The body mystifies. The mind more so. Witnessing their complex intersections—and the unbidden ways in which the two can catastrophically fray—can unmoor us.

Obsessions are involuntary, upsetting, persistent thoughts that cannot be reasoned away. Hallucinations are false sensory perceptions.

It is hard to be empathetic and helpful to a patient if you see her as a threat to your credibility.

“As an experience,” Virginia Woolf once declared, “madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about.” To top it off, the allure of Woolf’s “madness” is not limited to this heady state of inspiration but also offers a kind of rare and perfect productivity. “It shoots out of

That too much elation is a chimera.

I adore this about her. The insistence upon beauty and awe being a daily part of her life. The fixed principle of the thing.

it is scarier to face a threat alone, without someone there to see what you are experiencing, to comfort, to understand.

I have found that one of the gifts of medicine is that it allows those who practice it to participate in the purest and most vulnerable moments of human life.

Being married to another writer is wonderful. Being married to another writer whose strengths compensate for your deficiencies is miraculous.