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“Many people can't comprehend the selfishness of suicide. And they're right, it is selfish. But in that dark place, you don't think clearly. You don't think about consequences. You can only think about making the pain stop, how to be less of a burden to everyone around you and how they should be spending their love on someone who deserves it. Someone who is worthy.”
― The Bipolarfly Effect
― The Bipolarfly Effect
“But there is more to a feeling than this essence. As I will explain, the qualifying body state, positive or negative, is accompanied and rounded up by a corresponding thinking mode: fast moving and idea rich, when the body-state is in the positive and pleasant band of the spectrum, slow moving and repetitive, when the body-state veers toward the painful band. In this perspective, feelings are the sensors for the match or lack thereof between nature and circumstance. And by nature I mean both the nature we inherited as a pack of genetically engineered adaptations, and the nature we have acquired in individual development, through interactions with our social environment, mindfully and willfully as well as not. Feelings, along with the emotions they come from, are not a luxury. They serve as internal guides, and they help us communicate to others signals that can also guide them.”
― Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain
― Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain
“Because the scientific understanding of manic-depressive illness is so ultimately beholden to the field of molecular biology, it is a world in which I have spent an increasing amount of time. It is an exotic world, one developed around an odd assortment of plants and animals—maize, fruit flies, yeast, worms, mice, humans, puffer fish—and it contains a somewhat strange, rapidly evolving, and occasionally quite poetic language system filled with marvelous terms like “orphan clones,” “plasmids,” and “high-density cosmids”; “triple helices,” “untethered DNA,” and “kamikaze reagents”; “chromosome walking,” “gene hunters,” and “gene mappers.” It is a field clearly in pursuit of the most fundamental of understandings, a search for the biological equivalent of quarks and leptons.”
― An Unquiet Mind
― An Unquiet Mind
“I nod. Pull out a chair and try to gather my thoughts. No small feat for me these days. I take a deep breath and try again. “What is … the treatment goal for people with … with what I …” Knight leans across the table toward me. “Bipolar disorder type I.” “Yeah.” “Okay … well, we want to stop the extreme mood changes. Bring down the ceiling on the mania, bring up the floor on the depression.” Knight uses his hands to illustrate the shrinking space. “Put more time between the episodes. And make the medication regimen as tolerable as possible. Stability. That’s what we’re aiming for.”
― Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See
― Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See
“I don’t know if you’re going to understand this, Greyson, but I’m going to tell you anyway. You should never be afraid to cry.” “But boys—” I started to say. “No, not just because it’s okay for boys to cry too. But because, Greyson, you are very lucky. Not everyone can feel things as deeply as you. Most people, their feelings are … bland, tasteless. They’ll never understand what it’s like to read a poem and feel almost like they’re flying, or to see a bleeding fish and feel grief that shatters their heart. It’s not a weakness, Grey. It’s what I love about you most.” Then he hugged me. Hard. And I’m not sure, but he might have been crying. That short, unsullied time when I simply thought he was special has a sense of place and a smell all its own. It is a tiny shred of my father that, like a child’s blanket, I am both attached to and embarrassed by. And that I would be devastated to lose. I suppose that irretrievable time is as much a piece of me as it is of him.”
― Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See
― Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See
Bhaskar’s 2025 Year in Books
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3,881 books
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223 friends
2,497 books
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282 friends
858 books
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48 friends
4,749 books
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1,320 friends
1,207 books
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6 books
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