“I can't survive,' he once told me of his refusal to come indoors,'if I can't hear the orchestra the way I like to hear it.”

“I feel jerked around. I feel sympathetic. I feel abused. It's almost harder to see Nathaniel on the good days than the bad, because you let yourself be deceived into thinking he's going to stay that way...And I can't just walk away. Part of it is the desire to follow through on something that's become more important and meaningful in my life, and to satisfy the human instinct to help someone less fortunate. And maybe there's something more.”

“Love is mental illness going in and mental illness coming out. In between, you do a lot of laundry.”

“Learning how to play an instrument has always been near the top of my to-do list, but what are the chances now? There's little downtime with a column and a two-year-old, and after reading Goldilocks and the three Bears and going through half a bottle of wine with dinner on an average evening, imagining a day when I join Nathaniel on the Elgar Cello Concerto is not a vision but a hallucination. I'm at the point where the things on your to-do list get transferred to a should-have-done list, and one reason I write a column is for the privilege of vicariously sampling other worlds, dropping in with my passport, my notebook and my curiosity.”

“It is possible to cause seemingly biochemical changes through human emotional involvement. You literally have changed his chemistry by being his friend.”

“Mental illness doesn't choose the most talented or the smartest or the richest or the poorest. It shows no mercy and often arrives like an unexpected storm, dropping an endless downpour on young dreams.”

“Everyone said to Vincent van Gogh, "You can't be a great painter, you only have one ear." And you know what he said? "I can't hear you.”