Mira Bartok quotes:

Eloquent and moving... an extraordinary testament to the enduring power of love - beyond faith and dogma. It reminds us of why we are here: to love and live fully, to be curious about all things, and to live a compassionate - and passionate - authentic life.

I felt held hostage by her illness and by the backward mental health system that once again was incapable of helping our family in crisis.

Candid and searing, Deborah Jiang Stein's memoir is a remarkable story about identity, lost and found, and about the author's journey to reclaim"?and celebrate"?that most primal of relationships, the one between mother and child. I dare you to read this book without crying.

We humans are different - our brains are built not to fix memories in stone but rather to transform them, our recollections in their retelling.

Some of my old memories feel trapped in amber in my brain, lucid and burning, while others are like the wing beat of a hummingbird, an intangible, ephemeral blur.

I don't want to be the person who gasps in fear whenever she hears the sound of a doorbell or a phone. I just want to lose myself in these hills, in the river winding west to the city of bridges.

Children of the mentally ill learn early on how not to be a bother, especially if they grew up with neglect. As my sister insisted once, when she was in severe pain after injuring her ankle, 'This isn't me! This is not who I am!

Cheryl Strayed reminds us, in her lyrical and courageous memoir Wild, of what it means to be fully alive, even in the face of catastrophe, physical and psychic hardship, and loss.

We children of schizophrenics are the great secret keepers, the ones who don't want you to think that anything is wrong.

Who am I, then, if my memory is impaired?

My dog, Ginger, is jumpy-like me-sensitive to sound and sudden movement. She wasn't that way at first, but not long after we got her, my grandfather told me to stand still outside and hold her leash tight. Then he shot a gun off by our feet, several times. "This is how girls learn to obey," he said, "how to be seen and not heard."