Lauren Slater quotes:

I was born from nothing and to nothing I will return. And yet, when i say the word nothing, when i admit, at last, 'I am nothing,' i feel mysteriously like something again, ground zero, genesis, the pull of possibilities.

It is a fundamental misperception, Fouts says to me, to think human life has more value than any other life form.

tethered to the ground by quotidian conversation.the window rosy with anemic November light.

...tethered to the ground by quotidian conversation.... the window rosy with anemic November light.

Finally the dawn came, the sky fringed with pink, and the sun bright as a coin in a spill of rising red.

I looked up skin in the encyclopedia and confirmed that, sure enough, it is the human body's largest organ, a fact that suggests our surfaces are critical to who we are, not just the gateway to physical or spiritual depths but a profoundly important web of cells that, in protecting us, gives us form and function.

Sickness is the natural state in which we humans reside. We occasionally fall into brief brackets of health, only to return to our fevers, our infections, our rapid, minute mutations, which take us toward death even as they evolve us, as a species, into some ill-defined future.

The most miraculous moments of my life were not when my daughter and son were born, but when the second or third Prozac pill shot down my throat and catapulted me into a world called sane.

Wounds, I think, are never confined to a single skin but reach out to rasp us all.

I watch the sky progress through its morning paces, the light turning from rose to saffron as the sun ascends, its rays like ribbons tangling in the tops of trees.

I never said to myself, I am longing; that feeling lived at a level below language.

They cleared swiftly, dramatically, like a stage set or a movie; we went from black to stunning blue, the day emerging at once wet and crisp, the trees dripping jewels, the flowers drunk on drinking, their heads lolling with dizzy delight, rivulets etched into our earth, showing us which way the rain ran, downhill, of course, heading, all water, straight for our yet-to-be-pond.

the clear water the color of deeply steeped tea, surrounded by cattails and gracile grasses.

... instead of spelling stories you spread silence, which was outside the alphabet.

...the clear water the color of deeply steeped tea, surrounded by cattails and gracile grasses.

I didn't know then that the mind, like the earth, has several layers: a crust, a mantle, a boiling core.

Are psychiatric crises so overwhelming to the mind that they inhibit the presence of ethics? Is depression at root an amoral phenomenon, its focus on the self preventing any other from really counting? Perhaps. Sometimes. Sometimes, even when we are two we are really only one; we can feel nothing but our own bones, our own difficult breaths.

Everyone knows that a lot of memoirs have made-up scenes; it's obvious. And everyone knows that half the time at least fictions contain literal autobiographical truths. So how do we decide what's what, and does it even matter?

Mistrust is the fuel for so much mental pain, so many mental disorders. I am not talking here about the suspicions we sometimes have of one another, the distant but lurking sense that perhaps our lover lies to us, our best friend whispers behind our back. I am talking about a belief that betrayal inundates the atoms of the universe, is so woven into the workings of the world that every step is treacherous, and that below the rich mud lies a mine.

Much has been said about the meanings we make of illness, but what about the meanings we make out of cure? Cure is complex, disorienting, a revisioning of the self, either subtle or stark. Cure is the new, strange planet, pressing in. The doctor could not have known. And that made me, as it does every patient, only more alone.

Depression is a death within, a knowledge - terrifying - that you cannot resurrect yourself. Depression is loss of the vision that lets leaves breathe and fall, that lets the air smell of seed and soil. And there must be rage, yes I think there is rage toward such a severing, such a ragged-deep rupture with the world.