“ There is a self-perpetuating belief that one simply cannot help it, and this is very dangerous. It becomes an identity in and of itself. It becomes its own religion, and you wait for salvation, and you wait, and wait, and wait, and do not save yourself. If you saved yourself, and did not wait for salvation, you’d be self-sufficient. How dull. ”

“ Death is a fascinating thing. The human mind continually returns and returns to death, to mortality, immortality, damnation, salvation. Some fear death, some seek it, but it is in our human nature to wonder at the limits of human life, at least. When you are sick like this you begin to wonder too. ”

“ I wish I could find words to explain what this kind of cold is like- the cold that has somehow gotten in underneath your skin and is getting colder and colder inside you. ”

“ where am i? where am i going tomorrow? what if i fuck up? what if i make a fool of myself? what if i just go crazy & start to scream? that’s what scares me, because i feel as if i am just about to do it, every minute of the day ”

“ Everyone else thinks I’m a disaster, a screwup, a mess. On the phone, my grandfather demands, ‘So, have you got your head screwed on right yet?’… funny man, raging drunk. But you can’t blame him for the question. It’s the one everyone’s been asking since I was a kid. Surely she’ll grow out of it, they think. I grew into it. It grew into me. It and I blurred at the edges, became one amorphous, seeping, crawling, thing. ”

“ But the memory erased by madness is the memory one relies on to make sense of one’s life. I have precise memories of conversations, crystal-clear recall of books I’ve read, and a blow-by-blow memory of everything that happened in one year, then nothing for the next two. I piece my life together from the stories other people tell me, from journals and photos, from sitting with my head in my hands, searching for anything until I can get a dim picture of a face, a vague memory of something I know has happened but that I have to reconstruct from the wreckage of my mind ”

“ When there are bills, I write the checks, feeling wild and a little dizzy. This way the lights will stay on, and the water, and the phone. I understand that if I complete my tasks, nothing will go wrong. The world is an orderly system of cause and effect. This is a wonder and an enormous relief. ”

“ It is, at the most basic level, a bundle of contradictions: a desire for power that strips you of all power. A gesture of strength that divests you of all strength. ”

“ It’s always nice when someone’s in love with you. Gives you leverage. ”

“ Madness is not what it seems. Time stops. All my life I’ve been obsessed with time, its motion and velocity, the way it works you over, the way it rushes you onward, a pebble turning in a brook. I’ve always been obsessed with where I’d go, and what I’d do, and how I would live. I’d always harbored a desperate hope that I would make something of myself. Not then. Time stopped seeming so much like the thing that would transform me into something worthwhile and began to be inseparable from death. I spent my time merely waiting. I knew this even then. ”

“ Some of us use the body to convey the things for which we cannot find words. Some of us decide to take a shortcut, decide the world is too much or too little, death is so easy, so smiling, so simple; and death is dramatic, a final fuck-you to the world. ”

“ People take the feeling of full for granted. ”

“ These years are mostly lost to me. Madness strips you of memory and leaves you scrabbling around on the floor of your brain for the snatches and snippets of what happened, what was said, and when. I spend these two years caught in the revolving door of madness, going in and out of the hospital seven times, traveling from my bed at home to a bed on a locked ward, the weird world of the ward becoming more familiar to me than the one outside. This is the best I can do to piece the scattered memories together, to give some semblance of continuous time, to fill the hole in my life that madness made, and will not repair. ”

“ The very idea that you could control a man’s body was intoxicating: that you could make his head turn, follow your passing steps, that you could lean just so, or speak just so, or simply glance and toss your head, and he would be caught. ”

“ All of us carry around countless bags of dusty old knickknacks dated from childhood: collected resentments, long lists of wounds of greater or lesser significance, glorified memories, absolute certainties that later turn out to be wrong. Humans are emotional pack rats. These bags define us. ”