#pre

Bipolar robs you of that which is you. It can take from you the very core of your being and replace it with something that is completely opposite of who and what you truly are. Because my bipolar went untreated for so long, I spent many years looking in the mirror and seeing a person I did not recognize or understand. Not only did bipolar rob me of my sanity, but it robbed me of my ability to see beyond the space it dictated me to look. I no longer could tell reality from fantasy, and I walked in a world no longer my own. ↗

— Alyssa Reyans

#bipolar-disorder #bipolar-mother #depression #insanity #mental-health

Now and then, however, he is horribly thoughtless, and seems to take a real delight in giving me pain. Then I feel, Harry, that I have given away my whole soul to some one who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer’s day. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#undervalued #vanity

[S]he stood for some moments gazing at the sisters, with affection beaming in one eye, and calculation shining out of the other. ↗

— Charles Dickens

#expression #eyes #hypocrisy #hypocrisy

I was sixteen and my mother was about to throw me out of the house forever, for breaking a very big rule, even bigger than the forbidden books. The rule was not just No Sex, but definitely No Sex With Your Own Sex. ↗

— Jeanette Winterson

#books #books-express #sex #sexuality #winterson

Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#expectations #open-mindedness #preconceptions #reading #biography

I have never been able to understand the complaint that a story is "depressing" because of its subject matter. What depresses me are stories that don't seem to know these things go on, or hide them in resolute chipperness; "witty stories," in which every problem is the occasion for a joke; "upbeat" stories that flog you with transcendence. Please. We're grown ups now. ↗

— Tobias Wolff

#witty

Never ask while you are doing it if what you are doing is fun. Don't introduce even your most reliably witty acquaintance as someone who will set the table on a roar. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#fun #pressure #wit #witty

Walking out in the middle of a funeral would be, of course, bad form. So attempting to walk out on one's own was beyond the pale. ↗

— Steve Hockensmith

#pride-and-prejudice #zombies #zombies

Most theists are deists most of the time, in practice if not in theory. They practice the absence of God instead of the presence of God. ↗

— Peter Kreeft

#catholicism #christianity #deism #deist #god

Confronting the worst-case scenario saps it of much of its anxiety-inducing power. Happiness reached via positive thinking can be fleeting and brittle, negative visualization generates a vastly more dependable calm. ↗

— Oliver Burkeman

#stoicism #visualization