Scott Westerfeld Quotes

I recognize a lot of the things I'm going through. Like, I lose my temper a lot and I become unhinged and kind of hysterical.

People with bipolar disorder have difficulty with boundaries.

Once a restless or frayed mood has turned to anger, or violence, or psychosis, Richard, like most, finds it very difficult to see it as illness, rather than being willful, angry, irrational or simply tiresome.

Madness is never that far away. It's as close as saying yes to the wrong impulse.

In fact I am quite snappy and irritable, and I don't know if I'd like to make myself worse in that respect.

I wish I was more stupid because I'm either completely ecstatic and joyous and absolutely high as a kite or I'm a bit morbid. There's never anything in between.

In one day, I have times where I'm feeling great, I feel like I love my life, and then 2:30 rolls around and I'm the angriest man alive. My wife sees it.

It's true that Blake was emotionally disturbed - always has been - but he doesn't have murder in his heart. If he was going to do any damage to anything or anyone, it would be to himself.

I love a bit of drama. That's a bad thing. I can flip really quickly.

... fluctuating emotions ... [lead] us to excesses of both intervention and abdication.

People who are bipolar, they kind of latch onto things that are fanatical sometimes.

I am manic and that leads me to behave badly at times.

I have a very high frequency of anger, and a very high frequency of sadness.

I do have mood swings which can go into extremes.

Neurotic: someone who can go from the bottom to the top, and back again, without ever once touching the middle.

I had developed manic depression [bipolar disorder] ... and the main symptoms the constant voice in the head telling you to kill yourself.

Compassion is the fellow-feeling of the unsound.

Neurotics always feel as though they were going way up or way down, which is odd in people going sideways.

Occasionally, I go off the rails. I once nearly killed somebody once - it wasn't funny. I am a lunatic. The pressure of work, the pressure - everyone has a stop valve, and I don't have one.

Fits of depression come over the most of us. Usually cheerful as we may be, we must at intervals be cast down. The strong are not always vigorous, the wise not always ready, the brave not always courageous, and the joyous not always happy.

Manic-depression distorts moods and thoughts, incites dreadful behaviors, destroys the basis of rational thought, and too often erodes the desire and will to live. It is an illness that is biological in its origins, yet one that feels psychological in the experience of it, an illness that is unique in conferring advantage and pleasure, yet one that brings in its wake almost unendurable suffering and, not infrequently, suicide.

You aren't sick & unhappy only alive & stuck with it.

And I ask him why he cuts his arms with a razor. "Just fo feel. Just to feel something.

Depression...so mysteriously painful and elusive.

It’s so difficult to describe [depression] to someone who’s never been there, because it’s not sadness. I know sadness. Sadness is to cry and to feel. But it’s that cold absence of feeling — that really hollowed-out feeling.