Rebecca Solnit Quotes

He taught me never to smile, which helps me when I visit disaster sites.

What do you do when your world is falling apart? How do you hold onto the real and the rational? I think that's very relatable for people.

One of the things you realize when you have a health crisis in your immediate family is that life does not stop so that you can go through that experience.

Although focusing is best pursued as a deliberate strategy over a period of time, it is also valuable as a kind of psychological first-aid, as useful to a distressed, 'stuck' person as a tourniquet to an accident victim.

I want to keep my sanity.

In order to be a good emergency contact, you need a lot of friend-patience and empathy. Often, this comes from personal experience with anxiety, trauma, and depression.

If I had a nervous breakdown every time something awful happened in the world, I'd be crazier than a shithouse rat.

It's very rare that people let me hop off the crazy wagon.

Self-indulgence is something to watch, but anything that helps you understand situations that are difficult to understand is good. If you're having some sort of emotional trauma, you need to find a person to talk to about it who says, 'This is quite normal; it's fine.'

Many people say that recovery from an aneurysm is like having a layer of skin ripped off - your experience of life is more intense.

I'm pretty good at remaining calm during an emergency. My house burned down when I was 12, which made me really pragmatic about what needed to be done. But I can be bad in that I compartmentalize a lot of emotions and push them away to deal with them at a later date.

Through my own struggles with depression, I discovered that knowledge, therapy, medication and education can provide the strength to get through it in one piece.

Across the Atlantic, commercial therapy of all kinds provides so many more comfortable outlets for people when they are under pressure. The English tradition is to get a grip, whereas the American version is to get in touch with your feelings, to say: 'I'm a good person. Isn't it terrible when bad things happen to people like me?'

Whatever it is that's bothering me - interacting with annoying guy at a restaurant, contemplating my age, or losing friends to illness - I'll start to chip away at it. If you can poke holes in it, it's not as formidable; it's not as scary, and ultimately, it becomes another truth.

I think we all have mechanisms that we use, each of us individually, to deal with pain that we've had or just dealing with life or whatever. Everyone's story is different, but we all have some kind of mechanism that we use to deal with stuff, that we create pretty young.

If you're out there and things are going badly, are you going to cry or break down?

Many people are worried about my mental health. But as I've said many times, we're stronger than we think we are.

Dealing with depression effectively is a mark not of weakness, but of strength.

A few years ago, I would let it get to me. But now, as long as my mum and my sister and my kids don't have any stress, I'm good.

If we would have had clear brains to take a break, instead of breaking up, we would have left room for balance in our lives.

I have a shrink in New York and a shrink in Arizona, just in case. You never know when you will have a breakdown.

After an injury, I think you have to be strong mentally.

What I work hardest at is just trying to not let things get me crazy.

I've used my sense of humor as a coping tool. It's gotten me through a lot of challenging times.

I did speak to a counsellor after hitting rock bottom. It really did help, talking to somebody that didn't know me and just pouring my heart out to them in a few sessions.