Lauren Slater Quotes

#1. I didn't know then that the mind, like the earth, has several layers: a crust, a mantle, a boiling core.

Lauren Slater

#2. 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

#3. I watch the sky progress through its morning paces, the light turning from rose to saffron as the sun ascends, its rays like ribbons tangling in the tops of trees.

Lauren Slater

#4. It is a fundamental misperception," Fouts says to me, "to think human life has more value than any other life form.

Lauren Slater

#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

#6. Tethered to the ground by quotidian conversation.
... the window rosy with anemic November light.

Lauren Slater

#7. I was born from nothing and to nothing I will return. And yet, when i say the word nothing, when i admit, at last, 'I am nothing,' i feel mysteriously like something again, ground zero, genesis, the pull of possibilities.

Lauren Slater

#8. To say I believe time is fluid, and so are the boundaries between human beings, the border separating helper from the one who hurts always blurry.

Lauren Slater

#9. Wounds, I think, are never confined to a single skin but reach out to rasp us all.

Lauren Slater

#10. I found some way to recovery. But I know, have always known, that I could go back. Mysterious neurons collide and break. The brain bruises. Memories you thought were buried rise up.

Lauren Slater

#11. When you die, there's that much less breath to the world, and across continents someone supposedly separate gasps for air. When Marie, Joseph, peter, Moxi, Oscar, when I weep for you, don't forget I weep as well for me.

Lauren Slater

#12. 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

#13. Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it

Lauren Slater

#14. 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

#15. 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

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

Lauren Slater

#17. I have not healed so much as learned to sit still and wait while pain does its dancing work, trying not to panic or twist in ways that make the blades tear deeper, finally infecting the wounds.

Lauren Slater

#18. All the same, all different. What was it?

Lauren Slater

#19. 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

#20. Sickness is the natural state in which we humans reside. We occasionally fall into brief brackets of health, only to return to our fevers, our infections, our rapid, minute mutations, which take us toward death even as they evolve us, as a species, into some ill-defined future.

Lauren Slater

#21. The clear water the color of deeply steeped tea, surrounded by cattails and gracile grasses.

Lauren Slater

#22. I will go in, go down, go back.

Lauren Slater

#23. I felt a clot in my throat, something that wouldn't let language come ... And there is also a dream I have over and over again, of opening up my mouth and finding my tongue studded with broken glass, so every word is a wound.

Lauren Slater

#24. Illness was a temporary respite, a release from the demands of an alienating world.

Lauren Slater

#25. Finally the dawn came, the sky fringed with pink, and the sun bright as a coin in a spill of rising red.

Lauren Slater

#26. I never said to myself, I am longing; that feeling lived at a level below language.

Lauren Slater

#27. Things are screaming inside me and my eyes feel hot.

Lauren Slater

#28. The most miraculous moments of my life were not when my daughter and son were born, but when the second or third Prozac pill shot down my throat and catapulted me into a world called sane.

Lauren Slater

#29. Everyone knows that a lot of memoirs have made-up scenes; it's obvious. And everyone knows that half the time at least fictions contain literal autobiographical truths. So how do we decide what's what, and does it even matter?

Lauren Slater

#30. There is betrayal here, in what I do, but in betrayal I am finally camouflaged.

Lauren Slater

#31. Instead of spelling stories you spread silence, which was outside the alphabet.

Lauren Slater

#32. All it takes is the right training, and we step out, over the boundaries of our bodies and their limitations.

Lauren Slater

#33. 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

#34. OH THAT I COULD GO TO THE SKY WHERE I MIGHT FIND A CLEAR KNOWING.

Lauren Slater