Jay Asher Quotes

After my husband died, I could not write much - I could not concentrate. I was too exhausted most of the time even to contemplate writing. But I did take notes - not for fiction, but for a journal, or diary, of this terrible time. I did not think that I would ever survive this interlude.

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.

I saw Suicide in '74 and it was pretty horrifying.

When my dad died, I developed a nervous habit. He was very shy and quiet, and I was like him.

But for me, a physician, chief medical correspondent for a major network, and women's health expert, the thought of exposing myself to millions of people as someone who'd been completely blindsided by the suicide of my children's father, and by the impact of that suicide on Alex and Chloe and me, was nothing short of terrifying.

I hit my head against the wall because I don't want to know all the terrible things that I know about. I don't want to feel all these wretched things, but they're in me already. If I don't get rid of them, I'm not ever going to feel anything else.

Suicide carries in its aftermath a level of confusion and devastation that is, for the most part, beyond description.

if he goes and dies on me now, I know I'll go completely insane.

I simply cannot understand how any parent could kill themselves.

If my boy had perished in a Nazi compound, I could never have gone on living. I would have killed myself.

Even a 30-year-old man whose wife dies is eleven times more likely to commit suicide than a 30-year-old man whose wife is living. At age 30, when men can bury themselves in their jobs and are physically and financially attractive to women, the loss of the one woman a man loves is so devastating it is often not softened even by the opportunities for many women... in brief, it is the loss of love that devastates men.

under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. we have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. we have never seen a totally sane human being.

I thought about dying whenever I got bad news about other people.

I think I ran so hard and so fast, in a lot of ways, from my life and I kind of took a fall. It was like - what do they call it? - post-traumatic stress syndrome.

If I ever saw an amputee getting hanged, I'd probably just start calling out letters.

Flashbacks rarely involve language. Mine certainly didn't. They were visual, motor, and sensory, and they took place in a relentless, horrifying present.

And from my place, and from the time that I went through my divorce, I also had my father pass away in the middle of all that. And it kind of made everything else just kind of like the back burner, you know.

Depression is a feeling without a cause. Mourning has a cause.

When my family fell apart, it was such a troubled part of my life... I think I could understand what I was going through, but I didn't have the vocabulary for it.

There seem to be many causes of depression. One cause is profound loss, grief. Economic hardship we know is linked to depression. We don't have a full picture.

When you're traumatized, you pick out one thing you remember more than anything else.

I just couldn't go back to Suddenly Susan after David Strickland's suicide. I didn't see how we could make the show light and funny any more.

Elaine is just in pain. I think Elaine has become very, very sad woman. She is someone who is in deep need of many hours of analysis and I like to think that I'm not that type of person.

The times in my life when I've been my thinnest, I've been a walking psycho wreck. Forget the fact that I was basically starving myself; skinny was usually due to some kind of loss. Death. Rejection. Divorce.

Medically speaking, there is no such thing as a nervous breakdown. Which is very annoying to discover when you're right in the middle of one.