My body seemed to have become a foreign organism to me, rebelling in ways I couldn't understand.

Someone once asked, 'If you could take it all back, would you?' At the time I didn’t know. Now I do. I wouldn’t take that terrible experience back for anything in the world.

I would not be the person I am without having had that experience.

There is no such thing as the perfect monster. In fact, most look just like you or me.

I had asked him many times why he stayed when they all fled. He looked at me and said, 'Because I love you.'

We are, in the end, a sum of our parts, and when the body fails, all the virtues we hold dear go with it.

My father, who is one of the most empathetic people I know, had interpreted sanity as if it were a choice.

Unfortunately, the mind, while an incredible machine, cannot maintain its dignity quite as well as a machine.

I had felt it for weeks, that something inside me was askew.

'I am bipolar,' I say. 'And I am functioning. Actually, I am more than functioning: I am living, and living well.'

Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness