Lee Gutkind > Quotes

“As writers we intend to make a difference, to alter people's lives for the greater good. . .this is why we write, to have an impact on society, to put a personal stamp on history. . .Art and literature are the legacies we leave to succeeding generations. We'll be forgotten, but our books and essays, our stories and poems can survive us. . .”
― Lee Gutkind, You Can't Make This Stuff Up: The Complete Guide to Writing Creative Nonfiction -- from Memoir to Literary Journalism and Everything in Between

“My idea of a good time is sitting quietly with my own thoughts and not making eye contact with anyone.”
― Lee Gutkind, I Wasn't Strong Like This When I Started Out: True Stories of Becoming a Nurse

“grief is not like clinical depression, schizophrenia, or anxiety, which can be diagnosed and treated. The grieving need someone to say “I see you, I hear you, I understand you are hurting and you can tell me more.”
― Lee Gutkind, At the End of Life: True Stories About How We Die

“There are few things we can control; our emotions are not among them.”
― Lee Gutkind, At the End of Life: True Stories About How We Die

“We pray, those of us who believe; those of us who don’t believe ask, Let me go quickly and peacefully into the night.”
― Lee Gutkind, At the End of Life: True Stories About How We Die

“Panic, as I said before, is the most contagious of all sicknesses.”
― Lee Gutkind, I Wasn't Strong Like This When I Started Out: True Stories of Becoming a Nurse

“Miracles aren’t always awe inspiring. They aren’t always beautiful and obvious. Sometimes they’re sticky and gross. Sometimes they’re painful and full of loss. Sometimes you’ll miss them if you blink. My eyes are wide open today.”
― Lee Gutkind, I Wasn't Strong Like This When I Started Out: True Stories of Becoming a Nurse

“Regret is my compass. I am an alchemist, trained in the transmutation of my nervous system. I have installed trained guides beside me. I am saving at least one life."
"I keep writing. I must. Over and over and over. The same story a million ways.”
― Lee Gutkind, Show Me All Your Scars: True Stories of Living with Mental Illness

“this: what matters is not how we die but rather why we choose to live.”
― Lee Gutkind, At the End of Life: True Stories About How We Die

“Carl Jung: “Life is an experiment in consciousness that most people fail.”
― Lee Gutkind, Show Me All Your Scars: True Stories of Living with Mental Illness

“Medication cannot cure you of depression. Like a seatbelt, it can save your life—but a seatbelt never brought joy to anyone’s heart. A seatbelt never put a skip in a step.”
― Lee Gutkind, Show Me All Your Scars: True Stories of Living with Mental Illness

“I have a lifetime of learning ahead of me. I apply many of the things I learned in school, but I’ve forgotten most. Random snippets of the rules come back to me, at times, but my mind will eventually eradicate them all, relearn them, and reinvent them.”
― Lee Gutkind, I Wasn't Strong Like This When I Started Out: True Stories of Becoming a Nurse

“Feeling more tired than I'd ever felt after work, I walked through the sliding glass doors leading to the small alley that separated the parking garage from the hospital. I usually experienced this passage as a sort of limbo: a seven-foot-long stretch of asphalt that got me to where I parked, a portal where tired nurses left as fresh ones entered. On that morning, though, I felt a breeze on my face as I stepped through the double doors and saw the day's first light, and it hit me: I'm alive.”
― Lee Gutkind

“I am learning how to let my yes be yes and my no mean no without the need to justify why I choose to say either.”
― Lee Gutkind, Show Me All Your Scars: True Stories of Living with Mental Illness

“curriculum committee were not entirely wrong. Death is not a philosophical issue; it is a literary one. And yet, if philosophy”
― Lee Gutkind, True Stories, Well Told: From the First 20 Years of Creative Nonfiction Magazine

“. Most mental health problems don’t look like we expect. People with crushing depression still laugh and clap their hands. People with bipolar depression still go to work, order coffee at Starbucks, tread in dog shit, get married.”
― Lee Gutkind, Show Me All Your Scars: True Stories of Living with Mental Illness

“Most of all, you need moral courage because nursing is about the pursuit of justice. It requires you stand up to bullies, to do things that are right but difficult, and to speak your mind even when you are afraid.”
― Lee Gutkind, I Wasn't Strong Like This When I Started Out: True Stories of Becoming a Nurse

“The other night, the cats were howling. I turned over and convinced myself to go back to sleep because they weren’t my patients.”
― Lee Gutkind, I Wasn't Strong Like This When I Started Out: True Stories of Becoming a Nurse

“Take care. For yourself, for those you have carried, for the universe, for your deer, for your heart, for your angels, for those you love. There has never been a more selfless selfish act. Take care.”
― Lee Gutkind, Show Me All Your Scars: True Stories of Living with Mental Illness

“Self-injury forces us to look pain in the face, to see physical evidence of conditions that are usually personal and private. Mental illness is a difficult, confounding subject, one many of us would rather ignore. Self-injury draws our attention to something we don’t want to see, and perhaps this is why it makes so many people so uncomfortable.”
― Lee Gutkind, Show Me All Your Scars: True Stories of Living with Mental Illness

“almost all people who hurt themselves on purpose do so at least in part to regulate their emotions.”
― Lee Gutkind, Show Me All Your Scars: True Stories of Living with Mental Illness

“Marcin Chwistek is a physician who specializes in cancer pain management and palliative care.”
― Lee Gutkind, At the End of Life: True Stories About How We Die

“The nature of things dictates that we must leave those dear to us. Everything born contains its own cessation,”
― Lee Gutkind, At the End of Life: True Stories About How We Die

“When a life ebbs away, it is peaceful and painless.”
― Lee Gutkind, At the End of Life: True Stories About How We Die

“We use enough metal in caskets and underground vaults that we could rebuild the Golden Gate Bridge every January. The embalming fluid they pumped into my grandfather causes a higher incidence of leukemia and brain and colon cancer in funeral directors. The waste from the dead, along with embalming fluids, is pumped into the sewer, draining straight off the embalming table and down the drain, accompanied by the bleach that’s used to disinfect the body.”
― Lee Gutkind, At the End of Life: True Stories About How We Die

“Embalming fluid is highly carcinogenic,”
― Lee Gutkind, At the End of Life: True Stories About How We Die

“By virtue of the fact that they expect so much less than poor Americans—they don’t care about movies, clothes, and cars—they are more content than the poor people in America.”
― Lee Gutkind, Stuck in Time: The Tragedy of Childhood Mental Illness

“It was my biggest fear to go crazy like my mom. I worried about waking up one day and no longer understanding reality in quite the same way, being lost in the black hole of madness.”
― Lee Gutkind, Show Me All Your Scars: True Stories of Living with Mental Illness

“some houses have life—are home, are dwellings—and others don’t. Dwelling is an old-fashioned word we’ve misplaced. When we live heart and soul, we dwell. When we belong”
― Lee Gutkind, At the End of Life: True Stories About How We Die

“A son is a son until he takes a wife; a daughter is a daughter all of your life.”
― Lee Gutkind, At the End of Life: True Stories About How We Die