Bipolar Disorder Quotes

I am excessively slothful, and wonderfully industrious--by fits. There are epochs when any kind of mental exercise is torture, and when nothing yields me pleasure but the solitary communion with the 'mountains & the woods'--the 'altars' of Byron. I have thus rambled and dreamed away whole months, and awake, at last, to a sort of mania for composition. Then I scribble all day, and read all night, so long as the disease endures.

Mood in hypomania is usually ebullient, self-confident, and often transcendent, but it almost always exists with an irritable underpinning. Hypomanic mood, although elevated, is generally both fluctuating and volatile. Manic mood, frequently characterized as elated and grandiose, is often as not riddled by depression, panic, and extreme irritability.

I’m not bi-polar, I’m bi-winning. I win here and I win there.

To an extent, alcohol does provide relief from irritability, restlessness, and agitation associated with mania; not surprisingly, alcohol use often increases dramatically during mixed states as well. Unfortunately, however, alcohol and drug use often worsens the overall course of manic-depressive illness, occasionally precipitates the disease in vulnerable individuals, and frequently undermines the effects of treatment.

I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.

To be sure, I appear at times merry and in good heart, talk, too, before others quite reasonably, and it looks as if I felt, too, God knows how well within my skin. Yet the soul maintains its deathly sleep and the heart bleeds from a thousand wounds.”

I doubt sometimes whether a quiet & unagitated life would have suited me-yet I sometimes long for it.