Bipolar Disorder Quotes

“Trust me, in these moments - when you decide whether you can take anything else or if you have given up hope on your future, and you’re so upset that you can barely breathe, because everyone you’ve hurt and everything you’ve done wrong is swarming around in your mind - you’re sucked right back into that tornado. You don’t know how big the tornado will be until it’s already here, and you’re spiraling in it, watching it destroy everything around you - except it’s not a tornado. It’s you. You’re the tornado. You think you are causing pain to others, but most of all, you are in pain yourself, so you see no other way out. You can’t live this way anymore. And you think everyone would be better off without you.”
― Emma Thomas, Live for Me

“My psychiatrist said "you're BI Polar. I said "tell us something we don't already know".”
― Stanley Victor Paskavich

“The thing about pills, Regan wanted to say to the doctor who had clearly never taken any, was that the ups and downs still happened; they were just different now, contained within brackets of limitation. Some inner lawlessness was still there, screeching for a higher high and clawing for a lower low, but ultimately the pills were loose restraints, a method of numbly shrinking”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“I wondered how you would react when i revealed to you my hidden parts, my ugly parts that don't do well in the sunlight”
― Ashley Berry, Separate Things: A Memoir

“I was at the bottom.
And instead of telling me how sorry you were that I felt this way, you climbed down to the bottom with me, and we were feeling this together.”
― Ashley Marie Berry, Separate Things: A Memoir

“As if your brain wants to kill your soul”
― Andy Alsanati

“I haven't beat my mental illness I've quit letting it beat me”
― Stanley Victor Paskavich

“Yes, there was something special about me, and I knew what it was. I was the kind of girl they found dead in a hall bedroom with an empty bottle of sleeping pills in her hand. But things weren’t entirely black—not yet. When you’re young and healthy you can plan on Monday to commit suicide, and by Tuesday you’re laughing again.”
― J. Randy Taraborrelli, The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

“Bipolar disorder was like that: a wild party that was constantly on the verge of ending, chaos and bright lights, an exaltation of the senses. That was mania. But all parties had their end, and when the shadows were long and the glitter had lost its sparkle and gathered to mingle with the dust on the unclean floors and all the food lost its flavor and the music finally died—that was depression, lurking in between all of the dark spaces of the noise and the laughter, as unavoidable as death or darkness.”
― Nenia Campbell, Batter My Heart

“Living with bipolar disorder isn’t about trying to always be happy. It’s about looking up into the sky during your darkest nights and seeing the stars shining down on you. The darker your world becomes, the brighter they shine. They are the hope inside that guides you until the sun rises once more. It is then that you have stolen victory from certain defeat.”
― Bryce R. Hostetler, Slip-Resistant Socks: My Journey with Bipolar Disorder

“He is the most wonderful person alive. I am suddenly struck by the fact that he is unlike anyone else in the world. How many people could love me like this? How many people would visit every day at six o'clock, without fail? And bring me dinner, and a grocery bag of fruit? Who could? Who would? Why would they?”
― Marya Hornbacher, Madness: A Bipolar Life

“You know what would be so cool? To get to the end of my personality and just lay in the sun.”
― Carrie Fisher

“All I want to do is ask the universe: "Make me not ill, pal. I just wanna be able to wash my hair like everyone else.”
― Emily Reynolds, A Beginner's Guide To Losing Your Mind

“In regards to the candle that burns at both ends-
how brilliant the light is for the beholder!
How beautiful the pain of that candle is
To those who only witness from afar,
But will never truly feel the price of such a shine.”
― Maddy Kobar, Simply Not Meant To Be: Maddy Kobar's 2014-2018 Poems

“I look up at the sky again and whisper, ‘I will live for you.”
― Emma Thomas, Live for Me

“The thing is, I don’t want my sadness to be othered from me just as I don’t want my happiness to be othered. They’re both mine. I made them, dammit. What if the elation is not another ‘bipolar episode’ but something I fought hard for? Maybe I jump up and down and kiss you too hard on the neck when I learn, upon coming home, that it’s pizza night because sometimes pizza night is more than enough, is my most faithful and feeble beacon. What if I’m running outside because the moon tonight is children’s-book huge and ridiculous over the line of pines, the sight of it a strange sphere of medicine?

...What if my sadness is actually my most brutal teacher? And the lesson is always this: You don’t have to be like the buffaloes. You can stop.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“In giving her existence, a great law had been broken; and the result was a being, whose elements were perhaps beautiful and brilliant, but all in disorder; or with an order peculiar to themselves, amidst which the point of variety and arrangement was difficult or impossible to be discovered.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“Every time a pill sat in Regan's palm she suffered some new strangulation; a faint memory of some distant need to force her heart to race. She'd crave a senseless rage, a dried-up sob, a psychotic joy, but only find pulse after pulse of nothing.
Without the volatility of her extremes, what was she?
'Managed,' she'd said.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“The thing is, I don’t want my sadness to be othered from me just as I don’t want my happiness to be othered. They’re both mine. I made them, dammit. What if the elation is not another ‘bipolar episode’ but something I fought hard for? Maybe I jump up and down and kiss you too hard on the neck when I learn, upon coming home, that it’s pizza night because sometimes pizza night is more than enough, is my most faithful and feeble beacon. What if I’m running outside because the moon tonight is children’s-book huge and ridiculous over the line of pines, the sight of it a strange sphere of medicine?”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“If someone thinks you’re a fucking problem, an addict, a fuck-up, and broken, they’re going to treat you differently despite all their best intentions otherwise, which can foster a slow, steady reduction, stripping away confidence
and self-love until it all becomes a repeated, entrenched story. The irony is that this contraction often occurs in the care of those
who are genuinely trying to help.”
― Cory Richards, The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within

“I used to be a solipsist. When I was a solipsist, I didn’t believe that others existed. I believed in my own consciousness and only my own consciousness. Solipsists face a lonely existence, I can assure you that based on personal experience. What a prison the subjective reality of solipsism is. Solipsism drove me insane. Literally.

Fortunately, I now realize it is not a truth in the multiverse that other minds do not exist. As such, I know my mind is not a prison of loneliness. I am surrounded by beings that love me and that I love. So are you.”
― Aaron Kyle Andresen, How Dad Found Himself in the Padded Room: A Bipolar Father's Gift For The World

“I guess the fact that the three of us have had these diagnoses hanging over our heads makes us empathetic toward one another. When it is just us three, it is so much easier to be ourselves because we don’t have to try so hard. We all just understand each other and have become inseparable ever since.”
― Emma Thomas, Live for Me

“The neurobiological side of the hypothesis is proposed that a) the feats cause, at the brain level, a rise in dopamine b) delusions are feats of fantasy and fantasy shield feats that cause this same award, or relieve punishment c) the neuroleptics show efficacy in reducing delusions since they inhibit dopamine receptors and take away the prize for self-deception”
― Martín Ross, THE SHIELD FEATS THEORY: a different hypothesis concerning the etiology of delusions and other disorders.

“This disorder is a pain in the ass and it is work. At times it is a cross to bear, and at others it is just a piece of the AJ-shaped puzzle. It is a part of me, as natural as the color of my eyes, but it is not all of me. Bipolar disorder does not define me. And I refuse to let a simple word be used as a weapon against me. There is no arrangement of letters that can make me feel inferior.”
― A.J. Mendez Brooks, Crazy Is My Superpower: How I Triumphed by Breaking Bones, Breaking Hearts, and Breaking the Rules

“Like a canvas painted with bold strokes of light and dark, the experience of bipolar disorder is complex and nuanced. But within the spectrum of our moods and emotions lies a depth of creativity, passion, and resilience that is uniquely our own.”
― Dr. Rameez Shaikh

“What enraged me about my mother's illness was not precisely the issue of money; it was the fact that she transformed from parent to stranger. The manic episodes would erupt and turn her into a tornado of destruction. Any money she had disappeared. She was fired from jobs, discrimination laws be damned. She struck up friendships with customers at random places. Piles of clutter became mountains in her home; we had to literally clean up the mess. Worst of all, she became impossible to talk to. Her eyes darted around the room and as the speed of her speech increased, what she said made no sense. She could be mean, her language suddenly laden with swears. No one could slow her down or connect with her and she felt gone from me. The person I knew was not there anymore. When that person is your mother, the world becomes a frighteningly uncertain place where anything is possible, as if all the trees and all the world sprouted knives for branches. In the hospital I couldn't say any of this; money was just an easy thing I could point to, a worthless rebuttal to the fact of her bipolar disorder.”
― Margaret Kimball, And Now I Spill the Family Secrets: An Illustrated Memoir

“The world can be divided into good and evil. I am on the side of justice. If I am on the side of good, then someone has to be on the side of evil. Without someone to play the villain, I can't exist. Then, who is going to protect the world?”
― The Queen of Hatred

“How do you know? You said lithium didn’t work for some people. It’s not working for me!’ ‘Till the end of the month,’ Dr Stefan said evenly. ‘If there’s no change by then, we’ll try cutting the dose.’ ‘That’s another ten days! What do you care – you’re not the one taking it! That means I have to endure another ten days of hell, walking around like an idiot, bumping into things, forgetting the end of my sentences, feeling only half-alive! How am I supposed to believe this is going to work if it makes me feel like this? Why should I believe a word that you say?’ Dr Stefan smiled slightly. ‘Because, Flynn, this is the most animated I’ve ever seen you. I would venture to say that you’re beginning, just beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel.’ Flynn narrowed his eyes in contempt. ‘Well if that’s the case, then, to quote Robert Lowell, it must be the light of the oncoming train.’ Dr Stefan threw his head back and roared with laughter.”
― Tabitha Suzuma, A Note of Madness

“Losing your mind, which is what happened, is a terrible thing. But once it’s gone, it’s fine. It’s completely fine because there’s no part of you left that knows the rest of it is missing.”
― Carrie Fisher

“Even when I have been most psychotic, I have been aware of finding new corners in my mind and heart. Some of those corners were incredible and beautiful, and made me feel as if I could die right then and the images would sustain me. Some of them were grotesque and ugly, and I never wanted to see them again. But, always, there were those new corners, and when feeling my normal self, beholden for that self of medicine and love, I cannot imagine becoming jaded to life, because I know of those limitless corners, with their limitless views.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness