c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
It’s a little-known secret, and it should probably stay that way: attempting suicide usually jump-starts your brain chemistry. There must be something about taking all those pills that either floods the brain sufficiently or depletes it so completely that balance is restored. Whatever the mechanism, the result is that you emerge on the other side of the attempt with an awareness of what it means to be alive. Simple acts seem miraculous: you can stand transfixed for hours just watching the wind ruffle the tiny hairs along the top of your arm. And always, with every sensation, is the knowledge that you must have survived for a reason. You just can’t doubt it anymore. You must have a purpose, or you would have died. You have the rest of your life to discover what that purpose is. And you can’t wait to start looking.
— Terri Cheney, Manic: A Memoir
I stepped from the air-conditioned compartment onto the station platform, and the motherly breath of the suburbs enfolded me. It smelt of lawn sprinklers and station wagons and tennis rackets and dogs and babies.
— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
You create your own reality
— Allison Scott, Spiritual Chat on: Death and the Loss of a Loved One: Book 1 of Spiritual Chat on Practical Matters the Series
I didn't want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn't know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I'd cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.
— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
I was almost a wife but lost the man. I was almost recognisable as a friend. And then I wasn't. The nights when I flicked off the bedside lamp and found myself in the heedless, lonely dark. The times I thought, with a horrified twist, that none of this was a gift. Suzanne got the redemption that followed a conviction ... I got the snuffed-out story of the bystander, a fugitive without a crime, half hoping and half terrified that no one was ever coming for me.
— Emma Cline, The Girls
A rock, I thought crazily. He'll pick up a rock. He'll break open my skull, my brain leaking onto the sand. He'll tighten his hands around my throat until my wind-pipe collapses. The stupid things I thought of: Sasha and her briny, childish mouth. How the un had looked in the tops of the trees lining my childhood driveway. Whether Suzanne knew I thought of her. How the mother must have begged, at the end.
— Emma Cline, The Girls
Depression is an illness, and no fault of the person who suffers from it
— Julie Schumacher, Black Box
If I weren't so depressed, I'd kill myself.
— Steve Kluger, Almost Like Being in Love
I am committing suicide by cigarette,” I replied. She thought that was reasonably funny. I didn’t. I thought it was hideous that I should scorn life that much, sucking away on cancer sticks.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Welcome to the Monkey House
So be careful when you bend over.
— Charles Bukowski
ME/CFS is not synonymous with depression or other psychiatric ill- nesses. The belief by some that they are the same has caused much con- fusion in the past, and inappropriate treatment.Nonpsychotic depression (major depression and dysthymia), anxiety disorders and somatization disorders are not diagnostically exclusionary, but may cause significant symptom overlap. Careful attention to the timing and correlation of symptoms, and a search for those characteris- tics of the symptoms that help to differentiate between diagnoses may be informative, e.g., exercise will tend to ameliorate depression whereas excessive exercise tends to have an adverse effect on ME/CFS patients.
— Bruce M. Carruthers
In general, fatigue is not as severe in depression as in ME/CFS. Joint and muscle pains, recurrent sore throats, tender lymph nodes, various cardiopulmonary symptoms (55), pressure headaches, prolonged post-exertional fatigue, chronic orthostatic intolerance, tachycardia, irritable bowel syndrome, bladder dysfunction, sinus and upper respiratory infections, new sensitivities to food, medications and chemicals, and atopy, new premenstrual syndrome, and sudden onset are commonly seen in ME/CFS, but not in depression. ME/CFS patients have a different immunological profile (56), and are more likely to have a down- regulation of the pituitary/adrenal axis (57). Anhedonia and self- reproach symptoms are not commonly seen in ME/CFS unless a concomitant depression is also present (58). The poor concentra- tion found in depression is not associated with a cluster of other cognitive impairments, as is common in ME/CFS. EEG brain mapping (59,60) and levels of low molecular weight RNase L (21,26) clearly distinguish ME/CFS from depression.
— Bruce M. Carruthers
It is not wrong to feel sorry for yourself. Just like it is not wrong to sit in a puddle of water while the rain pours down on your head. But neither is productive, unless you enjoy feeling cold and miserable and soggy while mascara runs down your face.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Slaying Dragons
The benefit of carrying the entire world on your shoulders was that you didn’t have to stare it in the face.
— Rhian J. Martin, A Different Familiar
Drift me away along with the dust traveling to infinity.To another world where it feels more at home.To another world where I don’t feel alone.Trapped in the angst of my soul.Not being embraced as a whole.A state of nothingness creeps upon me.Disappearing in the darkness of the shadows.How it has clocked my life.Because that is the only place where I find peace.I call it nyctophilia.And what am I when the day turns into the night,listening to the nocturnal and the howling wind?My soul leaving my body,To be at rest.Tears strain down my cheeks,Enough for my lungs to fight for air in the peaks.The atmosphere seems to be held in place by a certain silence, waiting for a sign to move.Even the earth forgot its behoove.Taken over by this silence that I yet do not understand myself.It seems that things don’t have a meaning,At least not anymore.The demons and darkness have taken over.Making me believe that it knows better.These demons can’t be seen,But they’re far from imaginary.They live inside my mind.Their evilness prevails,About to end the fight.Then I stop and think:This is a melancholy I’ll fight one more night.
— Salina Khan
There is no point in treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad...Sadness is more or less like a head cold -- with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
— Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees
Who am I fooling? Bad dreams never end. We just pretend they aren’t there.
— Shannon  Mullen, See What Flowers
Sleeping is much safer than the nightmare I’m living. When I sleep I feel nothing and I do nothing and I see nothing and nothing matters and no one cares. There’s no one to hurt or disappoint or notice when I’m low and I don’t need to face anyone not anyone in the world or not even myself.
— Shannon  Mullen, See What Flowers
Comedy strikes here... just to reduce pressure and depression.
— Deyth Banger
It is not the darkness of shadows: one that follows you, haunts you, terrifies you. Instead, it consumes you, becomes you, weighs you down. It IS you. It is comforting. Familiar. I have walked with it. Eaten with it. Loved with it. Smiled with it. Yet I feel it destroying me.Like cancer.But I can’t remove it. It stays inside of me, taunting me to kill it, myself, but it does not realize that this seduction keeps me alive.
— Shannon  Mullen, See What Flowers
An emotionally locked person refuses to let go of their sad memories and live in the now.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
I sit in front of the notebook and feel like it’s just too late for me. And that this book isn’t working, nothing’s working, everything feels like it’s made of spiders.
— Jessica Abel, Growing Gills: How to Find Creative Focus When You’re Drowning in Your Daily Life
In the wasteland of metro Boston, at thirteen, fourteen, his big dream had been of a gun to his own head, putting him out of his misery—a misery that by sophomore year of college was indistinguishable from everybody else's.
— Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire
Running keeps me at a physical peak and sharpens my senses. It makes me touch and see and hear as if for the first time. Through it I get through the first barrier to true emotions, the lack of integration with the body. Into it I escape from the pettiness and triviality of everyday life. And, once inside,stop the daily pendulum perpetually oscillating between distraction and boredom...It is the swing from boredom to anxiety, from depression to worry, that exhausts and defeats us. The sure knowledge that we can be much more than we are frustrates us.
— George Sheehan, Running & Being: The Total Experience
When we are aware about our body’s sensations, we can release physical pain, tensions or stress through slow movements.
— Amit Ray, Yoga The Science of Well-Being
You are a warrior in a dark forest, with no compass and are unable to tell who the actual enemy is, So you never feel safe ..
— Anonymous
There are so many things I dare not say I have quietly stopped being me.
— Abby Fabiaschi, I Liked My Life
The word “depressed” is spoken phonetically as “deep rest”. We can view depression not as a mental illness, but on a deeper level, as a profound, and very misunderstood, state of deep rest, entered into when we are completely exhausted by the weight of our own identity.
— Jeff Foster
Im dying everydayMy breakfast are cigarettes and coffeeMy lunch is depressionMy snacks are regretsMy dinner are memories and angerMy night is non stoping tearsSleep is my deathWaking up the next day and here we go again dying everyday
— Ali hassan hasan
Don't take my hate personal. I hate even myself.
— Mario Fingarov
Complaints of feeling cut off, shut off, out of touch, feeling apart or strange, of things being out of focus or unreal, of not feeling one with people, or of the point having gone out of life, interest flagging, things seeming futile and meaningless, all describe in various ways this state of mind. Patients usually call it 'depression', but it lacks the heavy, black, inner sense of brooding, of anger and of guilt, which are not difficult to discover in classic depression. Depression is really a more extraverted state of mind, which, while the patient is turning his aggression inwards against himself, is part of a struggle not to break out into overt angry and aggressive behaviour. The states described above are rather the 'schizoid states'. They are definitely introverted. Depression is object-relational. The schizoid person has renounced objects, even though he still needs them.
— Harry Guntrip, Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and the Self
... whatever family name has been given to a case of depression, it has an objective in common with all its kind: to sabotage the network of emotions you had come to identify as the composition of yourself. It is then you discover that your “old self” is not the substantial and inviolable thing you thought it was, nor was the rest of your “old” reality.
— Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
Eventually everyone will give up on you
— Ali hassan hasan
Ignorance is the only possible happiness this world has to offer
— Patrick Süskind
When had I stopped being a person with Paranoid Schizophrenia, and become a Paranoid Schizophrenic; defined by my illness?
— Michaela Haze, The Bleeders
If my body is a Universe, I have a black hole. I mask it, but it sits at the center of my body. I question it. Am I living up to my potential? Would I lose my creativity if I got help? Isn't life a black hole?
— Claudia Turner, Notes on a Hospitalized Pregnant Woman
... and she was awed to see that vibrant life still struggled to thrive despite such destruction.
— Lois Lowry, Gathering Blue
My heart is sinking and my chest physically aches from the heavy sadness that it carries within.
— Shannon  Perry
I realise now that the pain Kevin felt - that night, and for nearly eighteen months beforehand, since his suicide attempt - was no less real, no less urgent, than a heart attach, a stroke, a seizure. Than the sensation of running too hard or running too fast, keeling over, grasping for air. Wishing for something to fill your lungs - to rush in and then revive you - except nothing ever does, and maybe nothing ever can.It is unpleasant, of course, to sympathise with suicide. It is unpleasant to believe in a reality in which death is the only option. And it is problematic, certainly, to compare suicide to running, to cardiac arrest, to terminal cancer. But this is precisely the problem: There is no fair parallel that can be drawn between those who felt the dark pull of suicide and those who never have.
— Amy E. Butcher, Visiting Hours: A Memoir of Friendship and Murder
If the achievement of so much in life could not make one happy, then why bother living?
— Christopher Bram, Lives of the Circus Animals
My mood settles around me, a wool coat that seems to grow heavier with the months in which I accomplish very little--and then, since the coat is too heavy to allow movement, accomplish nothing at all.
— Mark Doty, Dog Years
It was only later, replaying the scene in her mind again and again, that she began to believe it was the expression of a man who was methodically unplugging himself from reality, one cord at a time. The face of a man who was heading out of the blue and into the black.
— Stephen King, It
I'm left staring up at the night sky the only roof left because to many memories are drowning me.
— Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay
I'm ordered to a week of bed rest and I don't object because I feel so lousy. Not just my heel and my tailbone. My whole body aches with exhaustion. So I let my mother doctor me and feed me breakfast in bed and tuck another quilt around me. Then I just lie there, staring out my window at the winter sky, pondering how on earth this will all turn out.
— Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire
Sometimes, people meant it when they smiled. Other times, they smiled because they wanted to mean it.
— Shannon A. Thompson, July Thunder
Have I gone mad like Anne and no one has the heart to tell me? I wish someone would tell me, I feel crazy enough though.
— Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay
I’m not flailing now, as my muscles are rigid with the tension of holding myself together. The pain over my heart returns, and from it I imagine tiny fissures spreading out into my body. Through my torso, down my arms and legs, over my face, leaving it crisscrossed with cracks. One good jolt … and I could shatter into strange, razor-sharp shards.
— Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay
Revenge is often compared to full course dinner meal best served bitter cold, it is the weakest and poorest excuse for any man or woman to use to hurt another because of there own grief
— Timothy Norr
As soon as he closed the door of his room,The sadness came out of the walland asked"Where were you all the day
— Hilal Hamdaan
A hand-rolled cigarette to smoke,Another one bought from the store.If he lights one, his mind's lit upAnother one burns a hole..
— Sanhita Baruah
Or perhaps it was simply that things were happening inside her, terrible things, which no one else could even guess at, and thus it was impossible for her to engage with everyday life at the same time. If so, she would naturally have no energy left, not just for curiosity or interest but indeed for any meaningful response to all the humdrum minutiae that went on on the surface.
— Han Kang, The Vegetarian
There's a crack in my mind,That I don't know how to heal.There are demons in my head,People tell me are not real.The voices are my own,Speaking words I don't believe.Convincing me I'm worthless,And that everyone will leave.You want me to be better,Don't you think I want the same?But you've convinced yourself it's nothing,Or that I'm the one to blame.So I'll tell you that I'm 'fine,'Because that's all you want to hear.And I'll conceal it with a smile,While hiding all the fear.I'll bury all the feelings,And I'll cut out all the pain.But that won't mean I'm healed,I've just chosen to not 'complain.'Because being sad was only half of it,And it was not the half to kill.The downfall began when I started to feel nothing,When I slowly lost my will.
— Jeannine Allison, Unveiling The Sky
The tedium of existence and feeling imprisoned in a deplorable job can cause a person to consider the most expedient escape route from suffering including flirting with suicide. Fernando Pessoa wrote in “The Book of Disquiet” of his own feelings of uneasiness and sense of discouragement. “I suffer from life and from other people. I cannot look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten, and lost, with no connection to anything useful or real – only then do I find myself comforted.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Boredom and ineffective attempts to escape tedium are the perpetual lot of humankind.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
How to tell your pretend-boyfriend and his real boyfriend that your internal processors are failing:1. The biological term is depression, but you don't have an official diagnostic (diagnosis) and it's a hard word to say. It feels heavy and stings your mouth. Like when you tried to eat a battery when you were small and your parents got upset.2. Instead, you try to hide the feeling. But the dark stain has already spilled across your hardwiring and clogged your processor. You don't have access to any working help files to fix this. Tech support is unavailable for your model. (No extended warranty exists.)3. Pretend the reason you have no energy is because you're sick with a generic bug.4. You have time to sleep. Your job is canceling out many of your functions; robots can perform cleaning and maintenance in hotels for much better wage investment, and since you are not (yet) a robot, you know you will be replaced soon.5. The literal translation of the word depression: you are broken and devalued and have no further use.6. No one refurbishes broken robots.7. Please self-terminate.
— A. Merc Rustad, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015
[If there was] certainty that an acute episode [of depression] will last only a week, a month, even a year, it would change everything. It would still be a ghastly ordeal, but the worst thing about it — the incessant yearning for death, the compulsion toward suicide — would drop away. But no, a limited depression, a depression with hope, is a contradiction. The experience of convulsive pain, along with the conviction that it will never end except in death — that is the definition of a severe depression.
— George Scialabba
He was obsessed with obituaries. She'd never read them before, he couldn't believe it, to him it was like someone who'd never read the funnies...Michael always wanted to know what they died of- accidental gunshot wounds, overdose, cancer. 'Was it suicide?' That's what he really wanted to know.
— Janet Fitch, Paint it Black
No. No… No!’ the fear ebbed my voice, cut through me like a knife. I ran, bare feet slipping and sliding over the floorboards. I turned the corner and headed for the backdoor.Run. Run. I must run.As soon as I reached the backdoor in the kitchen, pulling the barn door from the hinges, I felt his gaze upon me. Cinders and kindling crunched at my feet; what had once been my lovely mahogany kitchen furniture was now little more than firewood. My crockery and china splintered in shards and as I turned to face him, I felt them dig into my skin, cut me with every shiver that bolted through my frame.‘You wanted Hemlock House. You have, Hemlock House.’ His voice was dark, cruel and yet hauntingly light. As if cooing, whispering to a newborn. He was lounging against the countertop as if waiting for breakfast, as if waiting for something so meaningless.
— Charlotte Munro, Skeletons in The Closet [A Horror Collection]
It was a tried and tested remedy. Go home, take two Panadols and fall into a deep dreamless slumber. The next morning awake in a hazy stupor, go through the daily routine and as soon as all obligations are met and affected parties satisfied, repeat procedure with Panadol. Continue routine for several days, months if necessary… it all depended on the magnitude of the cut.
— Jinat Rehana Begum, First Fires
Disquietude that springs from the fundamental nature of being a human being is vaster and more encompassing than depression, which has a cause and therefore a cure.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Never tell a depressed person to “Cheer up.” Unless you want them to tell you to “Shut up.
— Toni Sorenson, The Great Brain Cleanse
Having an inaccurate or incomplete view of ourselves is why are always depressed
— Sunday Adelaja
In order not to be captured in a trap of depression at the latter end of your life, you should properly assess yourself, rightly understand your identity and realize that you are not the same as your appearance
— Sunday Adelaja
Time went by and there wasn’t even sadness.“You know how another patient put it? She said this feeling inside her was . . . it was anti-feeling. Like a black hole in space, and everything—happiness, anger, hope, meaning—it would all get sucked in, tipped over the event horizon, and she couldn’t feel any of it. That’s the way it was for me. I walked around like everyone else, and had this wonderful opportunity at the museum, and came home to this brilliant guy who loved me and was nothing but sweet. Your father tried so hard. But I felt . . . empty. If I could’ve filled that space up with anything, I would’ve. If somebody had turned to me and said, ‘It’s easy, just pour some dry cement in there and you’ll be a normal human girl,’ I would’ve done it like that.” She snaps her fingers. “But I couldn’t. And your father couldn’t do it for me.
— Rebecca Podos, The Mystery of Hollow Places
Those drugs were either going to bring me nirvana or they were going to kill me. I was sure of it. And I was comfortable with it.
— Joss Sheldon, The Little Voice
I am sure I have summer depression
—  the heat makes me instantly regret being alive.
I never knew You lived so close to the floor,but every time I am bowed down,crushed by this weight of grief,I feel Your hand on my head,Your breath on my cheek,Your tears on my neck.You never tell me to pull myself together,to stem the flow of many years.You simply stay by my sidefor as long as it takes,so close to the floor.
— Sheila Walsh, Loved Back to Life: How I Found the Courage to Live Free
At any other time it's better. You can do the things you feel you should; you're an expert at going through the motions. Your handshakes with strangers are firm and your gaze never wavers; you think of steel and diamonds when you stare. In monotone you repeat the legendary words of long-dead lovers to those you claim to love; you take them into bed with you, and you mimic the rhythmic motions you've read of in manuals. When protocol demands it you dutifully drop to your knees and pray to a god who no longer exists. But in this hour you must admit to yourself that this is not enough, that you are not good enough. And when you knock your fist against your chest you hear a hollow ringing echo, and all your thoughts are accompanied by the ticks of clockwork spinning behind your eyes, and everything you eat and drink has the aftertaste of rust.
— Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
Words drop from my lips spiraling downward; they land scattered on your ears. I spoke them green and golden, but you turned them shriveled brown.
— Patricia Robin Woodruff
I saw that for a long time I had not liked people and things, but only followed the rickety old pretense of liking. I saw that even my love for those closest to me had become only an attempt to love, that my casual relations -- with an editor, a tobacco seller, the child of a friend, were only what I remembered I should do, from other days. All in the same month I became bitter about such things as the sound of the radio, the advertisements in the magazines, the screech of tracks, the dead silence of the country -- contemptuous at human softness, immediately (if secretively) quarrelsome toward hardness -- hating the night when I couldn't sleep and hating the day because it went toward night. I slept on the heart side now because I knew that the sooner I could tire that out, even a little, the sooner would come that blessed hour of nightmare which, like a catharsis, would enable me to better meet the new day.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Attitudes and ignorance” about (any type of) abuse can be passed down through the generations. It is important to our healing that we sort out the belief systems we adopt; belief systems that were taught to us and because they are so full of lies, they lead to all kinds of depressions, addictions and other struggles while we try to cope with the manifestations of the problems instead of the roots of the problems.
— Darlene Ouimet
Poverty, oppression, grief and depression will increase, if a country does not live according to the rules of God.
— Sunday Adelaja
Who hasn't walked through a life of small tragedies? 'Sister Sonja often asked me, as though to understand the depth and breadth of human suffering would be enough to pull me outside of my own.
— Jacqueline Woodson, Another Brooklyn
Our “increasing mental sickness” may find expression in neurotic symptoms. These symptoms are conspicuous and extremely distressing. But “let us beware,” says Dr. Fromm, “of defining mental hygiene as the prevention of symptoms. Symptoms as such are not our enemy, but our friend; where there are symptoms there is conflict, and conflict always indicates that the forces of life which strive for integration and happiness are still fighting.” The really hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. “Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does.” They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted, still cherish “the illusion of individuality,” but in fact they have been to a great extent deindividualized. Their conformity is developing into something like uniformity. But “uniformity and freedom are incompatible. Uniformity and mental health are incompatible too. . . . Man is not made to be an automaton, and if he becomes one, the basis for mental health is destroyed.
— Aldous Huxley, Brave New World / Brave New World Revisited
People will come in your life and bring instant joy like a rainbow or wreak havoc like a hurricane. And once their duty is done the presence will away leaving you to live alone.
— Michael Tavon, God Is A Woman
I wish someone would promise me that nothing is meaningless,” he said. “I wish there were promises worth believing in. That after we’ve been hunted and lonely and anxious and living in fear, there is something else.
— Kyung-Sook Shin, I'll Be Right There
I was never ready and could you see it in the way time collapsed in my syntax? Because melancholia is the inability to sequentialize.
— Jackie Wang
That's how lonely and sad I was. Dying is not that hard. Lime the air being sucked slowly out of a room, the will to live was slowly seeping out of me. When you feel like rhat, dying doesn't seem like such a big deal.
— Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun
There is evidence that I have survived this before, that I will go on surviving. There is love. There is love. There is love. Maybe the Cheshire cat was right. Maybe we are all a little mad. And if we are all in this together, then none of us are truly alone. That means me. But it also means you. Across these pages, I reach out to you, dear one whose heart feels so alone. This too shall pass. And we will all be okay.
— Clementine Ford
My doctor has given me as strong an antihistamine as she is allowed to prescribe, but even that does nothing for the itching and swelling. The moment a grain of pollen enters the keep, I begin to tomato, and after two minutes of being exposed to the Ejaculateum Arboratoeaea, I am lying on the ground with my tongue lolling out of the side of my mouth.I am heartily glad that the trees and plants are still interested in copulatory activities; I only wish they would be so good as to keep their sperm away from my face. Do not pretend that pollen is anything else; it transfers haploid male genetic material and sullies the bedclothes unmercifully.
— Michelle Franklin, I Hate Summer: My tribulations with seasonal depression, anxiety, plumbers, spiders, neighbours, and the world.
I feel . . . low," I say, looking away. "Like, literally low. Flat. It's not . . . sad, exactly. I mean, sad too, obviously. But that's a different feeling, I guess."She nods. "There's a reason it's called 'depression' and not 'chronic sadness' or 'manic sorrow.'" She picks up a foam stress ball and squeezes it, leaving imprints of her fingers. "Depressions like these are holes left behind by a physical force. With mental depression, the force can be chemical or situational or both, but it doesn't just make a hole--it presses you into one that feels impossible to escape.
— Kate Hart, After the Fall
And then it happens. The panic. It's slow at first, creeping through the cracks in my thoughts until everything starts to feel heavy. It builds; it becomes something physical that clutches at my insides and squeezes out the air and the blood.
— Sara  Barnard, A Quiet Kind of Thunder
I'm going to lie down. Please wake me up in a couple of don't.
— Ruby Elliot
I can't see the logic in medicating a grieving person like there was something wrong with her, and yet it happens all the time... you go to the doctor with symptoms of profound grief and they push an antidepressant at you. We need to walk through our grief, not medicate it and shove it under the carpet like it wasn't there.
— Richard       Wagner, The Amateur's Guide To Death and Dying; Enhancing the End of Life
In my room, in the dark, I understood what I never had before, what no one else seemed to. I understood how a boy could go into the woods with a bullet and a gun and not come out. That there was no conspiracy, no evil influences or secret rituals; that sometimes there was only pain and the need to make it stop.
— Robin Wasserman, Girls on Fire
Everyone feels depressed, angry or frustrated at times; it’s a crossroads not a dead end.
— Sam Owen, 500 Relationships And Life Quotes: Bite-Sized Advice For Busy People
It wasn't that I stopped caring about life, but that I've stopped being able to care.
— Ruby Elliot
And his soul plunged downward, drowning in that deep pit: he felt that could never again escape from this smothering flood of pain and ugliness, from the eclipsing horror and pity of it all. And as he walked, he twisted his own neck about, and beat the air with his arm like a wing, as if he had received a blow in his kidneys. He felt that he might be clean and free if he could only escape into a single burning passion -- hard, and hot, and glittering -- of love, hatred, terror, or disgust. But he was caught, he was strangling, in the web of futility.
— Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel
A message for those of you who contemplate permanent solutions to temporary problems. You never know what could be coming in the future. There is so much music you've yet to hear.
— Hannah Hart, Buffering: Unshared Tales of a Life Fully Loaded
Stop shying away from people. If you actually took a moment to listen to what they have to say, they might just say something that will change your life.
— S.R. Crawford, From My Suffering: 25 Ways to Break the Chains of Anxiety, Depression & Stress
...this was as if an actual steamroller driven by a crazy grinning idiot had trundled through the door and flattened my entire life into a sad pancake of nothingness.
— Ruby Elliot, It's All Absolutely Fine
There’s nothing worse than bottling something up inside and letting it eat at you. It’s like being shot, and leaving the bullet inside our bodies. The wound would never heal. Instead, we need to let it out.
— S.R. Crawford, From My Suffering: 25 Ways to Break the Chains of Anxiety, Depression & Stress
I waited for you. I shouldn't have.But that's my problem. I'm alwayswaiting for you. For everyone. Butno one waits for me. I stay back, when everyone has moved on, andwait for you to come along. BecauseI don't want you to be alone. I don't like to be alone, so I don't want you to feel that way either. But you won'twait for me. That's okay. I'm used tobeing alone. Don't worry. I'll still waitfor you. I won't leave you alone.
— Kiki J.P. Deering
Why would I want to take baby steps? Babies are shit at walking - think about it. To move forward I'll be taking jazzy little lizard steps.
— Ruby Elliot
Time they say is a great healer, but in this case, I am not sure that is true.
— Emily  Williams, Letters to Eloise
Why should I wake up if not for myself? The others are smiling façades anyway or they’re programmed to feel joy. Push comes to shove we live in a fake world, pretending life’s always golly which is life’s greatest folly.
— Kevin Focke, A Salmon Amongst Trouts
We do not want to be told what we know. We do not want to call things by their names, although we're willing to call one another bad ones. We call meanness nobility and hatred honor. The way to make yourself a hero is to make me out a scoundrel. You won't admit that either, but it's true.
— Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel
I wish I had someone I could call without feeling guilty. Someone I could tell about my day, about the weird things going on in my head, the poems I’m thinking about writing, and they would listen and care and tell me about how their cat has gone to throwing up in their shoes, and the way the fall leaves make them feel, about how hard it’s been lately. We could both share, and feel heard. We could both listen, and feel understood. I just want a connection that doesn’t feel one sided.
— Kiki J.P. Deering
Depression can be a very disturbing and frightening experience. People often feel that depression descends upon them from nowhere and feel powerless to understand or change how they are feeling. It can physical changes such as tiredness and loss of appetite but depresson is not primarily a physical problem. Depression is routed in people's past experiences
—  their thoughts and feelings about themselves and the world
It hurts when you realize you aren’t as important to someone as you thought you were.Deep inside  Where nothing’s fine  I’ve lost my mind
— Kiki J.P. Deering
I don’t understand how you can smile all day long but cry yourself to sleep at night. How pictures never change but the people in them do. How your best friend become your worst enemy. Or how strange it is when your worst enemy turns into your best friend. How forever turns into a few short months that you’d do almost anything to get back. How you can let go of something you once said you couldn’t live without. How even though you know something is best for you, it hurts just the same. How the people who once wanted to spend every second of their time with you, think a few minutes of their time is too much to spare. How people make promises despite how common it is for promises to be broken. How people can erase you from their lives just because it’s easier than working things out.
— Kiki J.P. Deering
Depression is such a cruel punishment. There are no fevers, no rashes, no blood tests to send people scurrying in concern, just the slow erosion of self, as insidious as cancer. And like cancer, it is essentially a solitary experience; a room in hell with only your name on the door
— Martha Manning, Undercurrents: A Life Beneath the Surface
It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed ... If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything except that pain, a clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting her cell by cell.
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
The blues don’t jump right on you. They come creeping. Shortly after my sixtieth I slipped into a depression like I hadn’t experienced since that dusty night in Texas thirty years earlier. It lasted for a year and a half and devastated me. When these moods hit me, usually few will notice—not Mr. Landau, no one I work with in the studio, not the band, never the audience, hopefully not the children—but Patti will observe a freight train bearing down, loaded with nitroglycerin and running quickly out of track. During these periods I can be cruel: I run, I dissemble, I dodge, I weave, I disappear, I return, I rarely apologize, and all the while Patti holds down the fort as I’m trying to burn it down. She stops me. She gets me to the doctors and says, “This man needs a pill.” I do. I’ve been on antidepressants for the last twelve to fifteen years of my life, and to a lesser degree but with the same effect they had for my father, they have given me a life I would not have been able to maintain without them. They work. I return to Earth, home and my family. The worst of my destructive behavior curtails itself and my humanity returns. I was crushed between sixty and sixty-two, good for a year and out again from sixty-three to sixty-four. Not a good record.
— Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run
He wrote arguments for and against life; he began to think the slowest and most painful form of suicide was living, running the whole decathlon of suffering, no breather or bottled water. Fear of dying was irrational. Death was utilitarian. Decrease in net resource consumption and planetary suffering. Increase in net comedy. There was no afterlife but there was a right-before-death, and medical research said it was loopy and nice, all white lights and gentle voices. With booze it wasn't even scary. Some people with terrible lives didn't kill themselves, but that didn't mean they shouldn't. Most people weren't alive and didn't mind. You couldn't regret it.
— Tony Tulathimutte, Private Citizens
People die every day, psychologically speaking. Some part of them gets tired. And that small part tries to kill off the entire person.
— Ray Bradbury, The October Country
I'm so glad I didn't die on the various occasions I have earnestly wished I might, for I would have missed a lot of lovely weather.
— Elizabeth von Arnim, The Solitary Summer
It is not normal for a body to remain horizontal; beyond a certain length of time it attracts concern. Death and burial ('laid to rest') are seen as the natural horizontal states, which is surely why the calculated falsity of perpendicular deaths, such as hangings, crucifixions, burnings at the stakes, etc. produce such indelible shock.
— Murray Bail, Eucalyptus
To the deepest, most cellular level of my being, I resent people who believe that depression is the same as weakness, that "sad" people must be coddled like helpless toddlers.
— Emery Lord, When We Collided
I wasn't glad that I hadn't died. And I wasn't sad that I hadn't. I wasn't anything.
— Kathleen Rooney, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk
Gerald Middleton was a man of mildly but persistently depressive temperament. Such men are not at their best at breakfast, nor is the week before Christmas their happiest time.
— Angus Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes
The fact is that when you admit that you can’t blame anyone or anything else, you begin to blame yourself. The human mind gives up trying to find an executioner, but still it must blame someone. Anger that is not expressed tends to turn inward and, instead, attacks the very one who feels it. You move from anger and guilt into depression.
— Kate McGahan, Jack McAfghan: Return from Rainbow Bridge
What we perceive as dejection over the futility of life is sometimes greed, which the monastic tradition perceives as rooted in a fear of being vulnerable in a future old age, so that one hoards possessions in the present. But most often our depression is unexpressed anger, and it manifests itself as the sloth of disobedience, a refusal to keep up the daily practices that would keep us in good relationship to God and to each other. For when people allow anger to build up inside, they begin to perform daily tasks resentfully, focusing on the others as the source of their troubles. Instead of looking inward to find the true reason for their sadness - with me , it is usually a fear of losing an illusory control - they direct it outward, barreling through the world, impatient and even brutal with those they encounter, especially those who are closest to them.
— Kathleen Norris, The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and Women's Work
This sound, which like all music--indeed, like all pleasure--I had been numbly unresponsive to for months, pierced my heart like a dagger, and in a flood of swift recollection I thought of all the joys the house had known: the children who had rushed through its rooms, the festivals, the love and work, the honestly earned slumber, the voices and the nimble commotion, the perennial tribe of cats and dogs and birds, "laughter and ability and Sighing, And Frocks and Curls." All this I realized was more than I could ever abandon, even as what I had set out so deliberately to do was more than I could inflict on those memories, and upon those, so close to me, with whom the memories were bound. And just as powerfully I realized I could not commit this desecration on myself.
— William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness
I hate sadness. Anything is better than sadness. Even feeling nothing.
— Rebekah Crane, The Odds of Loving Grover Cleveland
The first thing the therapist asked me was, 'Are you here because you're depressed?' I said, 'Not at all--I'm here because I'm Southern.'" Anne Herndon
— Maryln Schwartz, New Times In The Old South: Or Why Scarlett's in Therapy & Tara's Going Condo
Some people, perhaps those with more dignity and less rage gnawing at the roots of their being, are nicer as failures, For me, it was like descending a deep pit that had no bottom
— Amanda Craig, In a Dark Wood
That is the worst thing about despair: it is not constant, any more than love is.
— Amanda Craig, In a Dark Wood
I remember only images, snapshots burned into me, bleeding into each other until I no longer knew the order in which they had happen.
— Laure Eve, The Graces
... I have always found that the Trough periods of the human undulation provide excellent opportunity for all sensual temptations, particularly those of sex. This may surprise you, because, of course, there is more physical energy, and therefore more potential appetite, at the Peak periods; but you must remember that the powers of resistance are then also at their highest. The health and spirits which you... use in producing lust can also... be very easily used for work or play or thought or innocuous merriment. The attack has a much better chance of success when the man's whole inner world is drab and cold and empty. And it is also to be noted that the Trough sexuality is subtly different in quality from that of the Peak - much less likely to lead to... "being in love," much more easily drawn into perversions, much less... generous and imaginative and even spiritual... It is the same with other desires of the flesh. You are much more likely to make [a] man a sound drunkard by pressing drink on him as an anodyne when he is dull and weary... than... when he is happy...
— C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
Depressed states can make us feel like we're constantly fighting against ourselves but we must engage in that fight for ourselves.
— Sam Owen, 500 Relationships And Life Quotes: Bite-Sized Advice For Busy People
What doesn't kill you very often makes you weaker. What doesn't kill you can leave you limping for the rest of your days. What doesn't kill you can make you scared to leave your house, or even your bedroom, and have you trembling, or mumbling incoherently, or leaning with your head on a window pane, wishing you could return to the time before the thing that didn't kill you.
— Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive
Zoe stopped one last time in front of the mirror, adjusting her new American dress. She didn’t see the dress, however. She saw what the big Russian did to her. She saw what al-Qaeda did to her. She saw a person shunned by her Persian village. She saw ugliness. Every time she looked in the mirror she saw deficiency.
— Michael Benzehabe
Forcing yourself to see the world through love's gaze can be healthy. Love is an attitude to life. It can save us.
— Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive
That kind of monotony that running generates - the one soundtracked by heavy breathing and the steady rhythm of feet on pavements - became a kind of metaphor for depression.
— Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive
I'm a Polaroid developing in reverse
— Tyler Knight, Burn My Shadow: A Selective Memory of an X-Rated Life
See, there's the pie chart. If you look, you can see clear as day that the happy times -- the times when you think "How fun! I'm glad I'm alive" -- don't make up even one tenth of life. I'm work this out properly with a calculator, so there's no mistake.
— Tatsuhiko Takimoto, Welcome to the N.H.K.
Asking 'why' only makes us feel hopeless. Asking 'how' points the way forward, and shows us what we must do
— Sue Klebold, A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy
One cliche attached to bookish people is that they are lonely, but for me books were my way out of being lonely.
— Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive
The way out is never through yourself.
— Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive
In actuality, there's nothing to do about a useless, recurring depression. A person could become disconsolate or angry. Even if they're enraged enough to punch something, they won't find a target. A huge organization... they wish that some huge, evil organization existed. That becomes our dream...
— Tatsuhiko Takimoto, Welcome to the N.H.K.
Life doesn’t need to be difficult to become impossible.
— PJ Bayliss
but the effort of setting the table, heating up the food and then washing the dishes seemed to him tonight a superhuman one.
— José Saramago, Seeing
That's the most important thing for a sickness like ours: a sense of trust. If I put myself in this person's hands, I'll be OK. If my condition starts to worsen even the slightest bit - if a screw comes loose - he'll notice straight away, and with tremendous care and patience he'll fix it, he'll tighten the screw again, put all the jumped threads back in place. If we have that sense of trust, our sickness stays away.
— Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
Render unto meditation the things that are meditation’s, and unto medication the things that are medication’s.
— Barry Graham, Kill Your Self: Life After Ego
You can't quell depression by making love. But we tried. But we tried, oh, we did.
— Yrsa Daley-Ward, bone
Despite how long I'd slept, I was so tired--tired in my bones, in my crumpled heart."- Sarah J Maas, A Court of Mist and Fury
— サラ・J・マース
I sleep and sleep and sleep, yet I still have an unquenchable thirst for it.
— Maria Elena, Eternal Youth
It's what the loss uncovers in you that brings on despair, not the loss itself.
— Nicci French, Friday on My Mind
Will peace ever comeWill its will ever be doneFrom dawn to duskNight to sun We wait and watchHoping for changeTrying not to fallAnd to always stand tallFor we all have willEven if it not clear Even when we only followWe still can choose to not fearBut the time continues And I grow old So as I lie hereWhat will unfold?Will there be change Will peace be arrangedI hope so...
— Toni mastertfrf
I am helpless as the sea at the end of her string. I am restless. Restless and useless. I, too, create corpses.
— Sylvia Plath