But you have to understand, mental illness is like cholesterol. There is is good kind and the bad. Without the good kind- less flavor to life. Van Gogh, Beethoven, Edgar Allen Poe, Sylvia Plath, Pink Floyd (the early Piper at the Gates of Dawn line up), scientific breakthroughs, spiritual revolution, utopian visions, zany nationalism that kills millions- wait, that's the bad kind. Tim Dorsey (Hurricane Punch)
"She stared at me "You have a message," she said. "On you machine." I looked over at my answering machine. Sure enough, the light was blinking. The woman really was a detective. "It's some girl," La Guerta said. "She sounds kind of sleepy and happy. You got a girlfriend, Dexter?" there was a strange hint of a challenge in her voice. "You know how it is," I said. "Women today are so forward, and when you are as handsome as I am they absolutely fling themselves at your head." Perhaps an unfortunate choice of words; as I said it I couldn't help thinking of the woman's head flung at me not so long ago. "Watch out," La Guerta said. "Sooner or later one of them will stick." I had no idea what she thought that meant, but it was a very unsettling image. "I'm sure you're right," I said. "Until then, carpe diem." "What?" "It's Latin," I said. "It means, complain in the daylight."
"Rory: "People are being serious." Jazza: "There's a serial killer out there. Of course people are being serious." Rory: "Yeah, but what are the chances?" Jazza: "I bet all of the victims thought that." Rory: "But still, what are the chances?" Jazza: "Well, I imagine they are several million to one." Jerome: "Not that high. You're only dealing with a small part of London. And while there might be a million or more people in that area, the Ripper is probably focusing on women, because all of the original victims were women. So halve that--" Jazza: "You really need another hobby."
When one hears hoofbeats, medical students are taught, one must think of horses, not zebras. But the doctor who sees my blood count will surely think of horses. He will arrive at a perfectly logical conclusion. It will no occur to him that, this time, it is truly a zebra galloping by.
We don't know when the first star exploded, or when the sun caught on fire. We don't know when the sun will stop burning and turn cold and dark, though we know it will. In between the fire and the cold, life beginning and ending, Laura, sometime after being born and before dying, plays a game and talks to a sister who has never existed, while Frank tells a little girl named Whitney a story about the life and death of a dog, a story that he sometimes believes while telling it. In the cities of the Sonoran Desert, the sunshine follows you into the shade. When you drink water anywhere, however pure the water, you're drinking the piss of dinosaurs. The volume of water in this world has never varied. Nothing comes or goes, increases or decreases. On a speck of dust in what they call the universe, David and Frank search for Laura, and Laura searches for David and Frank. La Llorona searches for her children. Whitney wants to not be sad. All of them search for love.
The best way of keeping a low profile was to immerse himself in the mundane. Act like them, talk like them. A smile, a joke was all it took - at least during the day. The night was his own.
NK, or natural killer, cells, which, like macrophages, attack targets like microbes, do not always kill. A 2013 article reports that about half of the NK cells sit out the fight, leaving a minority of them to become what their human observers call serial killers.