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“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

“fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain, and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger, and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy, he thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and a tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations—and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there weren’t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learned to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favors the paranoid. Even here in the twenty-first century you can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now, we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us. And it came to pass that certain people figured out how to use that.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

“At that moment I realized that the one question I would want to ask her, the only question for me worth asking, would be “Is it worth being so talented if you also have to suffer from a profound sensitivity that is intrinsically connected to your gifts?”

But I don’t know if she could even answer. What if she wants to possess her talent and also to be free of torment. What if she doesn’t want to have to choose. I think it’s okay to not be grateful for your curses. I think it’s okay to just want your blessings to be blessings.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“I've sent devils to hell. I've dug graves for the bodies never buried and called things that called right out of the ground. I took the poison of a moccasin. I took the worst of the river and the worst of men. I took it all and I'm still alive.”
― Andy Davidson