Lauren Slater Prozac Diary Quotes

I had lived my life by these kinds of banners, only now, searching the sentence, I found little in it that resonated deep in my bones. I had a cerebral sort of appreciation for the sentence, or perhaps, an appreciation based in memory, the way one remembers with fondness a past partner whom one no longer loves. ~ Lauren Slater

And I saw ans still see everything that I do have, but no matter what, there is always the itch of what gets lost. ~ Lauren Slater

In illness, the world went wonderfully warped, high temperatures turning your pillow to a dune of snow and bringing the night sky, with its daisy-sized stars, so close to your bed you could touch it, and taste the moon. ~ Lauren Slater

I love you as only a lover can. Less depressed, less obsessed, I am better than ever able to love your hair, which has blond lights in it, and your remarkable eyes, the blue of my Nana's chipped china. I love the smell of your skin, impossible to describe except to say it's a confluence of many pungent things, and I love your chest with the disks of your nipples, and your thighs striated with sweat, and your back and your breath while you are above me. ~ Lauren Slater

I couldn't reach her. I was never able to reach her. Maybe she moved at a pace too fast. Maybe she was too sad. She held herself stiff, a lacquered lady. I think because I couldn't feel her, I couldn't feel myself. ~ Lauren Slater

If this is the case, then the "normal state" Prozac ushers in is an experience in the surreal, Dali's dripping clock, a disorientation so deep and sweet you spin. Thus Prozac, make no mistake about it, blissed me out and freaked me out and later on, when the full force of health hit me, sometimes stunned me with grief. ~ Lauren Slater

But what happens if such a patient, say myself, for instance, has rarely if ever experienced a normal state of functioning? What happens if such a patient has spent much of her life in mental hospitals, both pursuing and being pursued by one's illness after another? What happens if "regular life" to such a person has always meant cutting one's arms, or gagging? ~ Lauren Slater

Restorative justice is more interested in relationships. A crime is not act against a rule, it's an act against a person. When you harm somebody, you owe it to them to make things right. By making things right, you begin to heal your relationship with the community. Our system is focused on blame and punishment and not on healing and learning. - Lauren Abramson (RJ Program in Baltimore, MD) ~ Dashka Slater

I record my life, sifting and trying to separate what is real from what I've dreamed. I have decided not to tell you what is fact versus what is unfact primarily because (a) I am giving you a portrait of the essence of me, and (b) because, living where I do, living in the chasm that cuts through thought, it is lonely… come with me, reader. I am toying with you, yes, but for a real reason. I am asking you to enter the confusion with me, to give up the ground with me, because sometimes that frightening floaty place is really the truest of all. Kierkegaard says, 'The greatest lie of all is the feeling of firmness beneath our feet. We are most honest when we are lost.' Enter that lostness with me. Live in the place I am, where the view is murky, where the connecting bridges and orienting maps have been surgically stripped away. ~ Lauren Slater

To say I believe time is fluid, and so are the boundaries between human beings, the border separating helper from the one who hurts always blurry. ~ Lauren Slater

When I was a girl I loved fevers and flus and the muzzy feeling of a head cold, all these states carrying with them the special accoutrements of illness, the thermometer with its lovely line of red mercury, the coolness of ice chips pressed to a sweaty forehead, and best of all, a distant mother coming to your bedside with tea. ~ Lauren Slater

I watch the sky progress through its morning paces, the light turning from rose to saffron as the sun ascends, its rays like ribbons tangling in the tops of trees. ~ Lauren Slater

Why doesn't passionate love last? how is it possible to see a person as beautiful on Monday, and 364 days later, on another Monday, to see that beauty as bland? surely the object of your affection could not have changed that much. she still has the same shaped eyes. her voice has always had that husky sound, but now it grates on you - she sounds like she needs an antibiotic. ~ Lauren Slater

Everyone knows that a lot of memoirs have made-up scenes; it's obvious. And everyone knows that half the time at least fictions contain literal autobiographical truths. So how do we decide what's what, and does it even matter? ~ Lauren Slater

Mistrust is the fuel for so much mental pain, so many mental disorders. I am not talking here about the suspicions we sometimes have of one another, the distant but lurking sense that perhaps our lover lies to us, our best friend whispers behind our back. I am talking about a belief that betrayal inundates the atoms of the universe, is so woven into the workings of the world that every step is treacherous, and that below the rich mud lies a mine. ~ Lauren Slater

Tethered to the ground by quotidian conversation.
... the window rosy with anemic November light. ~ Lauren Slater

OH THAT I COULD GO TO THE SKY WHERE I MIGHT FIND A CLEAR KNOWING. ~ Lauren Slater

I felt a clot in my throat, something that wouldn't let language come ... And there is also a dream I have over and over again, of opening up my mouth and finding my tongue studded with broken glass, so every word is a wound. ~ Lauren Slater

I have not healed so much as learned to sit still and wait while pain does its dancing work, trying not to panic or twist in ways that make the blades tear deeper, finally infecting the wounds. ~ Lauren Slater

Creeping fear of madness often accompanies depression. Sufferers wonder if their black moods will ever lift, or if their feelings of alienation from the healthy world will deepen and widen. "These fears are at least fifty percent of what it is to be melancholy," says Lauren Slater, a clinical psychologist who has written about her struggles with mental illness. "If you were to be really, really depressed but know that it was going to end in five days, it wouldn't be depression. The terror is in what the future holds. ~ Joshua Wolf Shenk

Wounds, I think, are never confined to a single skin but reach out to rasp us all. ~ Lauren Slater

And I have the same heart in the same socket of chest, and it hammers the way it used to, and I find myself thinking the same words, safe again, trapped again. My palms sweat on the steering wheel. I remind myself: I am not that girl. I am not that girl. I've changed. I've grown. It's a long time ago. ~ Lauren Slater

I believe my strength has something to do with memory, with that concept of fluid time. For while I recall with clarity the terror of abuse, I also recall the green and lovely dream of childhood, the moist membrane of a leaf against my nose, the toads that peeled a golden pool in the palm of my hand. Pleasures, pleasures, the recollections of which have injected me with a firm and unshakable faith. I believe Dostoevski when he wrote, "If one had only one good memory left in one's heart, even that may be the means of saving us." I have gone by memory. ~ Lauren Slater

Finally the dawn came, the sky fringed with pink, and the sun bright as a coin in a spill of rising red. ~ Lauren Slater

William talks about there being two kinds of will. Will A and Will B, I call it. Will A is what we all learn, to hold your head high, stuff it down, swallow your sobs, work hard kind of will. Will B, while it seems a slacker thing, is actually harder to have. It's a willingness instead of a willfulness, an ability to take life on life's terms as opposed to putting up a big fight. It's about being bendable, not brittle, a person who is brave enough to try to ride the waves instead of trying to stop them. Will B is what you need in order to learn to fall. It's the kind of will my mother never taught me, and yours probably never taught you either. It's a secret greater than sex; it's a spiritual thing. Will B is not passive. It means an active acceptance, a say yes, and you have to have a voice and courage if you want to learn it. ~ Lauren Slater

Instead of spelling stories you spread silence, which was outside the alphabet. ~ Lauren Slater

I never said to myself, I am longing; that feeling lived at a level below language. ~ Lauren Slater

The clear water the color of deeply steeped tea, surrounded by cattails and gracile grasses. ~ Lauren Slater

I was born from nothing and to nothing I will return. And yet, when i say the word nothing, when i admit, at last, 'I am nothing,' i feel mysteriously like something again, ground zero, genesis, the pull of possibilities. ~ Lauren Slater

I will go in, go down, go back. ~ Lauren Slater

Depression is a death within, a knowledge - terrifying - that you cannot resurrect yourself. Depression is loss of the vision that lets leaves breathe and fall, that lets the air smell of seed and soil. And there must be rage, yes I think there is rage toward such a severing, such a ragged-deep rupture with the world. ~ Lauren Slater

They cleared swiftly, dramatically, like a stage set or a movie; we went from black to stunning blue, the day emerging at once wet and crisp, the trees dripping jewels, the flowers drunk on drinking, their heads lolling with dizzy delight, rivulets etched into our earth, showing us which way the rain ran, downhill, of course, heading, all water, straight for our yet-to-be-pond. ~ Lauren Slater

I looked up "skin" in the encyclopedia and confirmed that, sure enough, it is the human body's largest organ, a fact that suggests our surfaces are critical to who we are, not just the gateway to physical or spiritual depths but a profoundly important web of cells that, in protecting us, gives us form and function. ~ Lauren Slater

School feeding is a great tool to encourage education and provide food aid to children born into extremely impoverished situations. The kids in school being fed by WFP are empowered by their school meal to learn and better their lives! ~ Lauren Bush

I tell people that going for a run is like taking a little bit of Prozac and a little bit of Ritalin because, ~ John J. Ratey

I have all the power.
And I need it terribly.
I need the power play. I need to make all the choices, to enter this deal with my eyes wide open.
Neither one of us believes in marriage, but we both believe in honesty, and in honest pleasure. Giving it, rather than giving away my heart. ~ Lauren Blakely

I think I'd been lost in her the second I pulled the wool cap over her adorably rumpled bed head on our first run. ~ Christina Lauren

The problem with being in the eye of the storm is you have no sense of how big it really is. ~ Christina Lauren

Who knows? Maybe they're right. Maybe we are driven crazy by our feelings. Maybe love is a disease, and we would be better off without it.
But we have chosen a different road. And in the end that is the point of escaping the cure: We are free to choose.
We are even free to choose the wrong thing. ~ Lauren Oliver

He cut the insides of my eyelids with razors. ~ Lauren Oliver

I studied dancing for 13 years. And loved to dance. Always wanted to dance with Fred Astaire. ~ Lauren Bacall

LAUREN: You know, Cecil, I was never a Girl Scout myself, but I can say I am thrilled to support your endeavor to help bring your niece...I'm sorry. What was her name again?
CECIL: I don't want to um -
LAUREN: Janice. It was Janice. I love the way you are taking part in Janice's life. You must really care for her.
CECIL: Yes. With all my heart. But - ~ Joseph Fink

Look at me. We aren´t them lauren. You´re not your mother or father any more than I´m my mother. You´re you and I´m me and I love you. ~ Elizabeth Scott

A feminist is just someone who recognizes power structures that keep people from having the fullest life they can. ~ Lauren Groff

Ew, guys, stop it. Not on the couch." Quinn was right next to us, batting me off of Jaxon.
"Oh, like we haven't gotten plenty of fluids on this couch already, sweetheart," Cole laughed from behind her.
"All of you are disgusting, shut up, push play, and keep your fluids to yourselves," Jace complained. ~ Kimberly Lauren

Trust is a good way to get oneself killed ~ Lauren Kate