There is always a part of my mind that is preparing for the worst, and another part of my mind that believes if I prepare enough for it, the worst won't happen.

There are relatively few things that kill people that are young other than car accidents and suicide.

Love has, at its best, made the inherent sadness of life bearable, and its beauty manifest.

One is what one is, and the dishonesty of hiding behind a degree, or a title, or any manner and collection of words, is still exactly that: dishonest.

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

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.

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

I don't think grief of grief in a medical way at all. I think that I and many of my colleagues, are very concerned when grief becomes pathological, that there is no question that grief can trigger depression in vulnerable people and there is no question that depression can make grief worse.

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.

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

Scientists have made extraordinary advances in understanding the brain and its disorders.

Psychologists, for reasons of clinical necessity or vagaries of temperament, have chosen to dissect and catalog the morbid emotions -- depression, anger, anxiety -- and to leave largely unexamined the more vital, positive ones.

Grief is so human, and it hits everyone at one point or another, at least, in their lives. If you love, you will grieve, and that's just given.

An ardent temperament makes one very vulnerable to dreamkillers.

It's more common than not that bipolar illness will start in the teens. One of the reasons I spend a lot of time on college campuses is exactly that reason. It's terribly important to talk to students about knowing these things in advance.

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.

I think you have waves of awareness and one of the things that I found with grief was actually -- I was well prepared for it by the cyclicality of my manic depressive illness because I was used to things coming and going and so forth.

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

A possible link between 'madness' and genius is one of the oldest and most persistent of cultural notions.

I think that for thousands of years people have made the observation that there are certain kinds of extreme depressive states that seem to be more likely to produce philosophers, people in the arts, unusually brilliant scientists.