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Prozac Diary QUOTES

Prozac Diary QUOTES

1 " Illness was a temporary respite, a release from the demands of an alienating world. "

― Lauren Slater , Prozac Diary

2 " How do you describe emptiness? Is it the air inside a bubble, the darkness in a pocket, snow? I think, yes, I was six when or seven when I first felt it, the dwindling that is depression. "

― Lauren Slater , Prozac Diary

3 " 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 , Prozac Diary

4 " I had lots of books, most of them nonfiction, because I’d always felt that in nonfiction, specifically in the disciplines of psychology, philosophy, and theology, I might find clues about ways to live my life. "

― Lauren Slater , Prozac Diary

5 " 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 , Prozac Diary

6 " And I saw and still see everything that I do have, but no matter what, there is always the itch of what gets lost. "

― Lauren Slater , Prozac Diary

7 " I went over to my bookshelves, makeshift boards on bricks. I had a lot of books, most of them nonfiction, because I’d always felt that in nonfiction, specifically in the disciplines of psychology, philosophy, and theology, I might find clues about ways to live my life. "

― Lauren Slater , Prozac Diary

8 " After all, when you are sick, there are plenty of places (insurance willing) where you can go to get healed, but when you are healed are there any places you can go to learn not to be sick? "

― Lauren Slater , Prozac Diary

9 " Sometimes, in the movie theater or the supermarket, I look around at people who I suppose live their lives without a chemical crutch, and they amaze me. "

― Lauren Slater , Prozac Diary

10 " 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 , Prozac Diary

11 " 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 , Prozac Diary

12 " Getting better was a grief. One morning you woke up and your fever had fled. Your throat felt depressingly fine. "

― Lauren Slater , Prozac Diary

13 " Prozac, too made me want to weep. Prozac, too, was grief, because it returned me to the regular world with consequences I never expected. "

― Lauren Slater , Prozac Diary

14 " All the same, all different. What was it? "

― Lauren Slater , Prozac Diary

15 " A piano tuner used to come over to our house when I was young. He was a blind man, his eyes burnt-out holes in his head, his body all bent. I remember how strange he looked against the grandeur of our lives, how he stooped over that massive multitoothed instrument and tweaked its tones. The piano never looked any different after he’d worked on it, but when I pressed a C key or the black bar of an F minor, the note sprung out richer, as though chocolate and spices had been added to a flat sound. This was what was different. It was as though I’d been visited by a blind piano tuner who had crept into my apartment at night, who had tweaked the ivory bones of my body, the taut strings in my skull, and now, when I pressed on myself, the same notes but with a mellower, fuller sound sprang out. "

― Lauren Slater , Prozac Diary

16 " 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 , Prozac Diary

17 " 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 , Prozac Diary

18 " If you have been sick for a long, long time, Prozac may make you high. It probably won’t make you, never quite managed to be a part of, but a world, nevertheless, that you at first fit into with the precision of a key to a lock or a neurotransmitter to its receptor. "

― Lauren Slater , Prozac Diary

19 " 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 , Prozac Diary

20 " It should come as no surprise that this was so, that after years of illness my remission on that first drugged day – confusing, yes, portending loss, yes – was also a blessing, pure and simple. No, not a blessing, a redemption, both bright and blinding, heaven opening me up, letting me in. Good morning. "

― Lauren Slater , Prozac Diary