c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Costin regained his serious tone but his eyes softened."I won't force you into anything Sally. I know this is all different to you. I've known all my life that I had one perfect mate out there for me. And when I look at you, I'm in awe of what I've been given." Sally blushed as he paused. "I won't leave you unprotected, and allowing other males around you is something that neither I, nor my wolf, will be able to handle. Besides," he said, his eyes twinkling with mischief, "how could you not want to be around all this?"Sally let out a snort. "You've been around Jen way too much.""I don't know, she's quite educational.""Yeah, I don’t think I really want you to be educated by her.
— Quinn Loftis
Kishan stretched out his hand and touched and earring lightly. His rakish pirate about-to-make-off-with-your-woman-and-what-do-you-think-you're-gonna-do-about-it look melted away to a soft smile that turned up the corner of his mouth.
— Colleen Houck, Tiger's Quest
Innocent tourists? You make me sound like the big bad wolf.”“And you’re not?” I questioned.“Only if you’re Red Riding Hood,” he said flirtatiously.“Wow, that’s original.
— Alyssa Rose Ivy, Flight
What is your collective GPA for this year?”“Not as high as I'd like it to be.”Freud steepled his fingers in front of his mouth. “What about your parents?”“I don't know. They haven't been in school for a while.
— Nenia Campbell, Cloak and Dagger
Life's a party. So smile and eat shit and pretend it's fucking caviar.
— Nenia Campbell, Armed and Dangerous
You seem to know a lot about it," she said. "And you do subtleties.""Yeah. Like I've always wanted to destroy the Nine Worlds while committing suicide.""Well, there's no need to be rude," protested Sif.
— Joanne Harris, Runemarks
We all love each other, Ange," I said impatiently, hating this whole conversation. "No, not like this," she went on relentlessly. "Fang loves you."......My mouth dropped open. How does she know this stuff? "Forget it! No one's getting married!" I hissed. "Not in New Hampshire or anywhere else! Not in a box, not with a fox! Now go to sleep, before I kill you! Oh yeah, like I got any sleep after that. - pg 35
— James Patterson, Max
She never saw the point of making fun of strangers – how could you possibly know enough about them to hit below the belt?
— Daniel Marks, Velveteen
I don't know what it is about "magic happens"-stickers on cars but every time I see one I wanna get out my permanent marker and sneak over and write underneath it "so does cot death".
— Tim Minchin
REMIND ME AGAIN, he said, HOW THE LITTLE HORSE-SHAPED ONES MOVE.
— Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
So what were your favorite subjects in school?""School?" He leaned back in his chair as though he needed the extra space to think about it. "Probably math. It always made sense. Unlike English, economics, and girls.""And exactly how do you plan on taking over the free world if you don't understand economics?""I'll hire advisers. I'll hire you, in fact.""Okay. Let me know when your army of junior high zombies is ready.
— Janette Rallison, My Double Life
You are quite possibly the least smooth guy I know,” she mumbled. “You can’t even put your arm around me without tripping up.
— Lish McBride, Necromancing the Stone
Billy tries to imagine the vast systems that support these athletes. They are among the best-cared for creatures in the history of the planet, beneficiaries of the best nutrition, the latest technologies, the finest medical care, they live at the very pinnacle of American innovation and abundance, which inspires an extraordinary thought - send them to fight the war! Send them just as they are this moment, well rested, suited up, psyched for brutal combat, send the entire NFL! Attack with all our bears and raiders, our ferocious redskins, our jets, eagles, falcons, chiefs, patriots, cowboys - how could a bunch of skinny hajjis in man-skits and sandals stand a chance against these all-Americans? Resistance is futile, oh Arab foes. Surrender now and save yourself a world of hurt, for our mighty football players cannot be stopped, they are so huge, so strong, so fearsomely ripped that mere bombs and bullets bounce off their bones of steel. Submit, lest our awesome NFL show you straight to the flaming gates of hell!
— Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
come humans, fulfill your evolutionary purpose adn build your hound a fire." Oberon
— Kevin Hearne, Trapped
But there was no going back to that idyllic time when only one god wanted to kill me.
— Kevin Hearne, Trapped
He's asleep in the harbor, disguised as dog shit.
— Joe Haldeman, Thieves' World
Oh, for the love of God. There is no agent more agent than you. I swear you have pin-striped ties encrypted into your DNA. When you die, the coffin is going to read Property of the FBI.
— Lisa Gardner, The Killing Hour
Sarcasm is one of the many services I offer to people who ask stupid questions!
— Habeeb Akande
I am Captain Dakkan. I am in charge of this facility.""Captain Dakkan," Ryan repeated. "It's good to meet you. I've heard... well... nothing about you...
— William L. Lavell
I get the same buzz cleaning up the yard as Leo Tolstoy did from scything hay.
— Sergei Lukyanenko, Twilight Watch
You don’t like my restaurant, Miss Connor?” “I couldn’t say since the waiting list to get in is six months long.” One side of his mouth curved up. “This is true.” His finger lingered, and I tried to swallow the nervous lump in my throat. “I think you can call me by my first name now, seeing as how you’re touching my boob. That puts us a little past formality, don’t you think?
— Jenny Lyn, Bite
Janice rolled her eyes. First, the doctor had ogled her, and now Karr was leering at her and licking his lips lasciviously."Oh this is great. I'm being mentally undressed by a space pirate.
— William L. Lavell
The bourbon goes into the recipe, Miss Connor, not into you,” he’d said from directly behind me. He had a way of doing that, catching me in the act. I suppose the number of times I screwed up made me an easy mark. My spine straightened at the scolding, but my mouth did what it knew best. “Well, that’s just a waste of perfectly good bourbon if you ask me.
— Jenny Lyn, Bite
teenagers are never joking. when seeking to prove a point, principals and teachers should remember that teenagers are never, ever sarcasic or ironic. if they say "I wish someone would drop a bomb on this school right now," that means they have arranged for a nuclear arsenal to be emptied onto the school and should be immediately suspended and ridiculed. if they say they were merely coming up with a joking excuse to postpone a bio test, reply that all jokes are funny, and that since dropping a bomb on a school is not funny, it is therefore  not a joke.
— David Levithan, The Realm of Possibility
I've heard that the best way to help poor people is to make sure you don't become one of them
— Robin S. Sharma, The Leader Who Had No Title: A Modern Fable on Real Success in Business and in Life
All right. The snow may be falling in the winter of my discontent, but at least I've got sarcastic company.
— John Green, Looking for Alaska
Come on, there's no one there. You want coffee?" Tess asked."Yeah, sure, why not? I'm only on the brink of a nervous breakdown. I don't imagine why caffeine wouldn't help this situation.
— Frankie Rose, Sovereign Hope
Nefarious purposes translation: For disgusting demon sex and the birth of the Devil incarnate. Nice.
— Elle Casey
Marcus stepped behind the bar, saying, “Dan sent me over to assist you and learn how to tend the bar.” Doms could be pain-in-the-ass mother hens.
— Cherise Sinclair, Lean on Me
So the reason I was struck again and again was because of my overwhelmingly positive energy. Funny, I'd always thought of myself as a pessimist.
— Jennifer Bosworth
He was impugning my virtue. I ought to have been offended, but for some reason the idea tickled me. That could be my next career: instrument of torture! Seducing prisoners, and then revealing my dragon scales! They would confess out of sheer horror.
— Rachel Hartman
Picture a place called the Karma Kafe and it'll save me the bother of describing it. There was nothing in it you wouldn't expect, from the Buddha flowerpots to the wallpaper decorated with symbols that probably said, "If you bought this just because it looked pretty, may Buddha piss in your coffee, you culturally ignorant moron.
— Kelley Armstrong, Spell Bound
Yeah, it's a kodak moment. Quick, take a picture.Sarah scoffs. I stick my tongue out at her.
— Annie Brewer, Back To You
It was a very proper wedding. The bride was elegantly dressed---the two bridemaids were duly inferior---her father gave her away---her mother stood with salts in her hand expecting to be agitated---her aunt tried to cry--- and the service was impressively read by Dr. Grant.
— Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
Edna restored the toffee to the centre of her tongue and sucking pleasurably, resumed her typing of Naked Love by Armand Levine. Its painstaking eroticism left her uninterested--as indeed it did most of Mr. Levine's readers, in spite of his efforts. He was a notable example of the fact that nothing can be duller than dull pornography.
— Agatha Christie, The Clocks
I admire all my three sons-in-law highly. Wickham, perhaps is my favourite; but I think I shall like your husband quite as well as Jane's.
— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
I don't need you to tell me I'm not well, though I don't really know what's wrong with me; I think I'm five times healthier than you are.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
Judging from the unfamiliar number, I assumed the text came from Shannon. If not, I would see who came by my house at 4:30 and go with it. Maybe it would be Mr. Darcy coming to pick me up in an extravagant horse-drawn carriage, but I couldn’t picture Mr. Darcy using a cell phone.
— Michelle Madow, Remembrance
The inextinguishable lesbian spark. You've surely heard about it? The one that was first ignited at Lesbos, because Sappho was so sad every time a young woman left the academy that she wrote her a poem. Fancy being sad because someone leaves! Perverted, that's what I call it. Don't you?
— Gerd Brantenberg, What Comes Naturally?
You're playing hookey for her? You met her, what, five minutes ago? And now she's what? Your girlfriend? Did you give her your varsity jacket?
— Ally Blake, The Magnate's Indecent Proposal
Mmm, being irresistibly likeable is such a trial,' she drawled in an impeccable aristocratic whine. 'One is constantly in demand, but one must do one's duty, mustn't one, dear chap? Noblesse oblige and all that...
— Susan Napier, A Lesson in Seduction
I'm so good at beginnings, but in the end I always seem to destroy everything, including myself.
— Kiera Van Gelder, The Buddha and the Borderline: My Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder through Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Buddhism, and Online Dating
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.
— Marsha M. Linehan
I couldn’t trust my own emotions. Which emotional reactions were justified, if any? And which ones were tainted by the mental illness of BPD? I found myself fiercely guarding and limiting my emotional reactions, chastising myself for possible distortions and motivations. People who had known me years ago would barely recognize me now. I had become quiet and withdrawn in social settings, no longer the life of the party. After all, how could I know if my boisterous humor were spontaneous or just a borderline desire to be the center of attention? I could no longer trust any of my heart felt beliefs and opinions on politics, religion, or life. The debate queen had withered. I found myself looking at every single side of an issue unable to come to any conclusions for fear they might be tainted. My lifelong ability to be assertive had turned into a constant state of passivity.
— Rachel Reiland, Get Me Out of Here: My Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder
Mental illness turns people inwards. That's what I reckon. It keeps up forever trapped by the pain of our own minds, in the same way that the pain of a broken leg or a cut thumb will grab your attention, holding it so tightly that your good leg or your good thumb seem to cease to exist.
— Nathan Filer, The Shock of the Fall
Believing something existed and then finding out it didn't was like reaching the top of the stairs and thinking there was one more step.
— Francesca Zappia, Made You Up
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 didn't have the luxury of taking reality for granted. And I wouldn't say I hated people who did, because that's just about everyone. I didn't hate them. They didn't live in my world. But that never stopped me from wishing I lived in theirs.
— Francesca Zappia, Made You Up
If only his mind were as easy to fix as his body.
— Han Nolan, Crazy
To think too much is a disease.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground & The Double
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
I am not the heroine of this story.And I'm not trying to be cute. It's the truth. I'm diagnosed borderline and seriously fucked-up. I hold grudges. I bottle my hate until it ferments into poison, and then I get high off the fumes. I'm completely dysfunctional and that's the way I like it, so don't expect a character arc where I finally find Redemption, Growth, and Change, or learn How to Forgive Myself and Others.
— Leah Raeder, Black Iris
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 didn’t say anything. I only burrowed down further in the bed.
— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
People say to the mentally ill, ‘You know so many people think the world of you.’ But when they don’t like themselves they don’t notice anything. They don’t care about what people think of them. When you hate yourself, whatever people say it doesn’t make sense. ‘Why do they like me? Why do they care about me?’ Because you don’t care about yourself at all.
— Richey Edwards
They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me.
— Nathaniel Lee
Isolated, she managed somehow to feel free—albeit with a freedom that made her want to smash a hole in the very center of the universe.
— Flora Rheta Schreiber, Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities
The people we love get under our skin and crawl through our veins and fine their way into our heart. They choke up our blood flow and mess up our breathing and tangle themselves through our bodies like wire. Like razors, like fire.We remember them even when we don't remember them.We try and forget, but it's pointless.Even amnesia. Even comas and brain damage and traumatic shock.Whatever makes us not remember, we still remember.Our minds flounder like fish but our bodies...Our bodies remember.
— Katrina Leno, The Half Life of Molly Pierce
I had officially joined the cacophony of sick mother fuckers.
— Betsy Lerner, Food and Loathing: A Life Measured Out in Calories
the intensity, glory, and absolute assuredness if my mind's flight made it very difficult for me to believe once i was better, that the illness was one i should willingly give up....moods are such an essential part of the substance of life, of one's notion of oneself, that even psychotic extremes in mood and behavior somehow can be seen as temporary, even understandable reactions to what life has dealt....even though the depressions that inevitably followed nearly cost me my life.
— Kay Redfield Jamison
Stigma against mental illness is a scourge with many faces, and the medical community wears a number of those faces.
— Elyn R. Saks
Crazy. It was the same word María and Tía Rosa flung at Grandpa Lázaro. The same word anyone said when they didn't understand something. "Crazy" was a way to shut people up, disregard them entirely.
— Daniel José Older, Shadowshaper
Inside my head is a jigsaw made of trillions and trillions and trillions of atoms. It might take a while.
— Nathan Filer, The Shock of the Fall
Black-and-white thinking is the addict's mentality, which can be a bar to recovery when one is still active. But an addict who finds the willingness can then rely on the same trait to stay clean: "Just don't drink," they say in AA. How's that going to work for an addicted eater? Food addicts have to take the tiger out of the cage three times a day. I've read that some drinkers have tried "controlled drinking," and it hasn't been very successful. Eaters don't just have to try it; they must practice it to survive. Having a food plan is an attempt to address that, and having clear boundaries is a key to its working. But the comfort of all or nothing is just out of reach.... I'm saying that food addicts, unlike alcoholics and may others, have both to try for perfection and to accept that perfection is unattainable, and that the only tool left is a wholesome discipline. The problem is, if we had any clue about wholesome discipline, we wouldn't be addicts.
— Michael Prager, Fat Boy Thin Man
But Hey, Guess What Crazy means I'm not liablefor my actions. So screw it, I'll go home, propped up on Prozac against distractions
— Ellen Hopkins, Impulse
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
He was seemingly born not only with a gift for language, but with a particularly nasty clock which makes him go crazy every three years or so.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Bluebeard
If you expand the boundaries of mental illness, which is clealry what has happened in this country during the past twenty-five years, and you treat the people so diagnosed with psychiatric medications, do you run the risk of turning an anger-ridden teenager into a lifelong mental patient? (p. 30)
— Robert Whitaker, Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America
What I didn't say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam.
— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
The amount of sympathy you get from having an illness is paid out like a Ponzi scheme and psychiatric disorders are all the way at the bottom.
— Nenia Campbell, Tantalized
Like a lot of people with mental illness, I spend a lot of time fronting. It’s really important to me to not appear crazy, to fit in, to seem normal, to do the things “normal people” do, to blend in. As a defense mechanism, fronting makes a lot of sense, and you hone that mechanism after years of being crazy. Fronting is what allows you to hold down a job and maintain relationships with people, it’s the thing that sometimes keeps you from falling apart. It’s the thing that allows you to have a burst of tears in the shower or behind the front seat of your car and then coolly collect yourself and stroll into a social engagement…We are rewarded for hiding ourselves. We become the poster children for “productive” mentally ill people, because we are so organized and together. The fact that we can function, at great cost to ourselves, is used to beat up the people who cannot function.Because unlike the people who cannot front, or who fronted too hard and fell off the cliff, we are able to “keep it together,” whatever it takes.
— S. E. Smith
Because drugs have become so profitable, major medical journals rarely publish studies on nondrug treatments of mental health problems.31 Practitioners who explore treatments are typically marginalized as “alternative.” Studies of nondrug treatments are rarely funded unless they involve so-called manualized protocols, where patients and therapists go through narrowly prescribed sequences that allow little fine-tuning to individual patients’ needs. Mainstream medicine is firmly committed to a better life through chemistry, and the fact that we can actually change our own physiology and inner equilibrium by means other than drugs is rarely considered.
— Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
Eventually my mother suffered a complete breakdown, and the court orders were finally signed. They took her to the State Mental Hospital at Kalamazoo. My mother remained in the same hospital at Kalamazoo for about 26 years.My last visit, when I knew I would never come to see her again-there-was in 1952. I was twenty-seven. My brother Philbert had told me that on his last visit, she had recognized him somewhat. "In spots" he said.But she didn't recognize me at all.She stared at me. She didn't know who I was.Her mind, when I tried to talk, to reach her, was somewhere else. I asked, "Mama, do you know what day it is?"She said, staring, "All the people have gone."I can't describe how I felt. The woman who had brought me into the world, and nursed me, and advised me, and chastised me, and loved me, didn't know me.It was as if I was trying to walk up the side of a hill of feathers."-Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
— Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Except then I wonder what it's like to feel normal because if you take away the things I've felt all my life--the insecurity, the pain, the loneliness, the absolute dissolution of any sane or rational thought during one of my more manic moods and the helplessness when I realize one of said manic moods is creeping up on me (like right now)--what's left after the fact? Emptiness?
— Kelley York, Suicide Watch
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
Killing yourself slowly is still killing yourself. Wanting to die is not the same as wanting to come home. Recovery is hard work. Not wanting to die is hard work.
— Blythe Baird, Give Me a God I Can Relate To
We all have scars; both inside and out. Use your experience to support those who are going down the same road of destruction you once went down. Know that your past is worth more than the pain you once carried, because it can now be used to comfort and give strength to another soul who is suffering. Cherish your trials and tribulations as gifts; embrace these opportunities to share the grace you have been given.
— Katie Maslin
Yr had a region called the Fear-bog. Lactamaeon had taken her there once to see the monsters and corpses of her nightmares accumulating there from year after year of terrifying dreams. They had swum through the almost solid g
— Joanne Greenberg, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden
...if in the heat of the dispute he insists and asks, 'Am I not the master of throwing myself out of the window?' I shall answer him, no; that whilst he preserves his reason there is no probability that the desire of proving his free agency, will become a motive sufficiently powerful to make him sacrifice his life to the attempt: if, notwithstanding this, to prove he is a free agent, he should actually precipitate himself from the window, it would not be a sufficient warranty to conclude he acted freely, but rather that it was the violence of his temperament which spurred him on to this folly. Madness is a state, that depends upon the heat of the blood, not upon the will. A fanatic or a hero, braves death as necessarily as a more phlegmatic man or a coward flies from it.
— Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach
Everyone wanted me to feed them that story—darkness to light, weakness to strength, broken to whole. I wanted it, too.
— John Green, Turtles All the Way Down
...all I could think about was how both sets of parents had needed to make their decision, on whether to medicate their child, in a scientific vacuum. (p. 35)
— Robert Whitaker, Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America
I know, Little Man, you are quick with the diagnosis of craziness when you meet a truth you don’t like. And you feel yourself as the ‘homo normalis’. You have locked up crazy people, and the normal people manage this world. Who then is to blame for all the misery? Not you, of course, you only do your duty, and who are you to have an opinion of your own? I know, you don’t have to repeat it. It isn’t you that matters, Little Man. But when I think of your newborn children, of how you torture them in order to make them into ‘normal’ human beings after your image.
— Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man!
Locking away appetite, anger, the fullness of life, anorexia helps cover up whatever struggles inside. With its controlling bouts of bingeing and starvation, of trance and half-life, it becomes a shield to fend off despair and longing and what most of use would see as ordinary responsible behavior.
— Carol Lee, To Die For
Doesn' t she care what she does to her family? ' people will ask. ' How can she starve herself like that? 'She has fallen into bad company, been influenced from within by something she thought she could control, but which has ended up controlling
— Carol Lee, To Die For
What other than mental illness spurs normal people to write prolifically? The chief cause is not quite illness, but nearly: love, especially unhappy love.
— Alice W. Flaherty, The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain
It’s so weird, to know you’re crazy and not be able to do anything about it, you know? It’s not like you believe yourself to be normal. You know there is a problem. But you can’t figure a way through to fixing it. Because you can’t be sure, you know?
— John Green, Turtles All the Way Down
You can live to be old or young, but you'll always have moments when you lose your head.
— Vincent van Gogh
Sadly, psychiatric training still includes far too little on the very serious psychiatric sequelae of childhood trauma, especially CSA [child sexual abuse]. There is inadequate recognition within mental health services of the prevalence and importance of Dissociative Disorders, sufferers of which are frequently misdiagnosed as Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), or, in the cases of DID, schizophrenia.This is to some extent understandable as some of the features of DID appear superficially to mimic those of schizophrenia and/or Borderline Personality Disorder.
— Joan Coleman, Attachment, Trauma and Multiplicity: Working with Dissociative Identity Disorder
Cry wolf often enough and you eventually get eaten by the wolf, even if the wolf is you.
— Kris Kidd
The shrinks call it Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. I call it hell. The demons are waiting in each corner, ready to drag me back to the battlefield.- Puncture Wounds (2014)
— James Coyne
Fuck 'em. They don't know what you know.' And it's true. None of these people know what we know.
— Marie Marquardt, The Radius of Us
There needs to be a nationwide awareness programme for all NHS staff, to educate them about dissociative disorders. Diagnoses need to be more obtainable within the NHS; people's lives should be placed ahead of funding restraints and bureaucratic red tape. We need minimum standards of care and treatment agreed and implemented within the NHS to end the current nightmare of the postcode lottery—not just guidelines that can be ignored but actual regulations.
— Carol Broad, Living with the Reality of Dissociative Identity Disorder: Campaigning Voices
Those with dissociative disorders face a big enough battle living as multiples and dealing with past trauma. Like everyone else, they deserve to be heard and recognised, not stigmatised.
— Carol Broad, Living with the Reality of Dissociative Identity Disorder: Campaigning Voices
The only problem was, when your whole existence is something you have to cope with, you look back one day and find that your strategy has become a way of life.
— Joanna Cannon, The Trouble with Goats and Sheep
Everything in life, except her kids, made her impatient. She had tried to do a million things. She'd wanted to be a documentary filmmaker and then a painter and then a tiny-ceramic-figure maker. None of it panned out. She'd be full of enthusiasm at first, full of big ideas and energy and drive, but it would all gradually evaporate and disappear. She could never maintain the momentum or the concentration or the confidence she needed to get anything done.
— Miriam Toews, The Flying Troutmans
The only time it's hopeless is when you're dead! Long as you're alive, you can get better - you can make it better.
— RoAnna Sylver, Chameleon Moon
I hear a siren and, if we weren’t already in a hospital, I would have assumed they were coming for nearly everyone in this room.
— Michael F. Stewart, Counting Wolves
A chorus of voices exhorts kids to study science. No one stops to ask whether it is inhumane to force adolescents to spend the bulk of their time studying subjects most of them hate. When skilled workers are put out of a job by technical advances and have to undergo “retraining,” no one asks whether it is humiliating for them to be pushed around in this way. It is simply taken for granted that everyone must bow to technical necessity, and for good reason: If human needs were put before technical necessity there would be economic problems, unemployment, shortages or worse. The concept of “mental health” in our society is defined largely by the extent to which an individual behaves in accord with the needs of the system and does so without showing signs of stress.
— Theodore J. Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future: The Unabomber Manifesto
And if we do speak out, we risk rejection and ridicule. I had a best friend once, the kind that you go shopping with and watch films with, the kind you go on holiday with and rescue when her car breaks down on the A1. Shortly after my diagnosis, I told her I had DID. I haven't seen her since. The stench and rankness of a socially unacceptable mental health disorder seems to have driven her away.
— Carolyn Spring, Living with the Reality of Dissociative Identity Disorder: Campaigning Voices
While she is still hospitalised, I take Emma out for strengthening walks, for her muscles and been under-used for a long time. She is sometimes breathless, I notice with concern, and there are other changes in her, either through a nerve her therapy touches, or through her illness, or both, which make her, quite often, disagreeable to be with.
— Carol Lee, To Die For
Because now mental health disorders have gone “mainstream”. And for all the good it’s brought people like me who have been given therapy and stuff, there’s a lot of bad it’s brought too.Because now people use the phrase OCD to describe minor personality quirks. “Oooh, I like my pens in a line, I’m so OCD.”NO YOU’RE FUCKING NOT.“Oh my God, I was so nervous about that presentation, I literally had a panic attack.”NO YOU FUCKING DIDN’T.“I’m so hormonal today. I just feel totally bipolar.”SHUT UP, YOU IGNORANT BUMFACE.Told you I got angry.These words – words like OCD and bipolar – are not words to use lightly. And yet now they’re everywhere. There are TV programmes that actually pun on them. People smile and use them, proud of themselves for learning them, like they should get a sticker or something. Not realizing that if those words are said to you by a medical health professional, as a diagnosis of something you’ll probably have for ever, they’re words you don’t appreciate being misused every single day by someone who likes to keep their house quite clean.People actually die of bipolar, you know? They jump in front of trains and tip down bottles of paracetamol and leave letters behind to their devastated families because their bullying brains just won’t let them be for five minutes and they can’t bear to live with that any more.People also die of cancer.You don’t hear people going around saying: “Oh my God, my headache is so, like, tumoury today.”Yet it’s apparently okay to make light of the language of people’s internal hell
— Holly Bourne
The reasons for Emma's illness and for her decision to allow life in, rather than die, are intertwined and involve the beginnings of her feelings of belonging, of safety and of competence to be in the world.
— Carol Lee, To Die For
Someone said once that they'd never heard of a crime they couldn't imagine committing, and I realized then that if I had a daughter and she had a rabbit and that rabbit was alone with me and I was feeling the way I felt right now and I had a way to kill that rabbit and the time to spend killing that rabbit then killing the rabbit was something I could imagine myself possibly doing or at least considering doing or being on the edge of doing. And smearing a husband with the blood wasn't such a far step after that if you had a desire to smear your husband with blood and smearing someone with blood was something I could imagine a situation calling for because there were at least a few people in this world that I wouldn't not like to see smeared with blood—one person being Werner for fucking my plans, for sending me back out into a life with my wildebeest, to figure out a way to live here and I didn't want to do that and I didn't know how to do that and I wasn't sure how I was going to do that—
— Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing
Every few minutes or so I would remember the look from the man who had wanted fifty cents, and I'd look at that framed memory hanging in myself and it meant I was here, back in this sick city, but in other ways I was not here at all and anyone who looked closely could see that I had nothing to give, that I was a junk drawer, a collection of things that may or may not have had a use.
— Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing
Your EGO feeds on the volume of the mental clutter, the greater the intensity the more crystallized is your EGO. Man dominates and exherts his mental superiority over others. Be Aware! Stop Mental Clutter, Kill EGO, Be YOU!
— Ramana Pemmaraju
What's going on? I'm in the back car of a roller coaster at the top of the climb, with the front rows already giving themselves over to gravity. I can hear those front riders screaming and know my own scream is only seconds away. I'm at the moment you hear the landing gear of a plane grind loudly into place, in that instant before your rational mind tells you it's just the landing gear. I'm leaping off a cliff only to discover I can fly... and then realizing there's nowhere to land. Ever. That's what's going on.
— Neal Shusterman, Challenger Deep
And you know the darkness beyond despair, just as intimately as you know the soaring heights. Because in this and all universes, there is balance. You can't have the one without facing the other. And sometimes you think you can take it because the joy is worth the despair, and sometimes you know you can't take it and how did you ever think you could? And there is the dance; strength and weakness, confidence and desolation.
— Neal Shusterman, Challenger Deep
You see demons in the eyes of the world, and the world sees bottomless pit in yours.
— Neal Shusterman, Challenger Deep
I suppose even a simple slogan can be twisted into whatever shape we want, like a balloon animal—we can even make it loop back around on itself, becoming a noose. In the end, the measure of who we are can be seen in the shapes of our balloon animals.
— Neal Shusterman, Challenger Deep
I knew you were in charge of me but my mind broke on its own.
— Alice Notley, In the Pines
Narcissists often feign oppression because narcissists always feel entitled.
— Criss Jami
Really, the only people you should be comparing yourself to would be people who make you feel better by comparison. For instance, people who are in comas, because those people have no spoons at all and you don't see anyone judging them. Personally, I always compare myself to Galileo because everyone knows he's fantastic, but he has no spoons at all because he's dead. So technically I'm better than Galileo because all I've done is take a shower and already I've accomplished more than him today.
— Jenny  Lawson, Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things
Over and over again, the same message, 'you are not enough'. You hear it enough times and it weaves itself into you, and it's not an idea any more it's who you are, 'not enough.' But then a boy comes along and changes the message. 'You are enough,' he says, 'enough for me.' And because he is all you have, being enough for him is enough for you, too, even though you know deep down that 'good enough' really just means 'pretty enough,' and if he really knew you, all of you, he'd bail, too.
— Lauren Miller
Sometimes, when you want to help a broken person, your attempts only remind them of their missing pieces.
— Gaia B. Amman, Sex-O-S: The Tragicomic Adventure of an Italian Surviving the First Time
To actually accept that you have an eating disorder or a mental health issue is actually a sign of great, great strength. It is not a sign of weakness at all.
— Nigel Owens
While a psychiatric diagnosis can serve a purpose in treatment plans, it should not become a tool to discredit a person's disclosure of abuse.
— Lee Ann Hoff, Violence and Abuse Issues: Cross-Cultural Perspectives for Health and Social Services
The stigma of mental illness is first and foremost a social justice issue!
— Patrick W. Corrigan, Challenging the Stigma of Mental Illness: Lessons for Therapists and Advocates
Suddenly, I’m lighter, only half of who I was.
— Shannon  Mullen, See What Flowers
The west coast is a mecca for wild hearts, wild minds, wild spirits and I’m a WMD—I’ve got so much energy I’m about to explode.
— Shannon  Mullen, See What Flowers
My mind feels like a race car on the track, getting faster and faster every time I pause to think or blink or try to focus on anything. Nothing can keep up to it, not the other cars, not my body, not anyone else in the bar. It’s a rush, pure exhilaration, and I’m having the time of my life. But instead of driving, I’m in the passenger seat, along for the ride, watching myself race around the track from my barstool.
— Shannon  Mullen, See What Flowers
The forest is blanketed by the greenest ferns and moss and bonsai-like trees, a wild majesty that beckons hobbits and pixies and elves and dreamers.
— Shannon  Mullen, See What Flowers
Self-stigma refers to the state in which a person with mental illness has come to internalize the negative attitudes about mental illness and turns them against him- or herself.
— Patrick W. Corrigan, Challenging the Stigma of Mental Illness: Lessons for Therapists and Advocates
I found it hard to write the bits where the things that were at first surprising or even shocking became normal incrementally until I couldn't see that they were anything but normal, because everything else had shifted just one centimetre here and one centimetre there, moving at the speed fingernails grow, until finally everything just clicked into exactly the wrong place.
— Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy
~~You are not alone~~ No, really. Literally. Maybe you have always known (or suspected) this. Maybe this news is shocking, baffling, dismaying, even unbelievable to you. Despite what you might believe or may have been told about yourself, you are not just 'moody'. Nor are you crazy or defective or possessed. You have what is commonly called 'multiple personalities'.
— A.T.W., Got Parts?: An Insider's Guide to Managing Life Successfully with Dissociative Identity Disorder
her eyes are unfathomable to me, hostile, even, as if she had removed herself to a place where I cannot reach her - somewhere I cannot know.
— Carol Lee, To Die For
At the root of this dilemma is the way we view mental health in this country. Whether an illness affects your heart, your leg or your brain, it’s still an illness, and there should be no distraction.– Michelle Obama
— Michelle Obama, Michelle Obama: In Her Own Words
When mental [illness] increases until it reaches the danger point, do not exhaust yourself by efforts to trace back to original causes. Better accept them as inevitable and save your strength to fight against the effects.
— George Sand
Sometimes healthy and whole people make you long for your old, 'undepressed' self, and it is hard to smile when you just feel like sobbing your heart out. People are going out, you aren't. People are vacationing, you aren't. They are getting ahead in their careers, you aren't. They are partying, you aren't. Socializing reminds you of everything you have lost to depression.
— Shubhrata Prakash, The D Word
I've learned to be comforted in the dark spot of my mind.
— Lisa M. Cronkhite, Disconnected
She fails to see who I am, even, for her eyes do not, will not, take me in. Instead they transmit a powerful message. She is like a billboard flashing, starkly: 'Keep Out'.
— Carol Lee, To Die For
I was back in disgust. I stood in the centre of the big room, naked, letting the heat strike me from the three points of heat, and I knew, and it was an illumination — one of those things one has always known, but never really understood before — that all sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel the roughness of a carpet under smooth soles, a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under flesh. If this goes, then the conviction of life goes too. But I could feel none of this. The texture of the carpet was abhorrent to me, a dead processed thing; my body was a thin, meagre, spiky sort of vegetable, like an unsunned plant; and when I touched the hair on my head it was dead. I felt the floor bulge up under me. The walls were losing their density. I knew I was moving down into a new dimension, further away from sanity than I had ever been. I knew I had to get to the bed fast. I could not walk, so I let myself down on my hands and knees and crawled to the bed and lay on it, covering myself.
— Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
Understand ... I don't hate her, I hate what she's become. I hate her illness.
— Joseph Stefano, Psycho Screenplay
She had spells of manic loquaciousness, followed by days of silence.
— Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge
Interestingly, the patients who presented to me self-diagnosed [with Dissociative Identity Disorder had tried to tell previous therapists of their plight, but had been disbelieved. These therapists had used fallacious ﻿"capricious criteria" (KIuft, 1988) to discredit the diagnosis; e.g., that the patient could not possibly have MPD because ﻿she was aware of the other alters [sic!].
— Richard P. Kluft
Schizo. It didn't matter how many times Dr. Gill compared it to a disease or physical disability, it wasn't the same thing. It just wasn't. I had schizophrenia. If I saw two guys on the sidewalk, one in a wheelchair and one talking talking to himself, which would I rush to open a door for, and which would I cross the road to avoid?
— Kelley Armstrong, The Summoning
Office Peone looked at John and wondered what mental illness he had. The Seattle streets were filled with the mostly-crazy, half-crazy, nearly crazy, and soon-to-be crazy. Indian, white, Chicano, Asian, men, women, children. The social workers did not have anywhere near enough money, training, or time to help them. The city government hated the crazies because they were a threat to the public image of the urban core. Private citizens ignored them at all times of the year except the few charitable days leading up to and following Christmas. In the end, the police had to do most of the work. Police did crisis counseling, transporting them howling to detox, the dangerous to jail, racing the sick to the hospitals, to a safer place. At the academy, Officer Peone figured he would be fighting bad guys. He did not imagine he would spend most of his time taking care of the refuse of the world. Peone found it easier when the refuse were all nuts or dumb-ass drunks, harder when they were just regular folks struggling to find their way off the streets.
— Sherman Alexie, Indian Killer
There are a couple of reasons why I take comfort in being able to put all this in my own vernacular and present it to you. For one thing, because then I'm not completely alone with it. And for another, it gives me a sense of being in control of the craziness. Now this is a delusion, but it's MY delusion and I'm sticking with it. It's sort of like: I have problems but problems don't have me.
— Carrie Fisher, Wishful Drinking
A panic attack is pathological exaggeration of the body’s normal response to fear, stress or excitement.
— Abhijit Naskar, The Islamophobic Civilization: Voyage of Acceptance
The case of a patient with dissociative identity disorder follows:Cindy, a 24-year-old woman, was transferred to the psychiatry service to facilitate community placement. Over the years, she had received many different diagnoses, including schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, schizoaffective disorder, and bipolar disorder. Dissociative identity disorder was her current diagnosis.Cindy had been well until 3 years before admission, when she developed depression, "voices," multiple somatic complaints, periods of amnesia, and wrist cutting. Her family and friends considered her a pathological liar because she would do or say things that she would later deny. Chronic depression and recurrent suicidal behavior led to frequent hospitalizations. Cindy had trials of antipsychotics, antidepressants, mood stabilizers, and anxiolytics, all without benefit. Her condition continued to worsen.Cindy was a petite, neatly groomed woman who cooperated well with the treatment team. She reported having nine distinct alters that ranged in age from 2 to 48 years; two were masculine. Cindy’s main concern was her inability to control the switches among her alters, which made her feel out of control. She reported having been sexually abused by her father as a child and described visual hallucinations of him threatening her with a knife. We were unable to confirm the history of sexual abuse but thought it likely, based on what we knew of her chaotic early home life.Nursing staff observed several episodes in which Cindy switched to a troublesome alter. Her voice would change in inflection and tone, becoming childlike as ]oy, an 8-year-old alter, took control. Arrangements were made for individual psychotherapy and Cindy was discharged.At a follow-up 3 years later, Cindy still had many alters but was functioning better, had fewer switches, and lived independently. She continued to see a therapist weekly and hoped to one day integrate her many alters.
— Donald W. Black, Introductory Textbook of Psychiatry
Sometimes it's as if I can shrink away to nothing. Sometimes I feel as pure and perfect as a ghost. The hunger, the headaches, the dizziness—these are the only things that are real.
— J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before
I have a mental illness, but that doesn't stop me from being mentally capable.
— Lisa M. Cronkhite, Disconnected
It’s hard to imagine a more squarely on-the-nose example of demonizing mental illness than portraying a mentally ill man as a literal demon.
— Charles Bramesco
The country is not growing because the mental state of the people are retarded
— Sunday Adelaja
But I know that if I don't at least try, I'll stay the way I am till it kills me. Till I kill me, I mean. I never really accept that that's what I'm doing - I say it, but I don't believe it.
— Deborah Hautzig, Second Star to the Right
Mental health is usually the last place people go when they think about someone being sick.
— Louise Gornall, Under Rose-Tainted Skies
My skin is so thin that the innocent words of others burn holes right through me.
— BPD Pieces of Me Community, BPD Voices Project Vol. 1