Fragments in Time

"It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility; they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a constraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex."

"There are degrees of addiction, and of intelligence and accomplishment. When I was dealing with my depression, I always had a bipartite understanding of what was happening to me: I understood that for me, personally, I was in hell; my pain was as acute as anything the planet had yet come up with. Comparing myself to people starving in the Sudan, to Holocaust survivors, to homeless men sleeping on the subway, and to fifth-stage cancer patients-there was no point thinking about all that. Any of those predicaments were obviously and objectively more atrocious than my little mind sickness. But you can only live in your own experience, and for me, my life was the worst."

"Just because most or many geniuses seem to be addicts does not mean that most addicts are geniuses. Just because four of the nine Americans who have won the Nobel Prize for literature-Ernest Hemingway, Eugene O’Neill, John Steinbeck, and William Faulkner-were known alcoholics does not mean that if you are a drunk, you are also a writer. The percentages of intelligence and talent among addicts are probably about the same as in the general population-maybe a little more, possibly a little less. As Oscar Wilde said, “All bad poetry is sincere.” The desire-and the great need-to express oneself that you might find among the mentally ill does not mean that very much of their art is worth our reading or listening to or viewing. Just because Anne Sexton became a poet after she wrote as part of her therapy, and just because she was encouraged by her psychiatrist to pursue it professionally, to publish in The New Yorker-that does not mean everyone who is plagued by bad moods deserves a Pulitzer Prize."

"It is nice to cry over something or somebody who isn’t me. Or aren’t all our tears really for ourselves anyway? When we cry with joy at weddings, aren’t we really sad that such happiness belongs to someone else? All our emotions, even the generous ones, even empathy, are really just a way of bringing the woes of the world closer to home. It’s all one big opportunity to feel, to feel more."

"A thing of beauty is a gift to the world-you don’t need good deeds to make yourself worthy, to make your life meaningful. If you just have the capacity to make people smile, that is plenty. That’s not a small thing. That’s a gift from God in an ugly world."

"he recalled that some thirty or so great plagues known to history had accounted for nearly a hundred million deaths. But what are a hundred million deaths? When one has served in a war, one hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while. And since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination. The doctor remembered the plague at Constantinople that, according to Procopius, caused ten thousand deaths in a single day. Ten thousand dead made about five times the audience in a biggish cinema. Yes, that was how it should be done. You should collect the people at the exits of five picture-houses, you should lead them to a city square and make them die in heaps if you wanted to get a clear notion of what it means. Then at least you could add some familiar faces to the anonymous mass."

"That’s the main difference between depression and addiction, as far as I can tell: depression is full of need, and addiction fulfills that need."

"I don’t have a list of tasks that take four minutes each to accomplish. I don’t do them and check them off and move on. I work my own hours, I wait for inspiration, I live my beautiful bohemian existence, and no one can judge me because I am not like everyone else. I don’t have to get married. I don’t have to have children. I don’t have to pay my own bills. I don’t have to own a home. I don’t have to eat or sleep or see people or answer the phone or make my bed or defrost the refrigerator. Because I am an artist. I am special. I am a goddess."

"The opportunity to be merciful is one of the most beautiful rights that we have (…) the possibility that we can be better than the worst things that happen to us, that we can take the horror and use it as a way to become nobler-why should we pass up this chance?"

"I feel that in a hundred years, state-mandated killing will seem as obviously wrong as slavery does to us today. (…) I hate that so many people cannot make the cognitive leap that they must to recognize this evil, to understand that to have an orderly approach to killing a man-a menu for his last meal, a schedule of visitors in his last twenty-four hours, an allowance of one interview two days before-is infinitely sicker than the impulsive, insane nature of most murders. I’d rather they just handed a bunch of M-16s to the victims’ families and friends and have them wreak havoc and revenge on the criminal-at least that would be natural, at least that would be human. Not humane, but human. The idea that a man in his holding cell on death row is put on suicide watch-heaven forbid he takes his own life and denies the executioners the opportunity to do it and punish him properly-defines the sickness of the whole business to me. “You may stand them up on the trap door of the scaffold, and choke them to death,” Clarence Darrow argued at the trial of Leopold and Loeb, “but that act will be infinitely more cold-blooded, whether justified or not, than any act these boys have committed or can commit."