Letty Cottin Pogrebin Quotes

I wrote 'A Boy and His Soul' that talks about how my mother had lupus and my dad dying of a heart condition.

I eat the way I do because I really enjoy it but also because it's the only thing I've found that helps me manage the illness I had, and that plays a big part in it.

I know from experience that one of the first things to drop off during great transitions, such as dealing with grief or loss, is taking care of our bodies.

I think 'Historian' is ultimately a positive record, but I was a little bit worried about taking people into a dark world. I tried to do it with as much care as possible, but it's not easy to ask people to think about death or loss or confusion.

We all question our sanity. Everyone has had an experience of loss of control of something.

I like to keep my issues drawn, it's always darkest before the dawn.

For people with mental illness, taking care of the body is not an automatic thing. The mind is in such chaos it's hard to come up with a plan. So to people like us, it's more important than ever to follow a regimen.

I feel everything very strongly, and that is why I am an actress. I have made such clear connections between some of my chronic boo-boos in my body and emotion. It is kind of fascinating. I really feel like as a society, we need tap into that and embrace that more and more instead of wondering why we are sick.

I don't know what I'm supposed to do now. I know other people have it a lot worse. I do know that, but it's crashing in anyway, and I just can't stop thinking that the little kid eating french fries with his mom in the shopping mall is going to grow up and my sister.

If I'm not doing the work I want, I usually suffer a psychological allergic reaction and get ill. It niggles when things get out of my control.

Under the sustaining influence of love, the physical body is always at its best. It is probably true that more people are sick from lack of love in their lives than from all other causes put together.

[I] have fantasies of killing myself and thus being the powerful one not the powerless one.

I do believe you're only as sick as your secrets.

I'm going to be here until I'm cured?" "Life is not cured, Mr. Gilner. Life is managed".

If we don't go mad once in a while, there's no hope.

The simple truth is that happy people generally don't get sick

I was sick all the time, one exotic illness after another, which lasted throughout my twenties. My worst decade. But from the day the first book was accepted, I never got sick again. Writing changed my life.

I always kind of divided the gay guys I met up into two groups when I first started coming out. There were the guys who thought there was something fundamentally wrong with them and hated themselves and were so burdened with shame and internalized homophobia. It just really paralyzed and shredded them. And then there were guys like me who thought, "I'm fine, everybody else is crazy. My church is sick and the family's crazy, but me? I'm fine."

I think you have waves of awareness and one of the things that I found with grief was actually - I was well prepared for it by the cyclicality of my manic depressive illness because I was used to things coming and going and so forth.

How long does it take for a broken spirit to kill a body that has food, water and shelter?

Anxiety destroys scale, and suffering makes us lose perspective.

You might find it difficult to see anything but your own sadness, the way smoke can cover a landscape so that all anyone can see is black. You may find that if someone pours water all over you, you are damp and distracted, but not cured of your sadness, the way a fire department can douse a fire but never recover what has been burnt down.

I lost everything in the post-natal depression.

Quite quickly I grew less deranged. I had begun the process of calming down, assimilating and compromising, which is necessary to live comfortably in the world as it is, and probably is why its imbalance never changes. But underneath, my idea of life was completely altered.