175+ Top Bipolar Quotes to Make Sense of Bipolar Disorder

Bipolar is often misunderstood.

And people living with bipolar disorder are often demonized by movies and in the media.

I once cared for a family member diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and I felt completely unprepared. I didn't know what to expect.

Reading stories helped.

I've culled what was initially a much longer list to bring you these bipolar disorder quotes.

I hope they help you make meaning of bipolar and see people who live with it as the human beings that they are.

Bipolar Quotes - Bipolar Disorder Quotes to Help You Make Meaning and Humanize This Mental Health Condition

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"For some reason the word “chronic” often has to be explained. It does not mean severe, though many chronic conditions can be exceptionally serious and indeed life-threatening. No, “chronic” means persistent over time, enduring, constant. Diabetes is a chronic condition, but measles is not. With measles, you contract it and then it is gone. It can sometimes be fatal, but is never chronic. Manic depression, in other words, is something you have to learn to live with. There are therapies which may help some people to function and function for the most part happily and well. Sometimes a talking therapy, sometimes pharmaceutical intervention helps." — Stephen Fry

"People with mental illnesses aren't wrapped up in themselves because they are intrinsically any more selfish than other people. Of course not. They are just feeling things that can't be ignored. Things that point the arrows inward." — Matt Haig (Reasons to Stay Alive)

"You’ve got to reach bedrock to become depressed enough before you are forced to accept the reality and enormity of the problem." — Jonathan Harnisch

"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..." — Elizabeth Wurtzel (Prozac Nation)

"Is any of it real? I mean, look at this. Look at it! A world built on fantasy. Synthetic emotions in the form of pills. Psychological warfare in the form of advertising. Mind-altering chemicals in the form of … food! Brainwashing seminars in the form of media. Controlled isolated bubbles in the form of social networks. Real? You want to talk about reality? We haven’t lived in anything remotely close to it since the turn of the century. We turned it off, took out the batteries, snacked on a bag of GMOs while we tossed the remnants in the ever-expanding Dumpster of the human condition. We live in branded houses trademarked by corporations built on bipolar numbers jumping up and down on digital displays, hypnotizing us into the biggest slumber mankind has ever seen. You have dig pretty deep, kiddo, before finding anything real." — Mr. Robot

"Manic-depression distorts moods and thoughts, incites dreadful behaviors, destroys the basis of rational thought, and too often erodes the desire and will to live. It is an illness that is biological in its origins, yet one that feels psychological in the experience of it, an illness that is unique in conferring advantage and pleasure, yet one that brings in its wake almost unendurable suffering and, not infrequently, suicide." — Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"When sleep puts an end to delirium, it is a good symptom." — Hippocrates

"Her parents, she said, has put a pinball machine inside her head when she was five years old. The red balls told her when she should laugh, the blue ones when she should be silent and keep away from other people; the green balls told her that she should start multiplying by three. Every few days a silver ball would make its way through the pins of the machine. At this point her head turned and she stared at me; I assumed she was checking to see if I was still listening. I was, of course. How could one not? The whole thing was bizarre but riveting. I asked her, What does the silver ball mean? She looked at me intently, and then everything went dead in her eyes. She stared off into space, caught up in some internal world. I never found out what the silver ball meant." — Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"When my mind plays tricks on me I can deal. But when my mind plays tricks on my mind I can not tell what's real" — Stanley Victor Paskavich

"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." — Marya Hornbacher (Madness: A Bipolar Life)

"If there was one thing I feared as I was growing up . . . No, that's stupid. I feared hundreds of things: the dark, the death of my father, the possibility that I might rejoice the death of my mother, sums involving vernier calipers, groups of schoolboys with nothing much to do, death by drowning. But of all these, I feared the most the possibility that I might go mad too." — Jerry Pinto (Em and The Big Hoom)

"In our absence, the violet early evening light pours in the bay window, filling the still room like water poured into a glass. The glass is delicate. The thin, tight surface of the liquid light trembles. But it does not break. Time does not pass. Not yet." — Marya Hornbacher (Madness: A Bipolar Life)

"Falling in love happens so suddenly that it seems, all at once, that you have always been in love." — Marya Hornbacher (Madness: A Bipolar Life)

"Lithium tweaks many mood-altering chemicals in the brain, and its effects are complicated. Most interesting, lithium seems to reset the body’s circadian rhythm, its inner clock. In normal people, ambient conditions, especially the sun, dictate their humors and determine when they are tuckered out for the day. They’re on a twenty-four-hour cycle. Bipolar people run on cycles independent of the sun. And run and run." — Sam Kean (The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements)

"Psychosis can happen out of the blue, to anyone, and no one knows why. Not even the best doctors on the planet.And that’s why Mom is always so afraid. If we don’t know what made me sick in the first place, how can anyone guarantee I won’t flip out again?" — Jeannine Garsee (The Unquiet)

"I’m a classic eccentric, living at the extremes of high mania and low mood. There’s no middle ground, only madness and sadness." — Fennel Hudson (Fine Things - Fennel's Journal - No. 8)

"You cannot free someone who is caged in their own self." — Anjum Choudhary (Souled Out)

"Crazy isn't a condition it's a place and it exists somewhere between Love and Oblivion" — Stanley Victor Paskavich

"Depression is a painfully slow, crashing death. Mania is the other extreme, a wild roller coaster run off its tracks, an eight ball of coke cut with speed. It's fun and it's frightening as hell. Some patients - bipolar type I - experience both extremes; other - bipolar type II - suffer depression almost exclusively. But the "mixed state," the mercurial churning of both high and low, is the most dangerous, the most deadly. Suicide too often results from the impulsive nature and physical speed of psychotic mania coupled with depression's paranoid self-loathing." — David Lovelace (Scattershot: My Bipolar Family)

"Unrequited love is the only emotion that allows sane people to taste the “life sentence” of someone with bipolar disorder. The longer they hang onto a lost cause the more unstable they look to everyone else. They contradict their own belief systems and statements, by circling the drain with two competing emotions—love and hate." — Shannon L. Alder

"I'm not the kind of person who likes to shout out my personal issues from the rooftops, but with my bipolar becoming public, I hope fellow sufferers will know it's completely controllable. I hope I can help remove any stigma attached to it, and that those who don't have it under control will seek help with all that is available to treat it." — Catherine Zeta-Jones

"Depression, somehow, is much more in line with society's notions of what women are all about: passive, sensitive, hopeless, helpless, stricken, dependent, confused, rather tiresome, and with limited aspirations. Manic states, on the other hand, seem to be more the provenance of men: restless, fiery, aggressive, volatile, energetic, risk taking, grandiose and visionary, and impatient with the status quo. Anger or irritability in men, under such circumstances, is more tolerated and understandable; leaders or takers of voyages are permitted a wider latitude for being temperamental. Journalists and other writers, quite understandably, have tended to focus on women and depression, rather than women and mania. This is not surprising: depression is twice as common in women as men. But manic-depressive illness occurs equally often in women and men, and, being a relatively common condition, mania ends up affecting a large number of women. They, in turn, often are misdiagnosed, receive poor, if any, psychiatric treatment, and are at high risk for suicide, alcoholism, drug abuse, and violence. But they, like men who have manic-depressive illness, also often contribute a great deal of energy, fire, enthusiasm, and imagination to the people and world around them." — Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"You wake up one morning and there it is, sitting in an old plaid bathrobe in your kitchen, unpleasant and unshaved. You look at it, heart sinking. Madness is a rotten guest." — Marya Hornbacher (Madness: A Bipolar Life)

"I have never seen battles quite as terrifyingly beautiful as the ones I fight when my mind splinters and races, to swallow me into my own madness, again." — Nicole Lyons (Hush)

"I feel sorry for every Therapist, Psychologist, and Psychiatrist I've ever met. I know I've put thoughts in their mind they will never forget." — Stanley Victor Paskavich

"The greatest communication barrier known to man is the lack of the common core of experience "When’s the last time you had a Manic Episode Doctor"?" — Stanley Victor Paskavich

"Bipolar illness, manic depression, manic-depressive illness, manic-depressive psychosis. That’s a nice way of saying you will feel so high that no street drug can compete and you will feel so low that you wish you had been hit by a Mack truck instead." — Christine F. Anderson (Forever Different: A Memoir of One Woman's Journey Living with Bipolar Disorder)

"For me, the first sign of oncoming madness is that I'm unable to write." — Marya Hornbacher (Madness: A Bipolar Life)

"I mean, that's at least in part why I ingested chemical waste - it was a kind of desire to abbreviate myself. To present the CliffNotes of the emotional me, as opposed to the twelve-column read.I used to refer to my drug use as putting the monster in the box. I wanted to be less, so I took more - simple as that. Anyway, I eventually decided that the reason Dr. Stone had told me I was hypomanic was that he wanted to put me on medication instead of actually treating me. So I did the only rational thing I could do in the face of such as insult - I stopped talking to Stone, flew back to New York, and married Paul Simon a week later." — Carrie Fisher (Wishful Drinking)

"Maybe there's a galaxy with a planet that's just a little more tilted, with a sun that shines just a little bit darker, and that's where I'm supposed to be, where it somehow makes sense to feel this broken." — Amy Reed (Crazy)

"Madness will push you anywhere it wants. It never tells you where you're going, or why. It tells you it doesn't matter. It persuades you. It dangles something sparkly before you, shimmering like that water patch on the road up ahead. You will drive until you find it, the treasure, the thing you most desire.You will never find it. Madness may mock you so long you will die of the search. Or it will tire of you, turn its back, oblivious as you go flying. The car is beside you, smoking, belly-up, still spinning its wheels." — Marya Hornbacher (Madness: A Bipolar Life)

"I’m not bipolar, I’ve just had a bipolar life foisted upon me." — Daniel O'Malley (The Rook (The Checquy Files, #1))

"Bipolar disorder is about buying a dozen bottles of Heinz ketchup and all eight bottles of Windex in stock at the Food Emporium on Broadway at 4:00 a.m., flying from Zurich to the Bahamas and back to Zurich in three days to balance the hot and cold weather (my sweet and sour theory of bipolar disorder), carrying $20,000 in $100 bills in your shoes into the country on your way back from Tokyo, and picking out the person sitting six seats away at the bar to have sex with only because he or she happens to be sitting there. It's about blips and burps of madness, moments of absolute delusion, bliss, and irrational and dangerous choices made in order to heighten pleasure and excitement and to ensure a sense of control. The symptoms of bipolar disorder come in different strengths and sizes. Most days I need to be as manic as possible to come as close as I can to destruction, to get a real good high -- a $25,000 shopping spree, a four-day drug binge, or a trip around the world." — Andy Behrman (Electroboy: A Memoir of Mania)

"Because I'm not, in fact, depressed, Prozac makes me manic and numb - one of the reasons I slice my arm in the first place is that I'm coked to the gills on something utterly wrong for what I have." — Marya Hornbacher (Madness: A Bipolar Life)

"Saying I don't take my meds because they make me feel funny. Is like cannibals saying they don't eat clowns because the taste funny" — Stanley Victor Paskavich

"My brain sometimes departs from the agreed-upon reality, and my private reality is a very lonely place. But in the end, I'm not sure I wish I'd never gone there." — Marya Hornbacher (Madness: A Bipolar Life)

"In the terms of 'Mental Illness' Isn't stable a place they put horses that wish to run free?" — Stanley Victor Paskavich

"Anxious, depressed, psychotic, lunatic, bipolar, manic - you name it, I attract it. Perhaps you’ve heard of me? In some circles I am known as the Pied Piper of Mental Illness." — J.L. Black (I Used to Think I Was Normal But Now I Take Pills for That)

"Like Sylvia Plath, Natalie Jeanne Champagne invites you so close to the pain and agony of her life of mental illness and addiction, which leaves you gasping from shock and laughing moments later: this is both the beauty and unique nature of her storytelling. With brilliance and courage, the author's brave and candid chronicle travels where no other memoir about mental illness and addiction has gone before. The Third Sunrise is an incredible triumph and Natalie Jeanne Champagne is without a doubt the most important new voice in this genre." — Andy Behrman (Electroboy: A Memoir of Mania)

"If I ever get rid of my Bi Polar condition we'll be so happy." — Stanley Victor Paskavich

"If I can't feel, if I can't move, if I can't think, and I can't care, then what conceivable point is there in living?" — Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"Trust me, in these moments - when you decide whether you can take anything else or if you have given up hope on your future, and you’re so upset that you can barely breathe, because everyone you’ve hurt and everything you’ve done wrong is swarming around in your mind - you’re sucked right back into that tornado. You don’t know how big the tornado will be until it’s already here, and you’re spiraling in it, watching it destroy everything around you - except it’s not a tornado. It’s you. You’re the tornado. You think you are causing pain to others, but most of all, you are in pain yourself, so you see no other way out. You can’t live this way anymore. And you think everyone would be better off without you." — Emma Thomas (Live for Me)

"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." — Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"We can’t turn our true selves off and on situationally and expect them to carry and sustain us. Rationing creativity results in bipolarism of the spirit. Our creativity is also our life force. When we turn it off and on like a spigot, we start to become less and less able to control the valve." — S. Kelley Harrell, M. Div.

"Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me." — Vincent van Gogh

"Compared to bipolar's magic, reality seems a raw deal. It's not just the boredom that makes recovery so difficult, it's the slow dawning pain that comes with sanity - the realization of illnesss, the humiliating scenes, the blown money and friendships and confidence. Depression seems almost inevitable. The pendulum swings back from transcendence in shards, a bloody, dangerous mess. Crazy high is better than crazy low. So we gamble, dump the pills, and stick it to the control freaks and doctors. They don't understand, we say. They just don't get it. They'll never be artists." — David Lovelace (Scattershot: My Bipolar Family)

"I’m sick. It’s true. It isn’t going to go away. All my life, I’ve thought that if I just worked hard enough, it would. I’ve always thought that if I just pulled myself together, I’d be a good person, a calm person, a person like everyone else." — Marya Hornbacher (Madness: A Bipolar Life)

"Build a life worth living. I stare at this phrase on my ceiling every morning before I decide to get out of bed. I painted it a few years ago after completing a few months of dialectal behavioral therapy. It is a quote by Marsha Linehan, who created DBT. After therapy, I impulsively decided to paint it on my ceiling in black, as some sort of reminder to build a life worth living. I don’t regret painting it up there - well, not yet, at least." — Emma Thomas (Live for Me)

"There had been a subtle realignment of the spheres. The world was somehow a place I could endure again. If life was a grey corridor lined with doors, it was now within my power to open some of them." — Alexis Hall (Glitterland (Spires, #1))

"Sometimes I though about killing myself. The idea of it circled my head, shining and lovely like a tinsel halo. How beautiful it would be if everything could just stop. If I could stop. If I didn't have to feel like this. Yes, I thought about it and thought about it, but I was too exhausted to do anything about it. That should have been funny, right?" — Alexis Hall (Glitterland (Spires, #1))

"Your typical Six-year-old is a paradoxical little person, and bipolarity is the name of his game." — Louise Bates Ames

"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 (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"I thought I would inaugurate a Bipolar Pride Day. You know, with floats and parades and stuff! On the floats we would get the depressives, and they wouldn’t even have to leave their beds - we’d just roll their beds out of their houses, and they could continue staring off miserably into space. And then for the manics, we’d have the manic marching band, with manics laughing and talking and shopping and fucking and making bad judgment calls." — Carrie Fisher (Wishful Drinking)

"Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or broken up with someone. But these experiences carry with them feelings. Depression, instead, is flat, hollow, and unendurable. It is also tiresome. People cannot abide being around you when you are depressed. They might think that they ought to, and they might even try, but you know and they know that you are tedious beyond belief: you are irritable and paranoid and humorless and lifeless and critical and demanding and no reassurance is ever enough. You're frightened, and you're frightening, and you're "not at all like yourself but will be soon," but you know you won't." — Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"I fucking hate it, the idea that something like that would be trivialized down to a fucking hashtag. I mean, there's a ton of biphobia — people refuse to accept bisexuality as an actual sexuality. And I'm biracial, but also white-passing, which is a unique perspective. So these kids say, like, "Oh, fucking tri-bi Halsey! She'll never miss an opportunity to talk about it!" I want to sit them down like a mom and go, "Six months ago you were begging for an artist that would talk about this shit! But then I do, and you say, 'Oh, not her. Someone else." — Ashley Frangipane

"The doctor’s words made me understand what happened to me was a dark, evil, and shameful secret, and by association I too was dark, evil, and shameful. While it may not have been their intention, this was the message my clouded mind received. To escape the confines of the hospital, I once again disassociated myself from my emotions and numbed myself to the pain ravaging my body and mind. I acted as if nothing was wrong and went back to performing the necessary motions to get me from one day to the next. I existed but I did not live." — Alyssa Reyans (Letters from a Bipolar Mother (Chronicles of A Fractured Life))

"It's okay darling, creative people are called crazy all the time." — Anjum Choudhary (Souled Out)

"I admit I have Mental Illness so please no more 'Fruit Cakes' for Christmas Please" — Stanley Victor Paskavich (Return to Stantasyland)

"Everything is, the way it is, for a reason. Or it isn't. Or neither. Or both. It's so hard to tell. It's so hard to tell you're a mile away by the Luke in your eye." — Alistair McHarg (Invisible Driving)

"Just to let you know I don't post my books and things on the net in hopes of being rich. The reason is. "I am a person with Bipolar Disorder" and they're are a lot of great minds on the "Famous Bipolar" list that died penniless. If I do the same it's no big deal but having a form of mental Illness I would love to get my name on the Bipolar list also one day. Preferably while I'm still living so I can make sure they spelled it right" — Stanley Victor Paskavich (Return to Stantasyland)

"Bipolar is an illness not a hopeless destination it can be maintained with proper medication" — Stanley Victor Paskavich

"A vivid Imagination is awesome a Manic Imagination is a curse." — Stanley Victor Paskavich

"Hunter was bipolar, for crying out loud. He had checked into the nut house on more than one occasion and, honestly, I was already starting to feel the anxiety of living together. I would need to get my martial arts skills up to par to deal with this lunatic. I knew that I would also need to pick up a copy of Kill Bill at my next convenience and take notes as I watched, just in case a fight happened to break out in the kitchen. Also, at night, I had decided that I would need to sleep with either a small pistol or a flamboyant hunting knife under my pillow for a quick grab, in case he skipped his meds one night and decided to kill me. I needed to be prepared for the unthinkable. " — Chase Brooks

"I know the empathy borne of despair; I know the fluidity of thought, the expansive, even beautiful, mind that hypomania brings, and I know this is quicksilver and precious and often it's poison. There has always existed a sort of psychic butcher who works the scales of transcendence, who weighs out the bloody cost of true art." — David Lovelace (Scattershot: My Bipolar Family)

"Soon madness has worn you down. It’s easier to do what it says than argue. In this way, it takes over your mind. You no longer know where it ends and you begin. You believe anything it says. You do what it tells you, no matter how extreme or absurd. If it says you’re worthless, you agree. You plead for it to stop. You promise to behave. You are on your knees before it, and it laughs." — Marya Hornbacher (Madness: A Bipolar Life)

"I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between...I am still so naïve; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?" — Sylvia Plath (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)

"I think that’s the hardest thing about bipolar disorder. You don’t know if you will wake up in the morning and spike a manic episode or if you won’t want to get out bed because you’re in a depressive episode that makes you want to go back to sleep and never see the light of day again. The moment I tell someone I am bipolar, they are shocked. You know, the whole ‘I never would have known because you don’t act like it’s a thing.' It always makes me laugh. ‘What does bipolar look like to you, sir?’ - that’s what I want to say to them." — Emma Thomas (Live for Me)

"Take me to your darkest corners and watch your demons surrender to mine.." — Anjum Choudhary (Souled Out)

"America hadn't really been suited for its long and tiresome role as the Last Superpower, the World's Policeman. As a patriotic American, Oscar was quite content to watch other people's military coming home in boxes for a while. The American national character wasn't suited for global police duties. It never had been. Tidy and meticulous people such as the Swiss and the Swedes were the types who made good cops. America was far better suited to be the World's Movie Star. The world's tequila-addled pro-league bowler. The world's acerbic, bipolar stand-up comedian. Anything but a somber and tedious nation of socially responsible centurions." — Bruce Sterling (Distraction)

"I guess the fact that the three of us have had these diagnoses hanging over our heads makes us empathetic toward one another. When it is just us three, it is so much easier to be ourselves because we don’t have to try so hard. We all just understand each other and have become inseparable ever since." — Emma Thomas (Live for Me)

"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." — Shannon L. Alder

"That's it: watch your moods. Don't let people see you fluctuate. Don't let yourself run your mouth. Never ever cry, even alone, because your cat or your kettle might tell. Always smile, but don't laugh loudly. Mania is an extrovert, but if you need to vent, tell your mattress or maybe your therapist, but put nothing in writing and never tell a friend or coworker how you're really feeling. Downplay any problem or joy. Pay attention to any signs that your life is shitty or excellent, because either is an illusion. Be careful around men, especially ones with big arms or opinions. Stop talking." — Elissa Washuta (My Body Is a Book of Rules)

"I've been accustomed to mysteries, holy and otherwise, since I was a child. Some of us care for orphans, amass fortunes, raise protests or Nielsen ratings; some of us take communion or whiskey or poison. Some of us take lithium and antidepressants, and most everyone believes these pills are fundamentally wrong, a crutch, a sign of moral weakness, the surrender of art and individuality. Bullshit. Such thinking guarantees tragedy for the bipolar. Without medicine, 20 percent of us, one in five, will commit suicide. Six-gun Russian roulette gives better odds. Denouncing these medicines makes as much sense as denouncing the immorality of motor oil. Without them, sooner or later the bipolar brain will go bang. I know plenty of potheads who sermonize against the pharmaceutical companies; I know plenty of born-again yoga instructors, plenty of missionaries who tell me I'm wrong about lithium. They don't have a clue." — David Lovelace (Scattershot: My Bipolar Family)

"Psychiatric diagnoses are getting closer and closer to the boundary of normal,” said Allen Frances. “That boundary is very populous. The most crowded boundary is the boundary with normal.”“Why?” I asked.“There’s a societal push for conformity in all ways,” he said. “There’s less tolerance of difference. And so maybe for some people having a label is better. It can confer a sense of hope and direction. ‘Previously I was laughed at, I was picked on, no one liked me, but now I can talk to fellow bipolar sufferers on the Internet and no longer feel alone.’” He paused. “In the old days some of them may have been given a more stigmatizing label like conduct disorder or personality disorder or oppositional defiant disorder. Childhood bipolar takes the edge of guilt away from parents that maybe they created an oppositional child." — Jon Ronson (The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry)

"Love is not enough. It takes courage to grab my father's demon, my own, or - God help me - my child's and strap it down and stop its mad jig; to sit in a row of white rooms filled with pills and clubbed dreamers and shout: stop smiling, shut up; shut up and stop laughing; you're sitting in hell. Stop preaching; stop weeping. You are a manic-depressive, always. your life is larger than most, unimaginable. You're blessed; just admit it and take the damn pill." — David Lovelace (Scattershot: My Bipolar Family)

"I'm bipolar, but I'm not crazy, and I never was. I'm stark raving sane." — Emilie Autumn

"I've invaded the walls of the asylums with my ink pen. The way they look at mental illness won't be the same again" — Stanley Victor Paskavich

"What do you know about bipolar disorder?” I almost say, What do you know about it? But I make myself breathe and smile. “Is that the Jekyll-Hyde thing?” My voice sounds flat and even. Maybe a little bored, even though my mind and body are on alert. “Some people call it manic depression. It’s a brain disorder that causes extreme shifts in mood and energy. It runs in families, but it can be treated.” I continue to breathe, even if I’m not smiling anymore, but here is what is happening: my brain and my heart are pounding out different rhythms; my hands are turning cold and the back of my neck is turning hot; my throat has gone completely dry. The thing I know about bipolar disorder is that it’s a label. One you give crazy people. I know this because I’ve taken junior-year psychology and I’ve seen movies and I’ve watched my father in action for almost eighteen years, even though you could never slap a label on him because he would kill you. Labels like “bipolar” say This is why you are the way you are. This is who you are. They explain people away as illnesses." — Jennifer Niven (All the Bright Places)

"you may have bipolar disorder, but it does not have you. It cannot have you because I have claimed you and I don't share." — Quinn Loftis (Call Me Crazy)

"Yes I'm Bipolar but I'm as normal as you except the times when my mind thinks like two" — Stanley Victor Paskavich

"Labels like “bipolar” say This is why you are the way you are. This is who you are. They explain people away as illnesses." — Jennifer Niven (All the Bright Places)

"I grew into it. It grew into me. It and I blurred at the edges, became one amorphous, seeping, crawling thing." — Marya Hornbacher (Madness: A Bipolar Life)

"That such a final, tragic, and awful thing is suicide can exist in the midst of remarkable beauty is one of the vastly contradictory and paradoxical aspects of life and art." — Kay Redfield Jamison (Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament)

"Even though I'm sleeping again, everything still feels a little rickety, like I'm here but not quite here, like I'm just a stand-in for my real self, like someone could just reach over and pinch me and I'd deflate. I thought I was feeling better, but I don't know anymore." — Amy Reed (Crazy)

"The tapestry of my life was a ruin of unravelling threads. The brightest parts were a nonsensical madman's weaving. And now every day was a grey stitch, laid down with an outpatient's patience, one following the next following the next, a story in lines, like a railway track to nowhere, telling absolutely nothing." — Alexis Hall (Glitterland (Spires, #1))

"But new love only lasts so long, and then you crash back into the real people you are, and from as high as we were, it's a very long fall, and we hit the ground with a thud." — Marya Hornbacher (Madness: A Bipolar Life)

"In the beginning I revelled in being so rebellious and bad. I had recently discovered the new age book You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay, which incorporated the power of visualization and affirmations. Even then the book resonated, resulting in me asserting, 'I, Paris, am the best hooker in town!' repeatedly on the long drive to work. I am not sure this is what Louise Hay had in mind!" — Joanne Brodie

"I wake up the next morning, happy and full of life. I again stare at my ceiling that says, ‘Build a life worth living’ This is the first time in forever that I have felt that maybe I am building a life worth living, that I’m not just faking it. My career my twin, books, and Archer are all I’ve had for so long, which was always worth living for - but love. Love is something more. Love makes you feel wanted. Love makes life worth living, and it’s something I have never felt in this way. I have known this guy only for a little over a week. He walked right into my life and changed everything. I don’t know how that is possible, but it is." — Emma Thomas (Live for Me)

"For eight years I was an inmate in a state asylum for the insane. During those years I passed through such unbearable terror that I deteriorated into a wild, frightened creature intent only on survival. And I survived. I was raped by orderlies, gnawed on by rats and poisoned by tainted food. I was chained in padded cells, strapped into strait-jackets and half-drowned in ice baths. And I survived. The asylum itself was a steel trap, and I was not released from its jaws alive and victorious. I crawled out mutilated, whimpering and terribly alone. But I did survive." — Frances Farmer (Will There Really Be a Morning?)

"Telling someone who is manic that she's manic is like telling a dictator that he's a dick. Neither is going to admit it, and both are willing to torture you to prove their points." — Melody Moezzi (Haldol and Hyacinths: A Bipolar Life)

"Minds that have withered into psychosis are far more terrifying than any character of fiction." — Christian Baloga

"I am no one's to be claimed, I belong to me." — Anjum Choudhary (Souled Out)

"I'm heavily medicated yet happily manic, I've been stuck on hypo mania for years." — Stanley Victor Paskavich (Stantasyland: Quips Quotes and Quandaries)

"Being both more systematically brutal than chimps and more empathetic than bonobos, we are by far the most bipolar ape. Our societies are never completely peaceful, never completely competitive, never ruled by sheer selfishness, and never perfectly moral." — Frans de Waal

"...Someone speaks in soft tones to me and says I am psychotic, but it's going to be all right. I put on my hat, unperturbed, and ask for some crayons." — Marya Hornbacher (Madness: A Bipolar Life)

"If you can still wipe your own backside then life's not that bad!" — E.J. Plows

"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." — Marya Hornbacher (Madness: A Bipolar Life)

"I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away — yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth's orbit ——————————— and wanted to shoot myself." — Søren Kierkegaard

"I used to think it utterly normal that I suffered from “suicidal ideation” on an almost daily basis. In other words, for as long as I can remember, the thought of ending my life came to me frequently and obsessively." — Stephen Fry

"I actually stopped talking. I actually listened. So I knew that I wasn't all the way manic, because when you're all the way manic you never listen to anybody but yourself." — Terri Cheney

"I Hate Being Bipolar. It’s Awesome!" — L.J. Shen (Tyed)

"When I was lost in the fog, it was as though nothing else existed. And, afterwards, it seemed incomprehensible that I had ever really thought like that. Self-recrimination inevitably followed." — Alexis Hall (Glitterland (Spires, #1))

"I get absolutely shitfaced. I am shitfaced and hyper and ten years old. I am having the time of my life." — Marya Hornbacher (Madness: A Bipolar Life)

"As lives go, I'll take the quietly desperate over the radically bipolar." — John Green (Will Grayson, Will Grayson)

"All of the diagnoses that you deal with - depression, anxiety, ADHD, bipolar illness, post traumatic stress disorder, even psychosis, are significantly rooted in trauma. They are manifestations of trauma. Therefore the diagnoses don't explain anything. The problem in the medical world is that we diagnose somebody and we think that is the explanation. He's behaving that way because he is psychotic. She's behaving that way because she has ADHD. Nobody has ADHD, nobody has psychosis - these are processes within the individual. It's not a thing that you have. This is a process that expresses your life experience. It has meaning in every single case." — Gabor Maté

"That’s what mountains do, they taunt you, lure you to the freedom of the wilderness, and it is fucking exhilarating." — Shannon Mullen (See What Flowers)

"Perhaps people felt there was nothing more they could do, you know? After all, how can someone be helped who doesn’t see the need? A Christian counselor I saw for a while described such situations as, “a White Elephant everyone can see but no one wants to deal with; everyone hopes the problem will just go away on its own.” Just like with my mom. Back then it seemed women were almost expected to go a little loopy sometimes. After all we’re the ones with raging hormones that get out of whack – by our periods, PMS or pregnancy and childbirth – and cause craziness and bizarre behavior. And because of those uncontrollable hormones, women are also more emotional and predisposed to depression. These are things my mom was actually told by her parents, her family, her husbands and friends... even her doctor. Eventually, she made herself believe that her erratic behavior stemmed from PMS, not mania or alcohol." — Chynna T. Laird (White Elephants)

"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." — Alyssa Reyans (Letters from a Bipolar Mother (Chronicles of A Fractured Life))

"May 18, 2018Some days I could fly and feel very happy. I record those days in my journal for I know that I will feel very sad again. And I need proof that I will be very happy again. Thankfully, I feel very happy tonight. Goodnight." — Juansen Dizon (I Am The Architect of My Own Destruction)

"Uncle Joe used to spend a fair amount of time in the loony bin. My family wasn't bothered by his regular trips to and from 'the facility'--they'd shrug and say, There goes Joe, and they'd put him in the car and take him in. One day Uncle Frank...was driving Uncle Joe to the crazy place. When they got there, Joe asked Frank to drop him off at the door while Frank went and parked the car. Frank didn't think much of it, and dropped him off.Joe went inside, smiled at the nurse, and said, 'Hi. I'm Frank Hornbacher. I'm here to drop off Joe. He likes to park the car, so I let him do that. He'll be right in.' The nurses nodded knowingly. The real Frank walked in. The nurse took his arm and guided him away, murmuring the way nurses always do, while Frank hollered in protest, insisting that he was Frank, not Joe. Joe, quite pleased with himself, gave Frank a wave and left." — Marya Hornbacher (Madness: A Bipolar Life)

"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." — Carrie Fisher (Wishful Drinking)

"In our family "whim-wham" is code, a defanged reference to any number of moods and psychological disorders, be they depressive, manic, or schizoaffective. Back in the 1970s and '80s - when they were all straight depression - we called them "dark nights of the soul." St. John of the Cross's phrase ennobled our sickness, spiritualized it. We cut God out of it after the manic breaks started in 1986, the year my dad, brother, and I were all committed. Call it manic depression or by its new, polite name, bipolar disorder. Whichever you wish. We stick to our folklore and call it the whim-whams." — David Lovelace (Scattershot: My Bipolar Family)

"I was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American." — Ben Lerner (Leaving the Atocha Station)

"People aren't crazy, they’re just reacting normally to an abnormally crazy world." — J.S.B. Morse (Now and at the Hour of Our Death)

"Call it dysphoric mania, agitated depression, or a mixed state: nobody will understand anyway. Mania and depression at once mean the will to die and the motivation to make it happen. This is why mixed states are the most dangerous periods of mood disorders. Tearfulness and racing thoughts happen. So do agitation and guilt, fatigue and morbidity and dread. Walking late at night, trying to get murdered, happens. Trying to explain a bipolar mixed state is like trying to explain the Holy Trinity, three persons in one God: you just have to take it on faith when I tell you that the poles bend, cross, never snapping." — Elissa Washuta (My Body Is a Book of Rules)

"In the United States, people with depression, bipolar, and schizophrenia are losing twelve to twenty years in life expectancy compared to people not in the mental health system. (176)" — Robert Whitaker (Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America)

"The say addiction might be linked to bipolar disorder. It's the chemicals in our brains, they say. I got the wrong chemicals, Ma. Or rather, I don't get enough of one or the other. They have a pill for it. They have an industry. They make millions. Did you know people get rich off of sadness? I want to meet the millionaire of American sadness. I want to look him in the eye, shake his hand, and say, 'it's been an honor to serve my country." — Ocean Vuong (On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous)

"Days passed in a grey fog. I was becalmed. Without energy, without hope, with no sight of land, I could remember feeling better but I somehow couldn't believe in it. There was nothing but this." — Alexis Hall (Glitterland (Spires, #1))

"The joy is an absurd yellow tulip, popping up in my life, contradicting all the evidence that shows it should not be there." — Marya Hornbacher (Madness: A Bipolar Life)

"I now know for certain that my mind and emotions, my fix on the real and my family's well-being, depend on just a few grams of salt. But treatment's the easy part. Without honesty, without a true family reckoning, that salt's next to worthless." — David Lovelace (Scattershot: My Bipolar Family)

"I am mad. The thought calms me. I don't have to try to be sane anymore. It's over. I sleep" — Marya Hornbacher

"If every Genius has a touch of Madness, does every Normal person have a touch of Ignorance ?" — Stanley Victor Paskavich

"I have met countless patients who told me that they “are” bipolar or borderline or that they “have” PTSD, as if they had been sentenced to remain in an underground dungeon for the rest of their lives, like the Count of Monte Cristo. None of these diagnoses takes into account the unusual talents that many of our patients develop or the creative energies they have mustered to survive." — Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)

"Which of my feelings are real? Which of the me's is me? The wild, impulsive, chaotic, energetic, and crazy one? Or the shy, withdrawn, desperate, suicidal, doomed, and tired one? Probably a bit of both, hopefully much that is neither." — Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"Oh! This'll impress you - I'm actually in the Abnormal Psychology textbook. Obviously my family is so proud. Keep in mind though, I'm a PEZ dispenser and I'm in the abnormal Psychology textbook. Who says you can't have it all?" — Carrie Fisher (Wishful Drinking)

"I feel like I'm a snow globe and someone shook me up and now every little piece of me is falling back randomly and nothing is ending up where it used to be." — Amy Reed (Crazy)

"Manic depression — or bipolar disorder — is like racing up to a clifftop before diving headfirst into a cavity. Maintaining a healthy lifestyle is the psychic equivalent of an extreme sport. The manic highs — that exhilarating rush to the top of the cliff — make you feel bionic in your hyper-energized capacity for generosity, sexiness and soulfulness. You feel like you have ingested stars and are now glowing from within. It’s unearned confidence-in-extremis — with an emphasis on the con, because you feel cheated once you inevitably crash into that cavity. I sometimes joke that mania is the worst kind of pyramid scheme, one that the bipolar individual doesn’t even know they’re building, only to find out, too late, that they’re also its biggest casualty." — Diriye Osman

"Some of our fiercest battles are fought and won in silence." — Kianu Starr

"I won't sleep if that's what it takes to not wake upas myself" — C. Renee Kiser (Hold Me Under: Poems to Drown to)

"If you think there is something wrong with Bipolar People you might want to Google the Famous Bipolar List. Everyone on it had something wrong with them but obviously for all the right reasons" — Stanley Victor Paskavich

"Having waited my entire life to get an award for something, anything...I now get awards all the time for being mentally ill. It’s better than being bad at being insane, right? How tragic would it be to be runner-up for Bipolar Woman of the Year?" — Carrie Fisher (Wishful Drinking)

"When I am high I couldn’t worry about money if I tried. So I don’t. The money will come from somewhere; I am entitled; God will provide. Credit cards are disastrous, personal checks worse. Unfortunately, for manics anyway, mania is a natural extension of the economy. What with credit cards and bank accounts there is little beyond reach. So I bought twelve snakebite kits, with a sense of urgency and importance. I bought precious stones, elegant and unnecessary furniture, three watches within an hour of one another (in the Rolex rather than Timex class: champagne tastes bubble to the surface, are the surface, in mania), and totally inappropriate sirenlike clothes. During one spree in London I spent several hundred pounds on books having titles or covers that somehow caught my fancy: books on the natural history of the mole, twenty sundry Penguin books because I thought it could be nice if the penguins could form a colony. Once I think I shoplifted a blouse because I could not wait a minute longer for the woman-with-molasses feet in front of me in line. Or maybe I just thought about shoplifting, I don’t remember, I was totally confused. I imagine I must have spent far more than thirty thousand dollars during my two major manic episodes, and God only knows how much more during my frequent milder manias.But then back on lithium and rotating on the planet at the same pace as everyone else, you find your credit is decimated, your mortification complete: mania is not a luxury one can easily afford. It is devastating to have the illness and aggravating to have to pay for medications, blood tests, and psychotherapy. They, at least, are partially deductible. 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 (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"Even bipolar vampires needed sleep from time to time, and he was well past his recommended safe dosage of stress." — Rachel Caine (Black Dawn (The Morganville Vampires, #12))

"My pillow is as good as any ocean to drown in the nightmare of myself. I swam all the way here from the moon." — C. Renee Kiser (I Liked You When I Thought I was Dead)

"Every one wants to be a Genius. But only the brave choose to go mad to get there..." — Stanley Victor Paskavich

"I'd wasted so much of my life. So many of my days, and all of my promise, all of my dreams, lost to hospitals, to depression, to wanting to die. This wasn't how it was supposed to be. This is not who I am. Except, of course, it was. It was all there was left to be." — Alexis Hall (Glitterland (Spires, #1))

"Except you cannot outrun insanity, anymore than you can outrun your own shadow." — Alyssa Reyans (Letters from a Bipolar Mother (Chronicles of A Fractured Life))

"A person who gossips & talks too much may not suffer from Bipolar Disorder but may suffer from Verbal Diarrhea.:)" — Timothy Pina

"The reason I don't Kill Myself is because I know I can." — Stanley Victor Paskavich

"Before I die I'd love to see my name on the Famous Bi Polar list I'm not ashamed of my Illness I believe most of my talent comes from it." — Stanley Victor Paskavich

"Serving as the only audience for a man raised by crowds of admirers exhausted her. [...] The buried thought that he might have found comfort elsewhere was almost a comfort to her." — Carey Wallace

"Clear your energy, honor your rhythm, live your vision " — George Denslow (Living Out of Darkness: A Personal Journey of Embracing the Bipolar Opportunity)

"I have bipolar 2 disorder, anxiety disorder, and ADHD. I take my medications every day. I go to therapy every week. I hope, one day, I can be on the other side of therapy - you know, like the one who gets to write stuff down and shakes her head and listens." — Emma Thomas (Live for Me)

"My psychiatrist said "you're BI Polar. I said "tell us something we don't already know"." — Stanley Victor Paskavich

"If you're selfish enough to kill yourself write your suicide note on the back of your will" — Stanley Victor Paskavich

"What if talking about your feelings doesn't fix anything? What if what you really need is to make the feelings go away?" — Amy Reed (Crazy)

"The depressed person is mired in the past; the manic person is obsessed with the future. Both destroy the present in the process." — S. Nassir Ghaemi (A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness)

"Cincinnati was where I learned that running away from your problems has a three-month statute of limitations, a lesson I have found repeatedly to be true. Three months is still a first impression -- of a city, of other people, of yourself in that place. But there comes a point when you can no longer hide who you are, and the reactions of others become all too familiar..." — Stacy Pershall (Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl)

"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." — Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"My life isn't good or bad. It's an incredible series of emotional and mental extremes, with beautiful thunderstorms and stunning sunrises. Some would say this is my artistic temperament. Others would say i am mentally ill or bipolar. I SAY... it's a bit of both and i make the most of them, CREATIVELY." — Jaeda DeWalt

"Not that I'm bipolar, but that I'm two people, and not just two people, but two people at odds with each other. The mom and the kid, the homebody and the explorer, the strong and the weak, the logical and the emotional, the funny and the sad, the angry and the calm, the open and the closed, the loved and the hated, the hot and the cold, the alive and the dead, the beautiful and the ugly. It's exhausting. I. Am. Exhausting." — Stacey Turis (Here's to Not Catching Our Hair on Fire: An Absent-Minded Tale of Life with Giftedness and Attention Deficit - Oh Look! A Chicken!)

"Schizophrenia is just a catch-all term for forms of mental behaviour that we don’t understand. In the nineteenth century there was a term, melancholia, which we would now call bipolar depression… but all forms of sadness, unhappiness, maladaptation, were poured into this label melancholia… Now, schizophrenia is a similar thing… A book about schizophrenia [says that] the typical schizophrenic lives in a world of twilight imagining. Marginal to his society, incapable of holding a regular job, these people live on the fringes content to drift in their own self-created value system. I said, that’s it! That’s it! Now I understand!" — Terence McKenna

"I look her in the eyes. ‘Words are just words. It’s the meaning of the words that determines how you feel about something. Feelings evoke emotions and make others feel something by what you say. You could say flatly, ‘I love you,’ or you could look someone in the eye and say, with a different tone of voice, ‘I love you.’ Which of those actually sounds like you love someone? That’s why it’s definitely how you say it." — Emma Thomas (Live for Me)

"Love is never enough. Madness is enough. It is complete, sufficient unto itself. You can only stand outside it as a woman might stand outside a prison in which her lover is locked up. From time to time, a well-loved face will peer out and love floods back. A scrap of cloth flutters and it becomes a sign and a code and a message and all that you want it to be. Then it vanishes and you are outside the dark tower again." — Jerry Pinto (Em and The Big Hoom)

"I've been diagnosed as being bi-polar but so have Florence Nightingale and King David...which kinda leaves me in pretty dam good company...if I must say so." — Timothy Pina

"Creativity is closely associated with bipolar disorder. This condition is unique . Many famous historical figures and artists have had this. Yet they have led a full life and contributed so much to the society and world at large. See, you have a gift. People with bipolar disorder are very very sensitive. Much more than ordinary people. They are able to experience emotions in a very deep and intense way. It gives them a very different perspective of the world. It is not that they lose touch with reality. But the feelings of extreme intensity are manifested in creative things. They pour their emotions into either writing or whatever field they have chosen" (pg 181)" — Preeti Shenoy (Life is What You Make It: A Story of Love, Hope and How Determination Can Overcome Even Destiny)

"That was the crux. You. Only you could work on you. Nobody could force you, and if you weren't ready, then you weren't ready, and no amount of open-armed encouragement was going to change that." — Norah Vincent

"When it comes to most true bipolars, consider this thought: Genius by birth, bipolar by design." — Stanley Victor Paskavich (Stantasyland: Quips Quotes and Quandaries)

"Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum." — Vincent van Gogh

"Because this territory in my internal universe is continually shifting, I've learned to look for patterns and rhythms in the chaos that I can use as guides when I can't locate steady ground. So I make maps from my memories. I make my maps out of words and stories." — Sascha Altman DuBrul (Navigating the Space Between Brillance and Madness: A Reader and Roadmap of Bipolar Worlds)

"Suddenly I wanted to get better. Mania wasn't fun anymore. It wasn't creative or visionary. It was mean parody at best, a cheap chemical trick. I needed to stop and get better. I'd take whatever they gave me, I pledged silently. I'd take Trilafon or Thorazine or whatever. I just wanted to sleep." — David Lovelace (Scattershot: My Bipolar Family)

"It’s the chemicals in our brains, they say. I got the wrong chemicals, Ma. Or rather, I don’t get enough of one or the other. They have a pill for it. They have an industry. They make millions. Did you know people get rich off of sadness? I want to meet the millionaire of American sadness. I want to look him in the eye, shake his hand, and say, “it’s been an honor to serve my country.”The thing is, I don’t want my sadness to be othered from me just as I don’t want my happiness to be othered. They’re both mine. I made them, dammit. What if the elation I feel is not another “bipolar episode” but something I fought hard for? Maybe I jump up and down and kiss you too hard on the neck when I learn, upon coming home, that it’s pizza night because sometimes pizza night is more than enough, is my most faithful and feeble beacon. What if I’m running outside because the moon tonight is children’s-book huge and ridiculous over the pines, the sight of it a strange sphere of medicine? It’s like when all you’ve been seeing before you is a cliff and then this bright bridge appears out of nowhere, and you run fast across it knowing, sooner or later, there’ll be another cliff on the other side. What if my sadness is actually my most brutal teacher? And the lesson is always this: you don’t have to be like the buffaloes. You can stop." — Ocean Vuong (On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous)

"She looked to Roy as though she lived in Oz, in the land of color, like she carried it with her everywhere she went. When they began dating, he found that her energy was the perfect counterpoint to the world into which he sank at regular intervals, that black and white Kansas that he inhabited." — J.K. Franko (Eye for Eye (Talion #1))

"Somewhere between love and hate lies confusion, misunderstanding and desperate hope." — Shannon L. Alder

"I've accepted the fact I have mental illness but when my imaginary friends start calling me crazy that's where I draw the line" — Stanley Victor Paskavich

"The scientist in me worries that my happiness is nothing more than a symptom of bipolar disease, hypergraphia from a postpartum disorder. The rest of me thinks that artificially splitting off the scientist in me from the writer in me is actually a kind of cultural bipolar disorder, one that too many of us have. The scientist asks how I can call my writing vocation and not addiction. I no longer see why I should have to make that distinction. I am addicted to breathing in the same way. I write because when I don’t, it is suffocating. I write because something much larger than myself comes into me that suffuses the page, the world, with meaning. Although I constantly fear that what I am writing teeters at the edge of being false, this force that drives me cannot be anything but real, or nothing will ever be real for me again." — Alice W. Flaherty (The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain)

"Everything I think I can't say 'cause it'd come out fucking emo, like, if I were to say what I've been thinking all day, every day: I don't know if I can go on like this forever; or, I'm also always thinking, it shouldn't be this hard just to have a brain. Everyone has a brain." — Elissa Washuta (My Body Is a Book of Rules)

"Been under treatment for PTSD and bipolar since 1992. I’m not ashamed of my illness. I’ve been shunned by many and I feel for those shunned, too." — Stanley Victor Paskavich (Stantasyland: Quips Quotes and Quandaries)

"You know those afternoons," he asks, drawing a shaking breath, "where you’re just going along, doing fine, and then afternoon comes and it feels like you’ve just got the wind knocked out of you and everything is wrong?" He sighs and slowly pushes himself so he’s sitting upright. His shoulders are slumped. "That’s all," he says. "It’s just one of those afternoons. “We are silent for a minute. Then he lies back down on the couch.I should say I love him. I should say it will be all right. But it won’t. I walk down the hall to my bedroom. I lie down on my side and stare at the wall, the blue-flowered wallpaper next to my nose. Despite my best efforts, I start to cry.I know those afternoons." — Marya Hornbacher (Madness: A Bipolar Life)

"My feelings are all over the place. Can you be bipolar in love?" — Nicole Reed (Ruining Me (Ruining, #1))

"She was a free bird one minute: queen of the world and laughing. The next minute she would be in tears like a porcelain angel, about to teeter, fall and break. She never cried because she was afraid that something 'would' happen; she would cry because she feared something that could render the world more beautiful, 'would not' happen." — Roman Payne (The Wanderess)

"What most people call talent is our way to vent, and if we’re not discovered it will never pay the rent." — Stanley Victor Paskavich

"I AM come of a race noted for vigor of fancy and ardor of passion. Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence--whether much that is glorious--whether all that is profound--does not spring from disease of thought--from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect. They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. In their gray visions they obtain glimpses of eternity, and thrill, in waking, to find that they have been upon the verge of the great secret. In snatches, they learn something of the wisdom which is of good, and more of the mere knowledge which is of evil. They penetrate, however, rudderless or compassless into the vast ocean of the "light ineffable", and again, like the adventures of the Nubian geographer, "agressi sunt mare tenebrarum, quid in eo esset exploraturi". We will say then, that I am mad." — Edgar Allan Poe (Eleonora)

"With someone you like that much, the lows are as low as the highs are high. Does that make sense?'It does. It also makes me sound bipolar. ‘Love will do that to a person." — Simone Elkeles

"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 (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"There are people who fantasize about suicide, and paradoxically, these fantasies can be soothing because they usually involve either fantasizing about others' reactions to one's suicide or imagining how death would be a relief from life's travails. In both cases, an aspect of the fantasy is to exert control, either over others' views or toward life's difficulties. The writer A. Alvarez stated, " There people ... for whom the mere idea of suicide is enough; they can continue to function efficiently and even happily provided they know they have their own, specially chosen means of escape always ready..." In her riveting 2008 memoir of bipolar disorder, Manic, Terri Cheney opened the book by stating, "People... don't understand that when you're seriously depressed, suicidal ideation can be the only thing that keeps you alive. Just knowing there's an out--even if it's bloody, even if it's permanent--makes the pain bearable for one more day."This strategy appears to be effective for some people, but only for a while. Over longer periods, fantasizing about death leaves people more depressed and thus at higher risk for suicide, as Eddie Selby, Mike Amestis, and I recently showed in a study on violent daydreaming. A strategy geared toward increased feelings of self-control (fantasizing about the effects of one's suicide) "works" momentarily, but ultimately backfires by undermining feelings of genuine self-control in the long run." — Thomas E. Joiner (Myths About Suicide)

"At first it's bliss. It's drunken, heady, intoxicating. It swallows the people we were - not particuarly wonderful people, but people who did our best, more or less - and spits out the monsters we are becoming.Our friends despise us. We are an epic. Everything is grand, crashing, brilliant, blinding. It's the Golden Age of Hollywood, and we are a legend in our own minds, and no one outside can fail to see that we are headed for hell, and we won't listen, we say they don't understand, we pour more wine, go to the parties, we sparkle, fly all over the country, we're on an adventure, unstoppable, we've found each other and we race through our days like Mr. Toad in his yellow motorcar, with no idea where the brakes are and to hell with it anyway, we are on fire, drunk with something we call love." — Marya Hornbacher (Madness: A Bipolar Life)

"I said just let me try one more time and she said, "THAT'S ENOUGH, ISABEL," again, and she could just say it over and over and it would never get through my thick skull because I'm always wanting and wanting because nothing is ever enough you are never enough I am never enough I am never enough I AM NEVER ENOUGH." — Amy Reed (Crazy)

"Absurdity and anti—absurdity are the two poles of creative energy." — Karl Lagerfeld

"It's difficult. I take a low dose of lithium nightly. I take an antidepressant for my darkness because prayer isn't enough. My therapist hears confession twice a month, my shrink delivers the host, and I can stand in the woods and see the world spark." — David Lovelace (Scattershot: My Bipolar Family)