I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.

I don’t think about the end game. I’ve got lots to occupy my mind. It’s the rage that keeps me going.

Mothers and daughters generally have fairly complex relationships, and ours was made much more so by Mother’s illness. She had Parkinson’s disease, which was not diagnosed for a long time… All that made me very self-protective, because for one thing, I didn’t want to get trapped.

Exercise is really important to me – it’s therapeutic. So if I’m ever feeling tense or stressed or like I’m about to have a meltdown, I’ll put on my iPod and head to the gym or out on a bike ride along Lake Michigan with the girls.

It’s very important that we re-learn the art of resting and relaxing. Not only does it help prevent the onset of many illnesses that develop through chronic tension and worrying; it allows us to clear our minds, focus, and find creative solutions to problems.

I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process.

When your soul is resting, your emotions are okay, your mind is okay, and your will is at peace with God, not resisting what He’s doing.

I talk to myself all the time. Just make sure you answer.

Fear keeps us focused on the past or worried about the future. If we can acknowledge our fear, we can realize that right now we are okay. Right now, today, we are still alive, and our bodies are working marvelously. Our eyes can still see the beautiful sky. Our ears can still hear the voices of our loved ones.

I say there’re no depressed words just depressed minds.

Kids who have an understanding of how and why their feelings are what they are are much more likely to talk to us about what’s happening, and they have better skills to work it out.

When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane.

Don’t just let the devil use your mind as a garbage dump.

What keeps me up at night? Anxiety. Anxiety, the inability to go to sleep, it’s quite literally that.

It’s been proven by quite a few studies that plants are good for our psychological development. If you green an area, the rate of crime goes down. Torture victims begin to recover when they spend time outside in a garden with flowers. So we need them, in some deep psychological sense, which I don’t suppose anybody really understands yet.

I think war is so incredibly backward, and I don’t think it’s intelligent, and it’s not sane. So why would you want to support it?

Isn’t it funny how babies laugh a lot? I read a toddler, a young child laughs 300 times a day. The average adult laughs, like, four times a day. God put it in them. He put the laugh in us, but I think sometimes we let life get us down, you know, have bad breaks, and we lose our breaks.

If it weren’t for painting, I wouldn’t live; I couldn’t bear the extra strain of things.

Where fear is, happiness is not.

Anger dwells only in the bosom of fools.

It opens the lungs, washes the countenance, exercises the eyes, and softens down the temper; so cry away.

Why should I stop working? If I do, I’ll die and it’ll all be finished.

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

I get nervous for everything – literally everything.

It seems like we wake up and it’s a race until you get to bed. It gets to you after a while and you think, ‚What the hell am I doing?‘

If a man be gloomy let him keep to himself. No one has the right to go croaking about society, or what is worse, looking as if he stifled grief.

If you keep feeling a point that has been sharpened, the point cannot long preserve its sharpness.

I don’t know how to function without music. When I’m not making it, I’m listening to it. It gives me courage and takes care of my mind.

Anger is like a storm rising up from the bottom of your consciousness. When you feel it coming, turn your focus to your breath.

People have different emotional levels. Especially when you’re young.

Cycling is a joy and faster than many other modes of transport, depending on the time of day. It clears the head.

We all get weary sometimes, and we tend to think that life is what makes us weary.

The story with anorexic girls – nobody works with anorexic girls. That has nothing to do with fashion.

I think every entertainer’s had nights when things go wrong. I mean you can’t remember everything all the time, and especially if you’re having hard times personally, things going on that you – you know, and then people make it worse. And that makes you feel worse.

An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.

I think the most important thing is to keep active and to hope that your mind stays active.

Having a bunch of cats around is good. If you’re feeling bad, you just look at the cats, you’ll feel better because they know that everything is just as it is. There’s nothing to get excited about. They just know. They’re saviours.

If a leader doesn’t convey passion and intensity then there will be no passion and intensity within the organization and they’ll start to fall down and get depressed.

The probability of apocalypse soon cannot be realistically estimated, but it is surely too high for any sane person to contemplate with equanimity.

I just always wanted to study human behavior because every psychologist that I would talk to would tell me I was bipolar, and I know I’m not bipolar, so I had to perform a psychoanalysis on myself to find out that I have unresolved grief.

Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man.

Therapy? I don’t need that. The roles that I choose are my therapy.

I had slumps that lasted into the winter.

You might be tough, but you can only be so tough for so long, you know what I mean? The brain can only take so much damage. The body can only take so much damage.

What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?

Cultivation to the mind is as necessary as food to the body.

I found that with depression, one of the most important things you could realise is that you’re not alone.

If you keep on writing for three years, every day, you should be strong. Of course, you have to be strong mentally, also. But in the first place, you have to be strong physically. That is a very important thing. Physically and mentally you have to be strong.

I have a slight bit of OCD, I think. I’m not walking around flipping light switches. But when I say I’m going to do something, I have to do it.

I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.

A great hallmark of mental wellness is the ability to be in the present moment, fully and with no thoughts of being elsewhere.

Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow. It empties today of its strength.

Overnight stardom can be harmful to your mental health. Yeah. It has ruined a lot of people.

If you start to think of your physical and moral condition, you usually find that you are sick.

I was in enough to get along with people. I was never socially inarticulate. Not a loner. And that saved my life, saved my sanity. That and the writing. But to this day I distrust anybody who thought school was a good time. Anybody.

Sometimes, women in families put themselves last until it manifests itself in their own health.

Music keeps the heart porous in many ways.

I am in my own head most of the time.

I really thought I was on the way out. My husband Blake saved my life. Often I don’t know what I do, then the next day the memory returns. And then I am engulfed in shame.

If I couldn’t laugh I just would go insane, If we couldn’t laugh we just would go insane, If we weren’t all crazy we would go insane.

I hesitate to use a pathologizing label, but underneath the so-called narcissistic personality is definitely shame and the paralyzing fear of being ordinary.