment of his own experience. He can pack up his own heightened awareness like a souvenir. His opened eyes are take-home talismans. You want the tour to give you back another version of yourself, you and everyone: a more enlightened human. — Leslie Jamison

If you look at a dancer in silence, his or her body will be the music. If you turn the music on, that body will become an extension of what you're hearing. — Judith Jamison

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. — Kay Redfield Jamison

My wonderful editor, Jackie Onassis, asked me to write a book that I wanted to write. I said, 'Look, it's not going to be scandalized. I'm not going to talk about anybody like a dog. I'm going to say the positiveness of my life, and talk about those who have contributed to the way I've been going, and that's that.' — Judith Jamison

Each way to suicide is its own: intensely private, unknowable, and terrible. Suicide will have seemed to its perpetrator the last and best of bad possibilities, and any attempt by the living to chart this final terrain of life can be only a sketch, maddeningly incomplete — Kay Redfield Jamison

You pass the old L.A. County jail, which is surprisingly beautiful. It's got a handsome stone facade and stately columns. The new L.A. County jail - called The Twin Towers - isn't beautiful at all; it's a stucco panopticon the color of sick flesh. — Leslie Jamison

I had been simply treating water, settling on surviving and avoiding pain rather than being actively involved in seeking out life. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Psychotherapy is a sanctuary; it is a battleground; it is a place I have been psychotic, neurotic, elated, confused, and despairing beyond belief. — Kay Redfield Jamison

How odd to smile during Richard's funeral. He was dead and I was smiling to myself. Grief does that. Laughter lies close in with despair, numbness near by acuity and memory with forgetfulness. I would have got used to it, but I didn't know this at the time. All I knew, was that memory had given pleasure first, then cracking pain. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I am tired of hiding, tired of misspent and knotted energies, tired of the hypocrisy, and tired of acting as though I have something to hide. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I was a protege; by the age of 10, I was studying with ballet choreographer Anthony Tudor in a class of adults. — Judith Jamison

It never occurred to her to give up. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I felt the naivete of a child in my dancing. I cherished that feeling. I had what I call a knowledgeable naivete, and it worked for me. — Judith Jamison

This is part of what we disdain about sweeteners, the fact that we can taste without consequences. Our capitalist ethos loves a certain kind of inscription - insisting we can read tallies of sloth and discipline inscribed across the body itself - and artificial sweeteners threaten this legibility. They offer a way to cheat the arithmetic of indulgence and bodily consequence, just like sentimentality offers feeling without the price of complication. — Leslie Jamison

We think we should have to work in order to feel. We want to have our cake resist us; and then we want to eat it, too. — Leslie Jamison

The assumption that rigidly rejecting words and phrases that have existed for centuries will have much impact on public attitudes is rather dubious. — Kay Redfield Jamison

We expect well-informed treatment for cancer or heart disease; it matters no less for depression. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Suicide is not a blot on anyone's name; it is a tragedy — Kay Redfield Jamison

I have often asked myself whether, given the choice, I would choose to have manic-depressive illness. If lithium were not available to me, or didn't work for me, the answer would be a simple no ... and it would be an answer laced with terror. But lithium does work for me, and therefore I can afford to pose the question. Strangely enough, I think I would choose to have it. It's complicated ... — Kay Redfield Jamison

So the criminals win, that's what you're saying? For now they do. But it's a long game, Jamison. And I always play for the long game. — David Baldacci

I can't really hear the audience applause when I'm on stage. I'm totally immersed in the piece. But sometimes I get a lot of it and wonder, "Now, why did they applaud here?" If it's a white crowd, they usually applaud because they think it's a pretty movement. If it's a black crowd, it's usually because they identify with the message. — Judith Jamison

Girl gets; girl gets; girl gets. Not that she is granted things but that things keep happening to her, until they don't - until she starts doing unto others as they have done, hurting everyone who ever hurt her, moving the world with her mind, conducting its objects like an orchestra. — Leslie Jamison

The complexities of what we are given in life are vast and beyond comprehension. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Not one word about proposals, no matter how much she pushes," I told my friends. "No matter what she says or how loud she cries, don't try to throw that up as a distraction."
Gabriel's lips twitched. "I don't think it's going to be that bad. It's one woman against five supernatural creatures ... And Zeb."
"You laugh because you haven't heard my mother's thirty-minute verbal dissertation on appropriate seasonal flower choices. We're better off letting her yell at us for being dirty, premarital fornicators. — Molly Harper

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. — Kay Redfield Jamison

They used to treat sheep carcasses with Lithium so if the Coyotes went after the herd and bit on the treated carcasses, the got so sick they kept their teeth to themselves. — Kay Redfield Jamison

But, with time, one has encountered many of the monsters, and one is increasingly less terrified of those still to be met. — Kay Redfield Jamison

The pain is what you make of it. You have to find something in it that yields. I understood my guiding imperative as: keep bleeding, but find some love in the blood. — Leslie Jamison

I've been lucky enough to work with extraordinary teachers along the way, and I'm excited to share what I've learned with graduate students at SNHU. I'm just as excited for what I'll learn from them. — Leslie Jamison

Commonality doesn't inoculate against hurt. — Leslie Jamison

Learning the edges or limits or sources of friction in empathy was one of the big issues for me. — Leslie Jamison

I believe that curiosity, wonder and passion are defining qualities of imaginative minds and great teachers; that restlessness and discontent are vital things; and that intense experience and suffering instruct us in ways that less intense emotions can never do. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I'm very smart when it comes to choosing dancers and trying to show the world that there's a whole lot of dancing going on. — Judith Jamison

Maybe it's a generational thing, but I never wanted to be the best black dancer in the world. I just wanted to be the best. — Judith Jamison

I never again looked at the sky and saw only vastness and beauty. From that afternoon on I saw that death was also and always there. — Kay Redfield Jamison

The disease that has, on several occasions, nearly killed me does kill tens of thousands of people every year: most are young, most die unnecessarily, and many are among the most imaginative and gifted that we as a society have. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Dancing is bigger than the physical body. Think bigger than that. When you extend your arm, it doesn't stop at the end of your fingers, because you're dancing bigger than that. You're dancing spirit. — Judith Jamison

We read to learn about the world.
We write to change the world. — Lori Jamison Rog

She was given a man's name."
The stable master nearly jumped out of his tunic. He hadn't heard Alec Kincaid's approach. He turned around and came face to shoulders with the giant warrior. " 'Twas her mama's way of giving her a place in this family. Baron Jamison weren't the man who fathered Jamie. He claimed her for his own, though. I'll give him that much kindness. Did you get a good look at her, then?" he added in a rush.
Alec nodded.
"You'll be taking her with you, won't you?" The Kincaid stared at the old man a long minute before answering.
"Aye, Beak. I'll be taking her with me." The choice had been made. — Julie Garwood

I am one of millions who have been treated for depression and gotten well; I was lucky enough to have a psychiatrist well versed in using lithium and knowledgeable about my illness, and who was also an excellent psychotherapist. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Who would not want an illness that has among its symptoms elevated and expansive mood, inflated self-esteem, abundance of energy, less need for sleep, intensified sexuality, and- most germane to our argument here-"sharpened and unusually creative thinking" and "increased productivity"? — Kay Redfield Jamison

Seemed to myself to be dull, boring, inadequate, thick brained, unlit, unresponsive, chill skinned, bloodless, and sparrow drab. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Often, people want both to live and to die; ambivalence saturates the suicidal act. — Kay Redfield Jamison

It took my year in England to make me realize how much I had been simply treading water, settling on surviving and avoiding pain rather than being actively involved in and seeking out life. The chance to escape from the reminders of illness and death, from a hectic life, and from clinical and teaching responsibilities was not unlike my earlier year as an undergraduate in St. Andrews: it gave me a semblance of peace that had eluded me, and a place of my own to heal and mull, but most important to heal. England did not have the Celtic, magical quality of St. Andrews - nothing, I suppose, ever could for me - but it gave me back myself again, gave me back my high hopes of life. And it gave me back, my belief in love. — Kay Redfield Jamison

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. — Kay Redfield Jamison

In some cases, some people do get depressed in the middle of their grief, and they really need to be treated for depression. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I'd be lying if I wrote that I remember exactly what he said. I don't. Which is the sad half life of arguments - we usually remember our side better. — Leslie Jamison

Like my father, I looked up rather more than I looked out. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Lithium prevents my seductive but disastrous highs, diminishes my depressions, clears out the wool and webbing from my disordered thinking, slows me down, gentles me out, keeps me from ruining my career and relationships, keeps me out of a hospital, alive, and makes psychotherapy possible. — Kay Redfield Jamison

let myself luxuriate in the decadence of being with Jamison. — Olivia Chase

Time will pass; these mood will pass; and I will, eventually, be myself again. But then, at some unknown time, the electrifying carnival will come back into my mind. — Kay Redfield Jamison

It's one of the most liberating things I experience in writing - letting yourself get rid of a gesture or character or plot point that always nagged, even if you couldn't admit to yourself that it did. — Leslie Jamison

Redeeming subjects from cliche is its own pleasure and privilege. — Leslie Jamison

Knowledge is marvelous, but wisdom is even better. — Kay Redfield Jamison

By the time they arrived, the snow was coming down fast ...
"It's beautiful," she said, pausing outside the door. She thrust out her hands and let the snow land on her palms.
"Yes, yes ... " Reid seemed in a mighty big hurry to get her inside.
"How long did you say the storm would last?" she asked, thinking it would be so beautiful. The snow
not being trapped with Reid Jamison.
Reid hesitated. "Longer than either of us is going to like," he muttered, looking miserable.
Jenna was afraid of that. — Debbie Macomber

The route to his hotel had been committed to memory a long time ago. From the overflowing trashcan on the corner to the feral cats that frequented the dumpsters behind the nearby shawarma shop, Jamison knew every detail. — Christian F. Burton

Nyla, he breathed, hoping not to wake her but also hoping that she would open her eyes. She didn't. She simply smiled and whispered, "Jamison, I'd like you to be the first to know that I love you." His heart convulsed. She had finally said it. — Mia Castile

I've had a really charmed life, you know. Things always come to me - they just do. — Judith Jamison