β
The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four people is suffering from a mental illness. Look at your 3 best friends. If they're ok, then it's you.
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Rita Mae Brown
β
I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.
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Sylvia Plath (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)
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I think that we're all mentally ill. Those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better - and maybe not all that much better after all.
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Stephen King
β
Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say βMy tooth is achingβ than to say βMy heart is broken.
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C.S. Lewis (The Problem of Pain)
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Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery.
None but ourselves can free our minds.
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Bob Marley
β
We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
β
If everybody is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.
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George S. Patton Jr.
β
Love is a serious mental disease.
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Plato (Phaedrus (Hackett Classics))
β
Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?"
"I give."
"You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog.
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David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest)
β
Now, come over here so I can pat you down."
"But you don't have-" Percy stopped. "Uh, sure."
He stood next to the armless statue. Terminus conducted a rigorous mental pat down.
"You seem to be clean," Terminus decided. "Do you have anything to declare?"
"Yes," Percy said. "I declare that this is stupid.
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Rick Riordan (The Son of Neptune (The Heroes of Olympus, #2))
β
You Are the Master of Your Attitude
You cannot control what happens to you, but you can control the way you think about all the events. You always have a choice. You can choose to face them with a positive mental attitude.
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Roy T. Bennett (The Light in the Heart)
β
Its so hard to talk when you want to kill yourself. That's above and beyond everything else, and it's not a mental complaint-it's a physical thing, like it's physically hard to open your mouth and make the words come out. They don't come out smooth and in conjunction with your brain the way normal people's words do; they come out in chunks as if from a crushed-ice dispenser; you stumble on them as they gather behind your lower lip. So you just keep quiet.
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Ned Vizzini (It's Kind of a Funny Story)
β
There are moments when mental overload can render words impossible.
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Nicholas Sparks (The Choice)
β
She is my mate. And my spy,' I said too quietly. 'And she is the High Lady of the Night Court.'
'What?' Mor whsipered.
I caressed a mental finger down that bond now hidden deep, deep within us, and said, 'If they had removed her other glove, they would have seen a second tatoo on her right arm. The twin to the other. Inked last night, when we crept out, found a priestess, and I swore her in as my High Lady.' (...) 'Not consort, not wife. Feyre is High Lady of the Night Court.' My equal in every way; she would wear my crown, sit on a throne beside mine. Never sidelined, never designated to breeding and parties and child rearing. My queen.
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Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Mist and Fury (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #2))
β
One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
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Friedrich Nietzsche
β
Although I was able to maintain a pleasant expression, I was mentally throwing up in her face.
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Augusten Burroughs
β
It's my experience that people are a lot more sympathetic if they can see you hurting, and for the millionth time in my life I wish for measles or smallpox or some other easily understood disease just to make it easier on me and also on them.
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Jennifer Niven (All the Bright Places)
β
I have had to experience so much stupidity, so many vices, so much error, so much nausea, disillusionment and sorrow, just in order to become a child again and begin anew. I had to experience despair, I had to sink to the greatest mental depths, to thoughts of suicide, in order to experience grace.
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Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha)
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Mental illness is so much more complicated than any pill that any mortal could invent
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Elizabeth Wurtzel (Prozac Nation)
β
Toska - noun /ΛtΕ-skΙ/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness.
"No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.
β
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Vladimir Nabokov
β
The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.
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Malcolm X (The Autobiography of Malcolm X)
β
You havenβt locked yourself in any rooms or rocked in any corners, right?β
I rolled my eyes and began walking again. βNo Daemon, but thanks for making sure Iβm mentally sound and all.
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Jennifer L. Armentrout (Obsidian (Lux, #1))
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The bravest thing I ever did was continuing my life when I wanted to die.
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Juliette Lewis
β
Visualize this thing you want. See it, feel it, believe in it. Make your mental blueprint and begin.
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Robert Collier
β
Maybe we all have darkness inside of us and some of us are better at dealing with it than others.
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Jasmine Warga (My Heart and Other Black Holes)
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People pontificate, "Suicide is selfishness." Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call in a cowardly assault on the living. Oafs argue this specious line for varying reason: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one's audience with one's mental fiber, to vent anger, or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathize. Cowardice is nothing to do with it - suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what's selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching.
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David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas)
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My best advice to anyone who wants to raise a happy, mentally healthy child is: Keep him or her as far away from a church as you can.
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Frank Zappa
β
Now that I'm in your mind, want to see some naked mental pictures of Jace?
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Cassandra Clare (City of Lost Souls (The Mortal Instruments, #5))
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That millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.
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Erich Fromm (The Sane Society)
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Never give up on someone with a mental illness. When "I" is replaced by "We", illness becomes wellness.
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Shannon L. Alder
β
Being able to feel safe with other people is probably the single most important aspect of mental health; safe connections are fundamental to meaningful and satisfying lives.
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Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
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The thing about a spiral is, if you follow it inward, it never actually ends. It just keeps tightening, infinitely.
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John Green (Turtles All the Way Down)
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My mind," he said, "rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world.
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β
Arthur Conan Doyle (The Sign of Four (Sherlock Holmes, #2))
β
It is not seen as insane when a fighter, under an attack that will inevitable lead to his death, chooses to take his own life first. In fact, this act has been encouraged for centuries, and is accepted even now as an honorable reason to do the deed. How is it any different when you are under attack by your own mind?
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Emilie Autumn (The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls)
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It has been said, 'the truth will make men free.' The truth alone has never made anyone free. It is only doubt which will bring mental emancipation.
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Anton Szandor LaVey
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Donβt let mental blocks control you. Set yourself free. Confront your fear and turn the mental blocks into building blocks.
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Roopleen
β
Never waste valuable time, or mental peace of mind, on the affairs of othersβthat is too high a price to pay.
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Robert Greene (The 48 Laws of Power)
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Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity was wrapped up with the deceased, the more difficult the loss.
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Meghan O'Rourke
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For someone like myself in whom the ability to trust others is so cracked and broken that I am wretchedly timid and am forever trying to read the expression on people's faces.
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Osamu Dazai (No Longer Human)
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The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. "Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does." They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.
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Aldous Huxley (Brave New World Revisited)
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As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.
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Wilfred Arlan Peterson
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If being sane is thinking there's something wrong with being different....I'd rather be completely fucking mental.
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Angelina Jolie
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A sick thought can devour the body's flesh more than fever or consumption.
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Guy de Maupassant (Le Horla et autres contes fantastiques (Classiques hachette))
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I had noticed that both in the very poor and very rich extremes of society the mad were often allowed to mingle freely.
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Charles Bukowski (Ham on Rye)
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The thing about having a mental breakdown is that no matter how obvious it is that you're having one, it is somehow not obvious to you. I'm fine, you think. So what if I watched TV for twenty-four straight hours yesterday. I'm not falling apart. I'm just lazy. Why it's better to think yourself lazy than think yourself in distress, I'm not sure. But it was better. More than better: it was vital.
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Tara Westover (Educated)
β
Hey, lookβyour girlfriend is saying something."
Artemis had a vast mental reserve of scathing comebacks at his disposal, but none of them covered girlfriend insults. He wasn't even sure if it was an insult. And if it was, who was being insulted? Him or the girl?
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Eoin Colfer
β
There is hope, even when your brain tells you there isn't.
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John Green (Turtles All the Way Down)
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A best friend is the only one that walks into your life when the world has walked out.
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Shannon L. Alder
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Anyone who has actually been that sad can tell you that there's nothing beautiful or literary or mysterious about depression.
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Jasmine Warga (My Heart and Other Black Holes)
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Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, 'This is the real me,' and when you have found that attitude, follow it.
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William James (The Principles of Psychology)
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I will be stronger than my sadness.
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Jasmine Warga (My Heart and Other Black Holes)
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When you are mad, mad like this, you don't know it. Reality is what you see. When what you see shifts, departing from anyone else's reality, it's still reality to you.
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Marya Hornbacher (Madness: A Bipolar Life)
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To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown.
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β
Jeanette Winterson
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I'm so good at beginnings, but in the end I always seem to destroy everything, including myself.
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Kiera Van Gelder (The Buddha and the Borderline: My Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder through Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Buddhism, and Online Dating)
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If you trade your authenticity for safety, you may experience the following: anxiety, depression, eating disorders, addiction, rage, blame, resentment, and inexplicable grief.
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BrenΓ© Brown
β
Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.
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Bertrand Russell (Unpopular Essays)
β
I'm the girl who is lost in space, the girl who is disappearing always, forever fading away and receding farther and farther into the background. Just like the Cheshire cat, someday I will suddenly leave, but the artificial warmth of my smile, that phony, clownish curve, the kind you see on miserably sad people and villains in Disney movies, will remain behind as an ironic remnant. I am the girl you see in the photograph from some party someplace or some picnic in the park, the one who is in fact soon to be gone. When you look at the picture again, I want to assure you, I will no longer be there. I will be erased from history, like a traitor in the Soviet Union. Because with every day that goes by, I feel myself becoming more and more invisible...
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Elizabeth Wurtzel (Prozac Nation)
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There is no standard normal. Normal is subjective. There are seven billion versions of normal on this planet.
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Matt Haig (Reasons to Stay Alive)
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Hug and kiss whoever helped get you - financially, mentally, morally, emotionally - to this day. Parents, mentors, friends, teachers. If you're too uptight to do that, at least do the old handshake thing, but I recommend a hug and a kiss. Don't let the sun go down without saying thank you to someone, and without admitting to yourself that absolutely no one gets this far alone.
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Stephen King
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Humanity is so weird. If weβre not laughing, weβre crying or running for our lives because monsters are trying to eat us. And they donβt even have to be real monsters. They could be the ones we make up in our heads. Donβt you think thatβs weird?
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T.J. Klune (The House in the Cerulean Sea (Cerulean Chronicles, #1))
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Sensitive people usually love deeply and hate deeply. They don't know any other way to live than by extremes because thier emotional theromastat is broken.
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Shannon L. Alder
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It's a funny thing about life, once you begin to take note of the things you are grateful for, you begin to lose sight of the things that you lack.
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Germany Kent
β
About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be defined as the general neurosis of our times.
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C.G. Jung
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The scars from mental cruelty can be as deep and long-lasting as wounds from punches or slaps but are often not as
obvious. In fact, even among women who have experienced violence from a partner, half or more report that the manβs emotional abuse is what is causing them the greatest harm.
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Lundy Bancroft (Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men)
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Sometimes loneliness makes the loudest noise.
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Aaron Ben-Ze'ev
β
He is not to them what he is to me," I thought: "he is not of their kind. I believe he is of mine- I am sure he is- I feel akin to him- I understand the language of his countenance and movements: though rank and wealth sever us widely, I have something in my brain and heart, in my blood and nerves, that assimilates me mentally to him.
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Charlotte BrontΓ« (Jane Eyre)
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When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. In learning to write, the pupil goes over with his pen what the teacher has outlined in pencil: so in reading; the greater part of the work of thought is already done for us. This is why it relieves us to take up a book after being occupied with our own thoughts. And in reading, the mind is, in fact, only the playground of anotherβs thoughts. So it comes about that if anyone spends almost the whole day in reading, and by way of relaxation devotes the intervals to some thoughtless pastime, he gradually loses the capacity for thinking; just as the man who always rides, at last forgets how to walk. This is the case with many learned persons: they have read themselves stupid.
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Arthur Schopenhauer (Essays and Aphorisms)
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Your complaints, your drama, your victim mentality, your whining, your blaming, and all of your excuses have NEVER gotten you even a single step closer to your goals or dreams. Let go of your nonsense. Let go of the delusion that you DESERVE better and go EARN it! Today is a new day!
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Steve Maraboli (Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience)
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He could only consider me as the living corpse of a would-be suicide, a person dead to shame, an idiot ghost.
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Osamu Dazai (No Longer Human)
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I wonder if that's how darkness wins, by convincing us to trap it inside ourselves, instead of emptying it out.
I don't want it to win.
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Jasmine Warga (My Heart and Other Black Holes)
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Lunatics are similar to designated hitters. Often an entire family is crazy, but since an entire family can't go into the hospital, one person is designated as crazy and goes inside. Then, depending on how the rest of the family is feeling that person is kept inside or snatched out, to prove something about the family's mental health.
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Susanna Kaysen (Girl, Interrupted: Screenplay based on the book)
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Intelligence is one of the greatest human gifts. But all too often a search for knowledge drives out the search for love. This is something else I've discovered for myself very recently. I present it to you as a hypothesis: Intelligence without the ability to give and receive affection leads to mental and moral breakdown, to neurosis, and possibly even psychosis. And I say that the mind absorbed in and involved in itself as a self-centered end, to the exclusion of human relationships, can only lead to violence and pain.
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Daniel Keyes (Flowers for Algernon)
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i think the idea of a 'mental health day' is something completely invented by people who have no clue what it's like to have bad mental health. the idea that your mind can be aired out in twenty-four hours is kind of like saying heart disease can be cured if you eat the right breakfast cereal. mental health days only exist for people who have the luxury of saying 'i don't want to deal with things today' and then can take the whole day off, while the rest of us are stuck fighting the fights we always fight, with no one really caring one way or another, unless we choose to bring a gun to school or ruin the morning announcements with a suicide.
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David Levithan (Will Grayson, Will Grayson)
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Opportunity does not waste time with those who are unprepared.
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Idowu Koyenikan (Wealth for All: Living a Life of Success at the Edge of Your Ability)
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Sometimes I think people take reality for granted.
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Francesca Zappia (Made You Up)
β
Today is a new day. Don't let your history interfere with your destiny! Let today be the day you stop being a victim of your circumstances and start taking action towards the life you want. You have the power and the time to shape your life. Break free from the poisonous victim mentality and embrace the truth of your greatness. You were not meant for a mundane or mediocre life!
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Steve Maraboli
β
I wanted to tell her that if only something were wrong with my body it would be fine, I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head, but the idea seemed so involved and wearisome that I didnβt say anything. I only burrowed down further in the bed.
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Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
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People with BPD are like people with third degree burns over 90% of their bodies. Lacking emotional skin, they feel agony at the slightest touch or movement.
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Marsha M. Linehan
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People should know about us. Girls who write their pain on their bodies. ~Louisa
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Kathleen Glasgow (Girl in Pieces)
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There is no progress or accomplishment without sacrifice.
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Idowu Koyenikan (Wealth for All: Living a Life of Success at the Edge of Your Ability)
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If you could read my mind, you wouldn't be smiling.
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Tamara Ireland Stone (Every Last Word)
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Insanity is everyone expecting you not to fall apart when you find out everything you believed in was a lie.
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Shannon L. Alder
β
The thing about people who are truly and malignantly crazy: their real genius is for making the people around them think they themselves are crazy. In military science this is called Psy-Ops, for your info.
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David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest)
β
When people are suicidal, their thinking is paralyzed, their options appear spare or nonexistent, their mood is despairing, and hopelessness permeates their entire mental domain. The future cannot be separated from the present, and the present is painful beyond solace. βThis is my last experiment,β wrote a young chemist in his suicide note. βIf there is any eternal torment worse than mine Iβll have to be shown.
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Kay Redfield Jamison (Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide)
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You know, I get it. Being raised as a superstar must be really, really difficult for you. Always a commodity, never a human being, not a single person in your family thinking youβre worth a damn off the courtβ yeah, sounds rough. Kevin and I talk about your intricate and endless daddy issues all the time. I know itβs not entirely your fault that you are mentally unbalanced and infected with these delusions of grandeur, and I know youβre physically incapable of holding a decent conversation with anyone like every other normal human being can, but I donβt think any of us should have to put up with this much of your bullshit. Pity only gets you so many concessions, and you used yours up about six insults ago. So please, please, just shut the fuck up and leave us alone.
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Nora Sakavic (The Raven King (All for the Game, #2))
β
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 short, for myself, I am a hard act to follow.
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Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)
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Children are people, and they should have to reach to learn about things, to understand things, just as adults have to reach if they want to grow in mental stature. Life is composed of lights and shadows, and we would be untruthful, insincere, and saccharine if we tried to pretend there were no shadows. Most things are good, and they are the strongest things; but there are evil things too, and you are not doing a child a favor by trying to shield him from reality. The important thing is to teach a child that good can always triumph over evil.
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β
Walt Disney Company
β
Feelings don't try to kill you, even the painful ones. Anxiety is a feeling grown too large. A feeling grown aggressive and dangerous. You're responsible for its consequences, you're responsible for treating it. But...you're not responsible for causing it. You're not morally at fault for it. No more than you would be for a tumor.
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β
Patrick Ness (The Rest of Us Just Live Here)
β
One of the things that baffles me (and there are quite a few) is how there can be so much lingering stigma with regards to mental illness, specifically bipolar disorder. In my opinion, living with manic depression takes a tremendous amount of balls. Not unlike a tour of Afghanistan (though the bombs and bullets, in this case, come from the inside). At times, being bipolar can be an all-consuming challenge, requiring a lot of stamina and even more courage, so if you're living with this illness and functioning at all, it's something to be proud of, not ashamed of.
They should issue medals along with the steady stream of medication.
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Carrie Fisher (Wishful Drinking)
β
Our society tends to regard as a sickness any mode of thought or behavior that is inconvenient for the system and this is plausible because when an individual doesn't fit into the system it causes pain to the individual as well as problems for the system. Thus the manipulation of an individual to adjust him to the system is seen as a cure for a sickness and therefore as good.
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β
Theodore John Kaczynski
β
Mental illness
People assume you arenβt sick
unless they see the sickness on your skin
like scars forming a map of all the ways youβre hurting.
My heart is a prison of Have you tried?s
Have you tried exercising? Have you tried eating better?
Have you tried not being sad, not being sick?
Have you tried being more like me?
Have you tried shutting up?
Yes, I have tried. Yes, I am still trying,
and yes, I am still sick.
Sometimes monsters are invisible, and
sometimes demons attack you from the inside.
Just because you cannot see the claws and the teeth
does not mean they arenβt ripping through me.
Pain does not need to be seen to be felt.
Telling me there is no problem
wonβt solve the problem.
This is not how miracles are born.
This is not how sickness works.
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Emm Roy (The First Step)
β
I once read in my physics book that the universe begs to be observed, that energy travels and transfers when people pay attention. Maybe that's what love really boils down to--having someone who cares enough to pay attention so that you're encouraged to travel and transfer, to make your potential energy spark into kinetic energy.
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Jasmine Warga (My Heart and Other Black Holes)
β
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.
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β
Edward L. Bernays (Propaganda)
β
Why Not You?
Today, many will awaken with a fresh sense of inspiration. Why not you?
Today, many will open their eyes to the beauty that surrounds them. Why not you?
Today, many will choose to leave the ghost of yesterday behind and seize the immeasurable power of today. Why not you?
Today, many will break through the barriers of the past by looking at the blessings of the present. Why not you?
Today, for many the burden of self doubt and insecurity will be lifted by the security and confidence of empowerment. Why not you?
Today, many will rise above their believed limitations and make contact with their powerful innate strength. Why not you?
Today, many will choose to live in such a manner that they will be a positive role model for their children. Why not you?
Today, many will choose to free themselves from the personal imprisonment of their bad habits. Why not you?
Today, many will choose to live free of conditions and rules governing their own happiness. Why not you?
Today, many will find abundance in simplicity. Why not you?
Today, many will be confronted by difficult moral choices and they will choose to do what is right instead of what is beneficial. Why not you?
Today, many will decide to no longer sit back with a victim mentality, but to take charge of their lives and make positive changes. Why not you?
Today, many will take the action necessary to make a difference. Why not you?
Today, many will make the commitment to be a better mother, father, son, daughter, student, teacher, worker, boss, brother, sister, & so much more. Why not you?
Today is a new day!
Many will seize this day.
Many will live it to the fullest.
Why not you?
β
β
Steve Maraboli (Life, the Truth, and Being Free)
β
First, Lord: No tattoos. May neither Chinese symbol for truth nor Winnie-the-Pooh holding the FSU logo stain her tender haunches.
May she be Beautiful but not Damaged, for itβs the Damage that draws the creepy soccer coachβs eye, not the Beauty.
When the Crystal Meth is offered, May she remember the parents who cut her grapes in half And stick with Beer.
Guide her, protect her
When crossing the street, stepping onto boats, swimming in the ocean, swimming in pools, walking near pools, standing on the subway platform, crossing 86th Street, stepping off of boats, using mall restrooms, getting on and off escalators, driving on country roads while arguing, leaning on large windows, walking in parking lots, riding Ferris wheels, roller-coasters, log flumes, or anything called βHell Drop,β βTower of Torture,β or βThe Death Spiral Rock βN Zero G Roll featuring Aerosmith,β and standing on any kind of balcony ever, anywhere, at any age.
Lead her away from Acting but not all the way to Finance. Something where she can make her own hours but still feel intellectually fulfilled and get outside sometimes And not have to wear high heels.
What would that be, Lord? Architecture? Midwifery? Golf course design? Iβm asking You, because if I knew, Iβd be doing it, Youdammit.
May she play the Drums to the fiery rhythm of her Own Heart with the sinewy strength of her Own Arms, so she need Not Lie With Drummers.
Grant her a Rough Patch from twelve to seventeen. Let her draw horses and be interested in Barbies for much too long, For childhood is short β a Tiger Flower blooming Magenta for one day β And adulthood is long and dry-humping in cars will wait.
O Lord, break the Internet forever, That she may be spared the misspelled invective of her peers And the online marketing campaign for Rape Hostel V: Girls Just Wanna Get Stabbed.
And when she one day turns on me and calls me a Bitch in front of Hollister, Give me the strength, Lord, to yank her directly into a cab in front of her friends, For I will not have that Shit. I will not have it.
And should she choose to be a Mother one day, be my eyes, Lord, that I may see her, lying on a blanket on the floor at 4:50 A.M., all-at-once exhausted, bored, and in love with the little creature whose poop is leaking up its back.
βMy mother did this for me once,β she will realize as she cleans feces off her babyβs neck. βMy mother did this for me.β And the delayed gratitude will wash over her as it does each generation and she will make a Mental Note to call me. And she will forget. But Iβll know, because I peeped it with Your God eyes.
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Tina Fey (Bossypants)
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There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you're high it's tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one's marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends' faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against-- you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.
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Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)
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But todayβs society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. If one is not cognizant of this difference and holds that an individualβs value stems only from his present usefulness, then, believe me, one owes it only to personal inconsistency not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitlerβs program, that is to say, βmercyβ killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they may suffer. Confounding the dignity of man with mere usefulness arises from conceptual confusion that in turn may be traced back to the contemporary nihilism transmitted on many an academic campus and many an analytical couch.
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Viktor E. Frankl (Manβs Search for Meaning)
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Just as there are physical monsters, can there not be mental or psychic monsters born? The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?
Monsters are variations from the accepted normal to a greater or a less degree. As a child may be born without an arm, so one may be born without kindness or the potential of conscience. A man who loses his arms in an accident has a great struggle to adjust himself to the lack, but one born without arms suffers only from people who find him strange. Having never had arms, he cannot miss them. To a monster the norm must seem monstrous, since everyone is normal to himself. To the inner monster it must be even more obscure, since he has no visible thing to compare with others. To a criminal, honesty is foolish. You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.
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John Steinbeck (East of Eden)
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Bipolar robs you of that which is you. It can take from you the very core of your being and replace it with something that is completely opposite of who and what you truly are. Because my bipolar went untreated for so long, I spent many years looking in the mirror and seeing a person I did not recognize or understand. Not only did bipolar rob me of my sanity, but it robbed me of my ability to see beyond the space it dictated me to look. I no longer could tell reality from fantasy, and I walked in a world no longer my own.
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Alyssa Reyans (Letters from a Bipolar Mother (Chronicles of A Fractured Life))
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When you come out of the grips of a depression there is an incredible relief, but not one you feel allowed to celebrate. Instead, the feeling of victory is replaced with anxiety that it will happen again, and with shame and vulnerability when you see how your illness affected your family, your work, everything left untouched while you struggled to survive. We come back to life thinner, paler, weakerΒ β¦ but as survivors. Survivors who donβt get pats on the back from coworkers who congratulate them on making it. Survivors who wake to more work than before because their friends and family are exhausted from helping them fight a battle they may not even understand. I hope to one day see a sea of people all wearing silver ribbons as a sign that they understand the secret battle, and as a celebration of the victories made each day as we individually pull ourselves up out of our foxholes to see our scars heal, and to remember what the sun looks like.
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Jenny Lawson (Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things)