Kay Redfield Jamison Quotes

This crowd did not diminish through the whole of that cold, wet day; they seemed not to know what was to by their fate since their great benefactor was dead, and though strong and brave men wept when I met them.

Sometimes, I wonder what I'm doing here.

I began writing 'The Cold Song' in the months following my father's death, when I felt this sense of loss, disappearance, of being right in the middle of life and wondering: 'What now? How to proceed?'

I still don't know quite what I'm supposed to do or be.

I don't want to put meaning on what I do because I don't know what it is.

Loss is something that I think is ultimately the number one struggle for humans.

Barefoot conducts his seminars on his houseboat in Sausalito. It costs a hundred dollars to find out why we are on this Earth. You also get a sandwich, but I wasn't hungry that day. John Lennon had just been killed and I think I know why we are on this Earth; it's to find out that what you love the most will be taken away from you, probably due to an error in high places rather than by design.

What are we doing here, that is the question.

Do I walk? Have I feet still? I raise my eyes, I let them move round, and turn myself with them, one circle, one circle, and I stand in the midst. All is as usual. Only the Militiaman Stanislaus Katczinsky has died. Then I know nothing more.

I don't even know what I'm looking for, although I hope I'll know it if I find it along the way. Sometimes I want to simplify my life into a simple bare thing. And other times I want to complicate it so thoroughly that everything I touch will become bound in some way to me. I've become quite aware of my contradictions, but there's no true resolution in that.

Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can't be sure.

All the times I have suddenly realized that my parents are dead, even now, it still surprises me, to exist in the world while that which made me has ceased to exist

I have no idea where I'm going but here's the real question: What am I doing here in the first place?

I wondered what I thought I was burying.

You can't just make yourself matter and then die, Alaska, because now I am irretrievably different, and I'm sorry I let you go, yes, but you made the choice. You left me Perhapsless, stuck in your goddamned labyrinth. And now I don't even know if you chose the straight and fast way out, if you left me like this on purpose. And so I never knew you, did I? I can't remember, because I never knew.

When grief is deepest, words are fewest.

One of the things that happens to people in grief is they secretly think they're crazy, because they realize they are thinking things that don't make sense.

Grief is exhausting.

When one by one our ties are torn, and friend from friend is snatched forlorn; when man is left alone to mourn, oh! then how sweet it is to die!

Grief is the price we pay for love.

Three days after my brother died, my father was in the hospital. He just did not want to live anymore. Before, he was fighting and loving life.

It is like visiting one's funeral, like visiting loss in its purest and most monumental form, this wild darkness, which is not only unknown but which one cannot enter as oneself.

Life would be so wonderful if we only knew what to do with it.

Perhaps you could sympathize with those who seek to replace a dead child with a copy, or to copy a parent or a relative or even a celebrity.

What is my message? That is what troubles me. I have not got a message.