c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Today it is hardly possible for any group to remain so isolated from others who have different values. Therefore it is necessary today for the individual to find support within himself. . . This strength within himself—through access to his own real needs and feelings and the possibility of expressing them—thus becomes crucially important for him on the one hand, and on the other made enormously more difficult through living in contact with various different value systems. These factors can probably explain the rapid increase of depression in our time and also the general fascination with various groups.
— Alice  Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self
The wind made me shiver as i pulled my arms into my T-shirt. There I was, cold, isolated and desperate for something I knew I couldn't have.A solution. A remedy. Anything.The silence continued except for my own footsteps. I hated it. Alone and confused was the last place I wanted to be.Somehow I knew I deserved this.
— Brian Krans, A Constant Suicide
A few months ago, a fog blinded me, thicker than ever before. I slept in the monster’s arms. I felt its breath on my neck, its scaled stomach rising and falling against my back, its head and face invisible as always. I couldn’t pretend anymore to Margaret that I was working. The children receded into noises grating on my ears. I stopped moving. Weeks went by indistinguishable one from another. I could smell the rot of myself, my armpits, my breath, my groin, as though the living part of death had already commenced, the preliminary decomposing, as the will fades. In Dante and Milton hell is vivid. Sin organizes the dead into struggle. The darkness bristles with life. There is story upon story to tell. But in the fog there is nothing to see. The monster you lie with is your own. The struggle is endlessly private. I thought it was over. That one night the beast at my back would squeeze more tightly and I would cease breathing. What remained of me hoped for it.
— Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone
People like you and me, we have too many nerves and not enough skin. That’s the issue. Too many nerves. Not enough skin. We feel things straight to our bones. We’re radar dishes. We take in everything and we feel everything. We feel pain that doesn’t even belong to us. We are the animal shelter of feelings. We rescue everything.
— Suanne Laqueur
There was no life Dennis burned to live except, it seemed, a life that wasn't depressed.
— Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings
I wonder if I have ever actually been happy. People have told me, really more times than I can remember, ever since I was a small boy, how lucky I was, but I have always felt as if I were suffering in hell. It has seemed to me in fact that those who called me lucky were incomparably more fortunate than I.
— Osamu Dazai
Once more, my harp! once more, although I thoughtNever to wake thy silent strings again,A wandering dream thy gentle chords have wrought,And my sad heart, which long hath dwelt in pain,Soars, like a wild bird from a cypress bough,Into the poet's Heaven, and leaves dull grief below
— Caroline  Norton
Grant us peaceof our unnatural sins,that sweet release as death begins.For a lease on lifeby "devouring" othersis full of great strifemaking "meat" of another…With blood of the innocentdripping down across my mind,my eyes red luminescentthinking of a past left behind.Of the friends I had madeand those I let downyet now I am afraidof finally shutting down.Yet I know deep insidethis is how it has to be, for humans to make strideyou have to kill me...
— Toni mastertfrf
I was going all well and then suddenly struck by this devil just out of the blue and i got paralyzed...
— affan Riz
There’s no meaning of life but there is meaning and life, and it’s there waiting for you.
— Adam Gnade, The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Fighting the Big Motherfuckin' Sad
And there he was waiting for the song to end, but it started again, like it's on repeat, maybe he is never meant to be happy, maybe this is the only feeling life has for him.
— Alamvusha
How can I put this? There's a king of gap between what I think is real and what's really real. I get this feeling like some kind of little something-or-other is there, somewhere inside me... like a burglar is in the house, hiding in a wardrobe... and it comes out every once in a while and messes up whatever order or logic I've established for myself. The way a magnet can make a machine go crazy.
— Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
...you have to ask yourself two questions: Who am I? And how may I become myself?
— Paul Beatty, The Sellout
You burn bright and you burn hard, like a fire in a dumpster,and nobody is so worriedabout you burning as they are worried about the fire spreading.
— Kris Kidd, Down for Whatever
We’ll take up where we left off, Esther’, she had said, with her sweet martyr’s smile. ‘We’ll act as if all this were a bad dream.’ A bad dream. To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.A bad dream. I remembered everything.
— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
You are only as deepas the ashtrays you use. You only stick around because you like the abuse.
— Kris Kidd, Down for Whatever
I’m a lot like you,and you’re a lot like me.It’s sad to say,and it’s sad to see.
— Kris Kidd, Down for Whatever
It isn’t easy,” is easy to say and sometimes I think that the only thing we can dois say really easy things to each other.
— Kris Kidd, Down for Whatever
Life must be terrible for working people, considering they spend every Friday night celebrating a two day break from it.
— Robert  Black
He who has lived and thought can't helpdespising people in his soul;him who has felt disturbs the ghost of irrecoverable days;for him there are no more enchantments;him does the snake of memories, him does repentance bite.
— Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin
What i'm trying to say is this. A certain kind of shittiness, a certain kind of stagnation, a certain kind of darkness, goes on propogating itself by its own power in its own self-contained cycle. And once it passes a certain point, no one can stop it - even if the person himself wants to stop it.
— Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
I was a vacant room. Inside, the music produces only a dry, hollow echo.
— Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
It's a hypothesis. History won't take us far enough to confirm it. And our certainties never really hold water. One day you feel like dying and the next you realize all you had to do was go down a few stairs to find the light switch so you could see things a bit more clearly.
— Anna Gavalda, Hunting and Gathering
I want to remember what we were like before we became ourselves.
— Kris Kidd, Down for Whatever
The piece of you that loves a part of me tries its best to hold onto the rest,but my heart is a thousand-piece puzzle of a faraway galaxy, deep purple,colors blending together and impossible to place.
— Kris Kidd, Down for Whatever
As a sufferer of depression for many years, I know the importance of trying to find positive experiences in each day, no matter how small.
— Sharon E. Rainey, The Best Part of My Day Healing Journal
You ask yourself when you’ll learn, and the answer is always,“Tomorrow.
— Kris Kidd, Down for Whatever
Sunrise is starting to feel like a guilt trip.
— Kris Kidd, Down for Whatever
When you live in the dark for so long, you begin to love it. And it loves you back, and isn’t that the point? You think, the face turns to the shadows, and just as well. It accepts, it heals, it allows.But it also devours.
— Raymond Carver
There isn’t any doubt I’m stuck in stress and depression.
— Deyth Banger
I look back on my life the way one watches a badly scripted action flick, sitting at the edge of the seat, bursting out, "No, no, don't open that door! The bad guy is in there and he'll grab you and put his hand over your mouth and tie you up and then you'll miss the train and everything will fall apart!" Except there is no bad guy in this tale. The person who jumped through the door and grabbed me and tied me up was, unfortunately, me. My double image, the evil skinny chick who hisses, Don't eat. I'm not going to let you eat. I'll let you go as soon as you're thin, I swear I will. Everything will be okay when you're thin.
— Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia
One in two recently evicted mothers reports multiple symptoms of clinical depression, double the rate of similar mothers who were not forced from their homes. Even after years pass, evicted mothers are less happy, energetic, and optimistic than their peers. When several patients committed suicide in the days leading up to their eviction, a group of psychiatrists published a letter in Psychiatric Services, identifying eviction as a “significant precursor of suicide.” The letter emphasized that none of the patients were facing homelessness, leading the psychiatrists to attribute the suicides to eviction itself. “Eviction must be considered a traumatic rejection,” they wrote, “a denial of one’s most basic human needs, and an exquisitely shameful experience.” Suicides attributed to evictions and foreclosures doubled between 2005 and 2010, years when housing costs soared.
— Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Watching me, judging me, smelling the crippling failure oozing from my skin, my desperation clawing and all-consuming panic drenching me as I gape in horror at the world and wonder why everyone is smiling and looking at me with secret knowledge of my aching shame.
— Sarah Kane, 4.48 Psychosis
He cries behind his wall, I think, and no one knows, not even he. And no one will ever know, and in the end he’ll always be alone in smiling pain.
— George R.R. Martin, A Song for Lya
Listening to Don Moen's songs always reminds me of my darkest momentsThen I was always listening to them and crying, locking myself alone in the room, shedding tears, questioning God, singing along with Don MoenBut today, whenever I listen to the songs, I always smile.Indeed, God never sleeps, He never slumbers
— OMOSOHWOFA CASEY
I am not ascare to die. I am only ascare that after death I be alone. Maybe because of suicide, I go to the hell? If hell all hot and crowded and noiseful, like Christian minister on TV say, then I not care because it will be just like India. But if hell cold and quiet, with lot of snow and leaf-empty trees, and people who smile with string-thin lips, then I ascare. Because it seems so much like my life in Am'rica.
— Thrity Umrigar, The Story Hour
I’m sorry about Finch. He was a good, screwed up kid who should have had more help.” “I feel responsible.
— Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places
He always kept a handful of stars in his pockets and rays of sunshine in his smile, ahurricane in his eyes and whole galaxies in his mind. And now when I close my eyes, my mind roams and enters the cave where our memories still resided. There's so much I wish I could tell you, but most of all I wonder how you could do this to us. I'm yet again stuck in this darkness that seems to never end.
— Victoria Haugnes, Diary of the mad: A short story collection
I want to believe him. I know stuff happens to people and they can't always be who they were or who they think they're supposed to be. But knowing that doesn't mean I'm okay with it. It's more like what Mr. Krueger says about black holes: We can't wish them away, so we'd better learn as much as we can about where they are and how they work so we don't get sucked in.
— R. Dean Johnson, Californium: A novel of punk rock, growing up, and other dangerous things
Depression has its degrees which should be clearly marked. There is an absolute depression, when the very foundation of the psychic mechanism is damaged by pressures and we find it very difficult to recover the joy of life. Quite different is a temporary depression which may, at times, be quite poorly directed, like a wind into the human sails. In order to distinguish between the two we might use the test of human reaction to a material improvement.
— Valerian Pidmohylny, Невеличка драма
A Depressive?' 'Smiles in ballrooms, weeps in bedrooms. Ill in her head.' Olive tapped her temple. 'And here.' She touched her heart.
— Jessie Burton, The Muse
Suicidal pain includes the feeling that one has lost all capacity to effect emotional change. The agony is excruciating and looks as if it will never end. There is the feeling of having been beaten down for a very long time. There are feelings of agitation, emptiness, and incoherence. 'Snap out of it and get on with your life,' sounds like a demand to high jump ten feet.
— David L. Conroy, Out of the Nightmare: Recovery from Depression and Suicidal Pain
Sometimes the darkness beyond is not glorious at all, it truly is an absolute absence of light. A clawing, needy tar that pulls you down. You drown but you don't. It turns you to lead so you sink faster in its viscous embrace. It robs you of hope and even the memory of hope. It makes you think you've always felt like this, and there's no place to go but down, where it slowly, ravenously digests your will, distilling it into the ebony crude of nightmares. And you know the darkness beyond despair, just as intimately as you know the soaring heights. Because in this and all universes, there is balance. You can't have the one without facing the other. And sometimes you think you can take it because the joy is worth the despair, and sometimes you know you can't take it and how did you ever think you could? And there is the dance; strength and weakness, confidence and desolation.
— Neal Shusterman, Challenger Deep
As it happens I am comfortable with the Michael Laskis of this world, with those who live outside rather than in, those in whom the sense of dread is so acute that they turn to extreme and doomed commitments; I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manage to fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History. But of course I did not mention dread to Michael Laski, whose particular opiate is History. I did suggest “depression,” did venture that it might have been “depressing” for him to see only a dozen or so faces at his last May Day demonstration, but he told me that depression was an impediment to the revolutionary process, a disease afflicting only those who do not have ideology to sustain them.
— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Habitual excuses for inactivity indicates little or no interest in what one ought to have done.
— Itohan Eghide, Master of Maxims
You stay up until 3am - the time when the fine lines start to get blurry. You found yourself standing on the edge. You think you’re not supposed to be there so you jumped and crossed the line. You’ve come to a place where the voices are much louder…where the words are much clearer. It’s a place where the harmless things hurt you. It is where you wonder why the sea-like decisions you’ve made and the copper-like smiles has led you to loathe yourself. You wonder why your skin suddenly craves the feeling of metal. You laugh. Because it’s 3am- the time when salts and metals come together… the time when tears and blood embrace.
— Kiel G.C.
Alcohol's been keeping depression alive and well for over ten thousand years.
— Stanley Victor Paskavich
They were wrong about the sun.It does not go down into the underworld at night.The sun leaves merelyand the underworld emerges.It can happen at any moment.It can happen in the morning,you in the kitchen going throughyour mild routines.Plate, cup, knife.All at once there’s no blue, no green,no warning.
— Margaret Atwood, Morning in the Burned House
Who can tell? It may be that there must always be growth - and that if one does not grow kinder and wiser and greater, then the growth must be the other way, fostering the evil things. Or it may be that the life they all led was too shut in, too folded back upon itself - without breadth or vision. Or it may be that, like a disease of crops, it is contagious, that first one and then another is sickened.
— Agatha Christie, Death Comes as the End
Do human beings have an infinite amount of energy with which to resist death? It is kinder and more accurate to say that they fought until they had no more fight left in them.
— David L. Conroy, Out of the Nightmare: Recovery from Depression and Suicidal Pain
Both the suicidal and non-suicidal are often angry with others. One way to discharge this anger is to fantasize about violent revenge. The insults of daily life often cause fantasies of revenge to flare up and quickly subside. The people with these fantasies usually do not act on them; they are not motives or goals. They are involuntary responses to perceived insult—ways of coping with rage. The suicidal, whether or not they attempt, suffer tremendous and persistent pain and anger. That this pain should find its way into their fantasies and dreams is no surprise. This ideation is not a motive for action; it is an alternative to action. Fantasizing about suicide is an effort to delay or avoid suicide, not the activity of formulating a motive, goal, or intention. Fantasies doubtlessly succeed in preventing many attempts.
— David L. Conroy, Out of the Nightmare: Recovery from Depression and Suicidal Pain
Despair, grief, and depression are not things that people can simply stop, any more than someone can will an end to a toothache or the pain of withdrawal. Acutely suicidal people have lost all sense of having power over their pain. To tell them to magically acquire will power is like asking a crippled person to race against a champion. It does not help them do the thing in question; it just makes them feel worse.
— David L. Conroy, Out of the Nightmare: Recovery from Depression and Suicidal Pain
The suicidal lead shame-drenched lives.
— David L. Conroy, Out of the Nightmare: Recovery from Depression and Suicidal Pain
Suicidal pain includes the feeling that one has lost all capacity to effect emotional change. The agony is excruciating and looks as if it will never end. There is the feeling of having been beaten down for a very long time. There are feelings of agitation, emptiness, and incoherence. "Snap out of it and get on with your life," sounds like a demand to high jump ten feet.
— David L. Conroy, Out of the Nightmare: Recovery from Depression and Suicidal Pain
She liked it dark when her soul felt black
— Jamie McGuire, A Beautiful Funeral
For those who have dwelt in depression's dark wood, and known its inexplicable agony, their return from the abyss is not unlike the ascent of the poet, trudging upward and upward out of hell's black depths and at last emerging into what he saw as "the shining world." There, whoever has been restored to health has almost always been restored to the capacity for serenity and joy, and this may be indemnity enough for having endured the despair beyond de
— William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness
There was a faint ringing in her ears that turned into a roar. And beneath it, a sudden wave of numbness, a too-familiar lack of sight or sound or feeling. She didn't know why it happened, because she had been so dead set on hating him, but . . . it would have been nice, she supposed. It would have been nice to have one person who knew the absolute truth about her—and didn't hate her for it.It would have been really, really nice.She walked away without another word. With each step she took back to her room, that flickering light inside of her guttered.And went out.
— Sarah J. Maas, Heir of Fire
What Maeve didn't understand, what she could never understand, was just how much that little princess in Terrasen had damned them a decade ago, even worse than Maeve herself had. She had damned them all, and then left the world to burn into ash and dust.So Celaena turned away from the stars, nestling under the thread-bare blanket against the frigid cold, and closed her eyes, trying to dream of a different world.A world where she was no one at all.
— Sarah J. Maas, Heir of Fire
The magic was boiling her blood. The darkness—it would be a relief compared to the hell smoldering in her veins. The Valg prince advanced, and part of her was screaming—screaming at herself to get up, to keep fighting, to rage and roar against this horrible end. But moving her limbs, even breathing, had become a monumental effort.She was so tired.
— Sarah J. Maas, Heir of Fire
There is no feeling like the one you get after you complete a goal,no matter how menial even one such as cleaning your home. You take a step back, look around and at that moment you feel true happiness.Don't let that person inside of you laze around and escape reality no matter how tempting they can be.They are the true devil, standing by doing nothing as the world passes you when you could have made a difference, no matter how small.
— Michael Mano
One interesting thing is that a stage is reached when nothing hurts any more. Things cannot become any worse, finally, for the one who is really depressed.
— Patricia Highsmith
It was the least she could do. For Nehemia—for. . . a lot of other people. There was nothing left in her, not really. Only ash and an abyss and the unbreakable vow she'd carved into her flesh, to the friend who had seen her for what she truly was.
— Sarah J. Maas, Heir of Fire
I ask myself every day am I an Adult?What is an Adult? To me an Adult is someone who can see the world for what it really is.And instead of giving up and trying to escape reality at every moment they can, they choose to continue on and use what is around them to help them succeed.
— Michael Mano
I was the climber of a sheer cliff, dragging myself on bleeding hands towards a summit that I'd never reach and sometimes didn't want to reach. The things I cared about were the hooks I'd driven into the rock face. Depression snapped them, one by one, one by one. My only certainty was the fall.
— Alexis  Hall, Glitterland
Choose to live...then live through experiences!
— Sheila Tiller-Tooks
My sister wrote letters to the dead and hid them in her bedroom drawers.I wrote imaginary letters in my head to living.
— Renee Ruin, Wounds: Volume 1
I think the therapists around this place think that if you know yourself, then somehow you’ll be better and healthier and you’ll be able to leave this place and live out your days as a happy and loving human being. Happy. Loving. I hate those words. I’m supposed to like them. I’m supposed to want them. I don’t. Don’t like them, don’t want them. This is the way I see it: if you get to know yourself really well, you might discover that deep down inside you’re just a dirty, disgusting, and selfish piece of shit. What if my heart is all rotted out and corrupted? What about that? What am I supposed to do with that information? Just tell me that. Most of the time I get the feeling that I’m just an animal disguised as an eighteen-year-old guy. At least I’m hoping that maybe deep down inside I’m a coyote.
— Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Last Night I Sang to the Monster
I want to drag knives over my skin, just so that I can feel something other than shame, but I'm not even brave enough to do that.
— Paula Hawkins, The Girl on the Train
People often compare depression to drowning. That is not even close. Consider sitting in a dark roomscared and confused—Choking on something you know nothing about,For reasons you cannot comprehend.That is depression. When you are drowning, you can still flail your arms,call for help, and try your best to keep afloat.In depression, you do nothing.Absolutely nothing.
— Akif Kichloo
Leon was weary of loving without any result; moreover he was beginning to feel that depression caused by the repetition of the same kind of life, when no interest inspires and no hope sustains it. He was so bored with Yonville and its inhabitants, that the sight of certain persons, of certain houses, irritated him beyond endurance; and the chemist, good fellow though he was, was becoming absolutely unbearable to him. Yet the prospect of a new condition of life frightened as much as it seduced him.
— Gustave Flaubert
What we have now, shall never be again. The poets of the past sit in amazement of the wanna-be's of an era long gone.
— T. Grassan, Ramblings of the Clinically Depressed: Images of Darkness Vol. II
Professing not to care is a primordial defense mechanism. Whenever a person finds oneself mired in failure and despondency, rebelling is a viable option to preserve false personal pride.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
You need to set yourself up for success, too. You need to invest in yourself. You need to stop being a butthead and sabotaging yourself.
— Robert Duff, Hardcore Self Help: F**k Anxiety
The scabs feel like I have a message on my arm. Something that needs to be read, urgently, by someone. It was only years later that I realized the person I had written that message to- the person who wasn't listening- was me. I was the one who should have been staring at that arm, and working out what the red hieroglyphics meant. Had I translated them, I would have realized those red lines read: 'Never feel this bad again. Never come back to this place, where only a knife will do. Live a gentle and kind life. Don't do things that make you want to hurt yourself. Whatever you do, every day, remember this- then steer away from here.
— Caitlin Moran, How to Build a Girl
Bells ringing with no soundLaughter with no voiceHappiness lost without being foundMaking love with no noise
— T. Grassan, Images of Darkness: A Book Of Thought Provoking Poetry
No one really wants you, they only want the idea of you.
— J.V. Constable
After you were born, someone turned on a tap. At first it was only a drip, a black drip, and I felt it as sadness. I had felt sad before . . . who hasn't ? I knew what it was like. But I didn't know that it would come like that, for no reason. I lived with it for weeks.
— Jerry Pinto, Em and The Big Hoom
Was there a drain?''No. There was no drain. There isn't one even now'.
— Jerry Pinto, Em and The Big Hoom
Play a Death March for me
— T. Grassan, Autumn Night Sanctuary
It is like oil. Like molasses, slow at first.Then one morning I woke up and it was flowing free and fast. I thought I would drown in it. I thought it would drown little you and Susan. I got up, got dressed and went out onto the road and tried to jump in front of a bus. I thought it would be a final thing, quick like a bang. Only , it wasn't.
— Jerry Pinto, Em and The Big Hoom
Depression is a prison. For some it is easy and short, for others it is difficult and long. For some the days go by easier than most and for others the days are eternity. But it is your choice to try and escape.
— C. Shultz
Who knew it was in my power to make anyone so happy? Or that I could ever be so happy myself? My moods were a slingshot; after being locked-down and anesthetized for years my heart was zinging and slamming itself around like a bee under a glass, everything bright, sharp, confusing, wrong - but it was a clean pain as opposed to the dull misery that had plagued me for years under the drugs like a rotten tooth, the sick dirty ache of something spoiled. The clarity was exhilarating; it was as if I'd removed a pair of smudged-up glasses that fuzzed everything I saw. All summer long I had been practically delirious: tingling, daffy, energized, running on gin and shrimp cocktail and the invigorating whock of tennis balls. And all I could think was Kitsey, Kitsey, Kitsey!
— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
Traveling down a road of self-destructionWith no room for any reconstruction
— Jessica-Lynn Barbour
I remember all the things we said we'd doAnd how not a single thing we said was true
— Jessica-Lynn Barbour
It dawns on me that maybe I'm just terrifically lazy; that I might be appropriating other people’s invisible sicknesses and disorders and scribbling them on the clipboard at the end of my bed to fool the nurses; so I can indulge in rest cures all day, every day. That I’m even fooling myself.
— Jalina Mhyana
Life crumples me like paper,Tight, smashed, discarded. But crumpled paper soon unfolds, Opening slowly, sharing what was once hidden inside,Allowing my story to be revealed.
— Robert Clifton Storey Jr
Everyone has scars, they just aren’t as visible as yours.
— Anne Eliot, Unmaking Hunter Kennedy
It's okay to feel like shit. It's okay to feel worthless. It's okay to feel insignificant. It's okay to miss someone you can't have. It's okay to have a tightness in your chest or a burning sensation on your arms or legs and it's okay to not want to eat or sleep or just overall hurt yourself or worse. It's okay to feel like your world is crashing down and it's okay to feel like you can't do this. But the point is that you try. And no matter who you are, or what age you are. Whether you're my ex from third grade (if I had one) or a random three year old who's just had a bad day. If you're 56 and your wife just divorced you and you just wanna think or get advice or anything. I'll be here. It's okay to think you're a whore, but you aren't. It's okay to feel really dumb. But I'll do my best to convince you otherwise. Cuz I can't do much, I can't. I can't completely understand what you're feeling. And I'm sorry about that. But I can sure as hell try. And I'll try my very best.
— Shiv Malhotra
People with mental illnesses aren't wrapped up in themselves because they are intrinsically any more selfish than other people. Of course not. They are just feeling things that can't be ignored. Things that point the arrows inward.
— Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive
But as the years passed, he missed her more, not less, and his need for her became a cut that would not scar over, would not stop leaking.
— Dennis Lehane, Shutter Island
I didn't totally fit in. I kind of disintegrated around people and became what they wanted me to be. But paradoxically, I felt an intensity inside me all the time. I didn't know what it was, but it kept building, like water behind a dam. Later, when I was properly depressed and anxious, I saw the illness as an accumulation of all that thwarted intensity. A kind of breaking through. As though, if you find it hard enough to let your self be free, your self breaks in, flooding your mind in an attempt to drown all those failed half-versions of you.
— Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive
Do you believe in other universes? Do you think there's another dimension where we're happy?
— Jasmine Warga, My Heart and Other Black Holes
Yes, I'm broken. And yes, he's broken. But the more we talk about it, the more we share our sadness, the more I start to believe that there could be a chance to fix us, a chance that we could save each other.
— Jasmine Warga, My Heart and Other Black Holes
It fascinated me how depression and anxiety overlap with post-traumatic stress disorder. Had we been through some trauma we didn't know about? Was the noise and speed of modern life the trauma for our caveman brains? Was I that soft? Or was life a kind of war most people didn't see?
— Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive
It's not wrong to feel sorry for yourself. Just like it's not wrong to stand 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
I wonder what it will feel like when all the lights go off and everything is quiet forever. I don't know if it will be painful, if in those last moments I'll be scared, but all I can hope is that it will be over fast. That it will be peaceful. That it will be permanent.
— Jasmine Warga, My Heart and Other Black Holes
She felt tears dripping down her cheeks, and she wondered if anyone would ever miss her if she simply sat here, drinking coffee for days and days, years and years.
— Hila Colman, Julie Builds Her Castle
I can feel everything. And I want to keep feeling everything. Even the painful, awful, terrible things. Because feeling things is what lets us know that we're alive.
— Jasmine Warga, My Heart and Other Black Holes
this is only the beginning. Many die, many kill their bodies and souls, but they cannot kill the justice of God, even they cannot kill the eternal spirit. From their very degradation that spirit will rise up to demand of the world compassion and justice
— Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness
Don"t gaze too hard at your belly button Or you will unexpectedly hit rock bottom!
— Ana Claudia Antunes, A-Z of Happiness: Tips for Living and Breaking Through the Chain that Separates You from Getting That Dream Job
Having to admit that you are depressed makes one feel less than. Broken. Yes, that's what it is. Broken.
— Gillian Marchenko, Still Life: A Memoir of Living Fully with Depression
I want to figure out how people can go on with their lives when mine has changed so much. I want to relearn how to breathe without carrying this big, empty cave inside me.
— Edwidge Danticat
Do you have any idea why you might be feeling better?”“No, not really,” I said curtly. Better wasn’t even the word for how I felt. There wasn’t a word for it. It was more that things too small to mention—laughter in the hall at school, a live gecko scurrying in a tank in the science lab—made me feel happy one moment and the next like crying. Sometimes, in the evenings, a damp, gritty wind blew in the windows from Park Avenue, just as the rush hour traffic was thinning and the city was emptying for the night; it was rainy, trees leafing out, spring deepening into summer; and the forlorn cry of horns on the street, the dank smell of the wet pavement had an electricity about it, a sense of crowds and static, lonely secretaries and fat guys with bags of carry-out, everywhere the ungainly sadness of creatures pushing and struggling to live. For weeks, I’d been frozen, sealed-off; now, in the shower, I would turn up the water as hard as it would go and howl, silently. Everything was raw and painful and confusing and wrong and yet it was as if I’d been dragged from freezing water through a break in the ice, into sun and blazing cold.
— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
You are not walking slow enough, when taking a walk, if you do not come across as bored or depressed (to the average sane person).
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
I was nothing more to him than a prison sentence, trapping him inside my walls and persecuting him for a crime he was tricked into committing.
— Nikki Kelly, Gabriel
I may not be the best mom. I may not even get back to being the average mother I once claimed to be. But I'm here. I'm getting back up. I'm not leaving. And I'm the mom God ordained for these fours souls, and therefore I am their best mom.
— Gillian Marchenko, Still Life: A Memoir of Living Fully with Depression
I fear depression - intensely. It is by far the most painful ailment I have ever faced. It is the thing that slammed into me, ran me over repeatedly, and then kicked me in the head when I was down. I struggled for change, for understanding, to figure out what was "wrong" with me - no one knew. Or at least, they didn't guess correctly.
— Jeannie Davide-Rivera, Twirling Naked in the Streets and No One Noticed: Growing Up With Undiagnosed Autism
I’m a writer/director, my movie is a hit at Sundance, I have a wonderful loving boyfriend, and wow, I have financial stability. Why can’t I get out of bed still? It made it even worse, because there’s nothing else I want. This is what I’m born to do. I’m living my purpose, I’m paying my rent, what’s missing?
— Justin Simien
Like depression, loneliness arises from unhappiness creating thoughts feeding into the insula, deepening the negative spiral of thoughts and feelings.
— David Michie, Mindfulness Is Better Than Chocolate
Teddy wondered, and not for the first time, not by a long shot, if this was the day that missing her would finally be too much for him.
— Dennis Lehane, Shutter Island
Light existed all along. Of course it did. Who says it didn't because I couldn't see it?
— Gillian Marchenko, Still Life: A Memoir of Living Fully with Depression
When I have flash backs from PTSD I wish my mind came with a delete key.
— Stanley Victor Paskavich
Call it dysphoric mania, agitated depression, or a mixed state: nobody will understand anyway. Mania and depression at once mean the will to die and the motivation to make it happen. This is why mixed states are the most dangerous periods of mood disorders. Tearfulness and racing thoughts happen. So do agitation and guilt, fatigue and morbidity and dread. Walking late at night, trying to get murdered, happens. Trying to explain a bipolar mixed state is like trying to explain the Holy Trinity, three persons in one God: you just have to take it on faith when I tell you that the poles bend, cross, never snapping.
— Elissa Washuta, My Body Is a Book of Rules
I wanted to be dead. No. That's not quite right. I didn't want to be dead, I just didn't want to be alive.
— Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive
I don't knowwhat I'm feeling. Existing like I'm on auto pilot.I've put my Armour on now. Limiting everything gettingin but also not letting anything out.
— Tina J. Richardson, I didnt mean it that way
That's it: watch your moods. Don't let people see you fluctuate. Don't let yourself run your mouth. Never ever cry, even alone, because your cat or your kettle might tell. Always smile, but don't laugh loudly. Mania is an extrovert, but if you need to vent, tell your mattress or maybe your therapist, but put nothing in writing and never tell a friend or coworker how you're really feeling. Downplay any problem or joy. Pay attention to any signs that your life is shitty or excellent, because either is an illusion. Be careful around men, especially ones with big arms or opinions. Stop talking.
— Elissa Washuta, My Body Is a Book of Rules
I want to give you all of me. But will you want all of me when you realize I’m in pieces?
— Jeannine Allison, Unveiling The Sky
You need hope to form a thought. It takes-I don't know-optimism to speak, to engage in conversation. Because really, what's the point of all this communicating? What difference does it really make what we say to each other? Or what we do, for that matter?
— Noah Hawley, Before the Fall
I can't speak anymore, I open my mouth but nothing comes out. So many things to say. I wonder if you really want to hear it anyway?Instead, I leave my heavy mind exploding with unfinished thoughts.
— Tina J. Richardson, I didnt mean it that way
Everyday feels the same and yet I crave sameness.Part of me wants to run away and be free.I feel trapped in my life I've created to protect myself.
— Tina J. Richardson, I didnt mean it that way
She had not been herself for weeks, yet no one noticed. She knew this feeling, it creeps up like sliding slowly into the darkness. Some days she clung on, other days she let herself slip further.
— Tina J. Richardson, I didnt mean it that way
Are you depressed?What? I don't know. Probably. Isn't everyone?
— Madeleine Roux, The Asylum Novellas: The Scarlets / The Bone Artists / The Warden
Sometimes bliss can only be found in the serenity of darkness.
— Saim .A. Cheeda
The days passed, the weeks. But everything seemed to have fused, gone into a conglomerated mass. He could not tell one day from another, hardly one place from another. Nothing was distinct or distinguishable. Often he lost himself for an hour at a time, could not remember what he had done.
— D.H. Lawrence
She sensed that they expected her to fall apart, but she didn't know how to fall apart. She knew it was strange. She looked the same despite this massive piece of herself that had gone missing. She acted the same. She went to work, greeted people, went home. Everything normal on the outside, except the occassional muffled crying on the job.
— Jill Leovy, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America
That’s the thing about depression. When I feel it deeply, I don’t want to let it go. It becomes a comfort. I want to cloak myself under its heavy weight and breathe it into my lungs. I want to nurture it, grow it, cultivate it. It’s mine. I want to check out with it, drift asleep wrapped in its arms and not wake up for a long, long time.
— Stephanie Perkins, Lola and the Boy Next Door
The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come -- not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow.
— William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness
Even a life raft is only supposed to get you from the sinking ship back to land, you were never intended to live in the life raft, to drift years on end, in sight of land but never close enough.
— Nick Flynn, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
For me, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is like a good friend. A necessary girlfriend, but with chronic PMS. A temperamental – and even volatile – friend who does not play well with others and whom I dearly love. It’s a strange relationship.
— Kelly Wilson, Caskets from Costco
The irony is that there is nothing purer than sorrow.
— Saim .A. Cheeda
It's scary, and downing, that I make my best music when I'm going through my depression... At that moment, all i can see is black, darkness and shadows, but in the bigger picture.. it's a blessing. When I look through all my work, my art, I wouldn't change or take away my depression and anxiety for ANYTHING.. because when i get those days of rainbows, and colors.. i know deep down, i'm only honest when i'm at the deepest of the oceans.. so it's like listening to a different side of my mind, that i never realize exists, until i get that little peek through the blinds, and finally see the sunlight.. THEN on those simple moments, even if they only last a few minutes, i know deep down... maybe i do have a talent. Maybe I have got something, a "gift", that some people call... So really, if it wasn't for my depression, i would never, truly believe I have anything worth giving. So I will NOT sit back and wish i wasn't clinically depressed, I will learn to embrace it, live with it, and talk my brain into believing, and fully knowing, I HAVE A GIFT. I AM WORTHY. I DO HAVE SOMETHING TO GIVE THE WORLD. I will not let my depression or anxiety control me. They can live here(in my mind), but they best know, I AM STILL, AND WILL ALWAYS BE IN CONTROL. .. BUT This is my home, and you're just living under it.
— scott mcgoldrick
Are you depressed?""What? I don't know. Probably. Isn't everyone?
— Madeleine Roux, The Asylum Novellas: The Scarlets / The Bone Artists / The Warden
We will remember what it was like to lose you, our pain the black background of our electric blue joy. We will remember that there are few answers to our questions; the questions that seem to float into an endless expanse of sky.
— Kelly Wilson, Caskets from Costco
Self-doubt and Depression are the real killers. The other are just pawns.
— Deyth Banger
I have become conscious of my own “cry face.” My face puckers like the business end of a hot dog except for my mouth, which stretches in a grimace so wide as to accommodate said hotdog horizontally within it. It’s not pretty.
— Kelly Wilson, Caskets from Costco
When you're having a depressive surge painful memories can start to emerge.
— Stanley Victor Paskavich
I wake up scared and I'm scared all day. I'm scared of being scared. Scared of "losing it". Scared of not being able to function. Scared of being hospitalized. Scared that I am not okay. Scared of what life is and if I am wasting mine. Scared that I have no home - that even the place I call home has no bottom to it and I will just keep falling under and under and under.
— Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays
We are all echoes of each other. We are all humans and feel both despair and happiness. Our similarities, as a species, are staggering. And our mental fragility is directly tied up with our humanity. We have nothing to be ashamed of in being human, any more than a tree should be ashamed of having branches. Let’s accept our own nature. Let’s be kind to ourselves and to each other. Let’s never add to the pain by blaming ourselves. We are all so weird that, really, none of us are. There are seven billion versions of strange on this freak wonder of a planet. We are all part of that. All freaks. All wonderful.
— Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive
There's two of me. The person I carry around like a dead carcass inside of me and the one I show to others.
— Francisco X. Stork, The Memory of Light
Understand, for instance, that having a sad thought, even having a continual succession of sad thoughts, is not the same as being a sad person. You can walk through a storm and feel the wind but you know you are not the wind.That is how we must be with our minds. We must allow ourselves to feel their gales and downpours, but all the time knowing this is just necessary weather.When I sink deep, now, and I still do from time to time, I try and understand that there is another, bigger and stronger part of me that is not sinking. It stands unwavering.
— Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive
Live with grace and dignity. It's a middle finger to the darkness
— Jamie Tworkowski, If You Feel Too Much: Thoughts on Things Found and Lost and Hoped For
Even more staggeringly, depression is a disease so bad that people are killing themselves because of it in a way they do not kill themselves with any other illness. Yet people still don’t really think depression really is that bad. If they did, they wouldn't say the things they say.
— Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive
It’s a weird thing, depression. Even now, writing this with a good distance of fourteen years from my lowest point, I haven’t fully escaped. You get over it, but at the same time you never get over it. It comes back in flashes, when you are tired or anxious or have been eating the wrong stuff, and catches you off guard. I woke up with it a few days ago, in fact. I felt its dark wisps around my head, that ominous life-is-fear feeling. But then, after a morning with the best five- and six-year-olds in the world, it subsided. it is now an aside. Something to put brackets around. Life lesson: the way out is never through yourself.
— Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive
We have nothing against playing video games; they have many good features and benefits. Our concern is that when they are played to excess, especially in social isolation, they can hinder a young man's ability and interest in developing his face-to-face social skills. Multiple problems, including obesity, violence, anxiety, lower school performance, social phobia and shyness, greater impulsivity and depression, have all been associated with excessive gaming. The variety and intensity of video game action makes other parts of life, like school, seem comparatively boring, and that creates a problem with their academic performance, which in turn might require medication to deal with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which then leads to other problems down the road in a disastrous negative cycle...
— Philip G. Zimbardo, Man, Interrupted: Why Young Men Are Struggling & What We Can Do about It
I realized at that moment that depression and I will always be linked, tugging back and forth, like the drunken uncle who still gets invited to the family reunion even though everyone knows he’s going to make a messy scene.
— Kelly Wilson, Caskets from Costco
Love is like a knife. It can either hurt you or it's too dangerous to hold on too.
— PureDragonWolf
If you have to wait for a long time, you have to seize hold of the waiting or it will become destructive. If you let things slide, your consciousness will waver, awakening fear and restlessness, then depression strikes, and you're pulled down.
— Peter Høeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow
The cold is lonely person's way of feeling alone and death
— PureDragonWolf
Emptiness is like air. It floats around unseen but you know it's there.
— PureDragonWolf
endure all always
— emily peltzer
I clamped down on the sick, hurt feeling inside that threatened to make me burst into tears. My eyes dried instantly. I was good at hiding tears. I should be; I'd had three years to get good at it.
— P.C. Cast, Marked
Right now, I've got the weight of several worlds on my shoulders. My best friend is living in a cancer ward, and there's nothing I can do for him. The Serpents have hired the Jester to spark race riots with faked news stories, and I don't know how to smoke him out. My enemies are hiding all around, watching everything I do, and I can't find them. For the first time in months I find myself in the familiar, paralyzing grip of overwhelming depression.
— Mark Waid, Daredevil, Volume 7