c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I know by now, only too well, that you can never get away from yourself because you never go away.
— Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
The real you is not sad, angry, depressed, ashamed, hurt, bitter or lost. These things are not real. They feel real but they're not. As spiritual beings living a brief human existence, this is not who we are. We are beautiful, radiant, joyful and loving.
— Sue Fitzmaurice
Larry: She doesn't want to be happy.Dan: Everybody wants to be happy.Larry: Depressives don't. They want to be unhappy to confirm they're depressed. If they were happy they couldn't be depressed anymore. They'd have to go out into the world and live. Which can be depressing.
— Patrick Marber
Being grateful is the bridge between the world of nightmares and the world where we are free to say no. It's the bridge between the world of delusions and the world of creativity.It's the power that brings death back to life, the power that turns poverty to wealth and anger to compassion.
— James Altucher, The Power of No: Because One Little Word Can Bring Health, Abundance, and Happiness
Preaching a man a sermon with a broken head and telling him to be right with God is equal to telling a man with a broken leg to get up and run a race.
— Richard Baxter
I had never heard her sound so calm, so resigned to her fate. She said she was neither happy nor unhappy, and that was why she couldn't go on.
— Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides to Die
Depression is rage spread thin.
— George Santayana
How can you hide from what never goes away?
— Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
When she enters the room she immediately shuts the window and draws the shade with a quick, hard pull. Then she throws herself down on the bed, and the sobbing starts all over again. It's as if she can't sob when she's not in a lying position - either that or she has to start sobbing the moment she lies down.
— Stig Dagerman, Sleet: Selected Stories
Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will break my soul.
— Kathryn Lopez
COPE
— Create Options Pending Emergence
I was so happy when I found out the wounds you’d inflicted weren’t serious, that you had stopped.” “Yes, I stopped. Barry, all of you, see what I did as this suicide attempt. But I didn’t want to die. I only wanted my mom to hear me. To come find me. To see that I was sad. To help me, I guess. I just didn’t have it in me to tell her what I needed. And fine, I get now that she couldn’t read my mind.” He wiped his eyes again. “But I didn’t get it then. I’m so mad at myself. What was wrong with me that I couldn’t just tell her? That I didn’t have the capacity to ask her for anything.
— Anne Eliot, Unmaking Hunter Kennedy
Slowly, inch by inch, I felt myself recovering. After a few weeks, the darkness began to recede; my appetite for life returned. Haven was wonderful; she understood and nursed me through these weeks until I felt strong enough to go out in public, to get on my bike again.
— Tyler Hamilton, The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France: Doping, Cover-ups, and Winning at All Costs
Suicide and mental health problems have no boundaries.
— Santosh Kalwar
Reflecting back on the journey to the“Great Outdoors”places me in a different tonal mood, filledup with hope and passion, not resentful,suppressed relics of anger unresolvedDid you listen to the winds?What did you hear?Did you listen to the trees?What knowledge did they bring you?Did you listen to the birds?What songs did they sing to you?Did you listen to the Universe(s)?What messages did they bring you?Did you listen to the ancestors?What hope did they send you?Did you really listen?Close your eyes and open up your fullheart and listen againNot for meDo it 4 UrSelfDo it 4 tha FutureLook beyond UrSelfOpen up UrSelfLove ThySelfQuiet the chatter of your mind, closethe racing tracks and be still andquiet so that U can hear whatthey’re trying to say to U.Be appreciative for what U have beenbestowed and blessed to be stewards of, pleasedo not take this to mean: Destroy, dominate,and control.Let it mean be cognizant of the complexity, respect truebiodiversity, respect and honor all Life, allow for balance, andrecognize evolutionary adaptability in all of Creation.The winds are blowing good tidings and blessingsin this here direction as this one poem comesto a close while striving for the rootedness of anancient Sequoia so high up in the sky and deeply rootedin our common Mother. Listen to my woes of lonelinessand see that will Life all around, NO one is truly lonely or alone.
— Irucka Ajani Embry, Balancing the Rift: Reconnectualizing the Pasenture
Fear tugs at me and I'm falling.I grab at the mattress, dig in with my fingers, flop onto my stomach, hold tight. Press my face into the pillow so hard it hurts. The quilt twists like it wants to smother me.I can't scream out loud, but there has to be some release. I kick my feet against the mattress in a muffled frenzy, legs flying fast and hard enough to carry me miles away. And when it's done, nothing's changed. I'm still stuck right here.
— Rachel M. Wilson
Pain, sorrow, anger, these are all powerful emotions. Allowed to rule and left unchecked, they would destroy you. However, through training and willpower you can choose to harness those feelings and use them for something great.
— Jonathan Yanez, Alan Price and the Colossus of Rhodes
I can't stand THE DEPRESSED. It's like a job. It's the only thing they work hard at. Oh good my depression is very well today. Oh good today I have another mysterious symptom and I will have another one tomorrow. The DEPRESSED are full of hate and bile and when they are not having panic attacks they are writing poems. What do they want their poems to DO? Their depression in the most VITAL thing about them. Their poems are threats. ALWAYS threats. There is no sensation keener or more active than their pain. They give nothing back except their depression. It's just another utility. Like electricity and water and gas and democracy. They could not survive without it.
— Deborah Levy, Swimming Home
She(my love) said to me, what's the matter with you?.......I replied.....'NOTHING
— Anuj Kr. Thakur
The author says that when an angry impulse is not immediately expressed, it turns to melancholy.
— Patrick O'Brian, Master and Commander
We got through it. Haven made excuses for me to friends, and made an appointment with a terrific doctor, who put me on Effexor, 150 milligrams a day, enough to get my brain straightened out.
— Tyler Hamilton, The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France: Doping, Cover-ups, and Winning at All Costs
The further you descend into a pit, the darker things appear. You can't keep digging to find the light.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Making Wishes
It was one of those dreams from which she woke up depressed about her reality, filled with a longing that pulled at her insides, wishing the dream could have lasted forever, or at least much longer than it had.
— Michael Monroe, Afterlife
You are not an alcoholic or an addict. You are not incurably diseased. You have merely become dependent on substances or addictive behavior to cope with underlying conditions that you are now going to heal, at which time your dependency will cease completely and forever.
— Chris Prentiss, The Alcoholism and Addiction Cure
What to do with life? Get out of bed, Derek. That’s what you do. You get out of bed, and you get yourself a cup of fucking coffee. That’s all you can do.
— Allie Burke, Paper Souls
Depression affects almost 80% of migraine sufferers at one time or another. People with migraine, especially chronic migraine, also are more likely to experience intense anxiety and to have suicidal tendencies. If we want to live happy and joyful lives with migraine, it is vital that we acknowledge and deal with the emotional realities of the disease.
— Sarah Hackley, Finding Happiness with Migraines: a Do It Yourself Guide, a min-e-bookTM
Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self--to the mediating intellect--as to verge close to being beyond description. It thus remains nearly incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it in its extreme mode, although the gloom, "the blues" which people go through occasionally and associate with the general hassle of everyday existence are of such prevalence that they do give many individuals a hint of the illness in its catastrophic form.
— William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness
We're in the business of melancholiaand we are married to our work.
— Casey Renee Kiser, Darkness Plays Favorites
That day wasn't the first time I had attempted suicide. Simply disappearing into the distant nothingness where there was no pain and no more feelings - back then I thought it an act of empowerment. Otherwise I had very little power to make any decisions about my life, my body, my actions. Taking my own life seemed my last trump card.
— Natascha Kampusch, 3,096 Days
There are moments when we all step away from the light...
— Gume Laurel III, Kingdom of Abel - Bathed in Shadow
It's the causes, not the dependent person, that must be corrected. That's why I see the United States' War on Drugs as being fought in an unrealistic manner. This war is focused on fighting drug dealers and the use of drugs here and abroad, when the effort should be primarily aimed at treating and curing that causes that compel people to reach for drugs.
— Chris Prentiss, The Alcoholism and Addiction Cure
For many people, depression is an abrupt change in an otherwise full and happy life. It emerges suddenly and devastates by its very strangeness and pathology.
— Nell Casey, Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression
The saddest thing of all was that their party represented a deviation from the conditions of the time. It was impossible to imagine that in the houses across the lane people were eating and drinking in the same way at such an hour. Beyond the window lay mute, dark, hungry Moscow. Her food stores were empty, and people had even forgotten to think of such things as game and vodka.And thus it turned out that the only true life is one that resembles the life around us and drowns in it without leaving a trace, that isolated happiness is not happiness, so that duck and alcohol, when they seem to be the only ones in town, are not alcohol and a duck at all.
— Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
Basically, everything that happens in our life is our fault and ours alone. A lot of people go through the same difficulties we went through, and they react completely differently. We looked for the easiest way out: a separate reality
— Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides to Die
Everyone comes with baggage, make sure you get one that comes with a rack
— Josh Stern, And That's Why I'm Single: What Good Is Having A Lucky Horseshoe Up Your Butt When The Horse Is Still Attached?
The seething rage that accompanies the truly despondent, effaces the delusional that mock from the safety of their shared illusion.
— Justin K. McFarlane Beau
My life felt so cluttered and obstructed that I could hardly breathe. I inhabited a closed, concentrated world, airless and without exits.
— Nell Casey, Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression
He looked like some plant bleached by darkness.
— Honoré de Balzac, The Wild Ass's Skin
[T]hough the darkness sometimes lifted just enough so I could construe my surroundings, familiar shapes solidifying like bedroom furniture at dawn, my relief was never more than temporary because somehow the full morning never came, things always went black before I could orient myself and there I was again with ink poured in my eyes, guttering around in the dark.
— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
Depression can be due to a low endocrine function, nutritional deficiencies, blood sugar problems, food allergies, or systemic yeast infection. Depression can also result from medical illnesses such as stroke, heart attack, cancer, Parkinson's disease, and hormonal disorder. It can also be caused by a serious loss, a difficult relationship, a financial problem, or any stressful, unwelcome life change.
— Chris Prentiss, The Alcoholism and Addiction Cure
It's too short,' she said, 'ever so much too short.' Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black, half-way down, in the darkness, in the shaft which ran from the sunlight to the depths, perhaps a tear formed; a tear fell; the waters swayed this way and that, received it, and were at rest. Never did anybody look so sad.
— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Depression lives and grows in the swamp of need.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
One of the first actions we take at Passages is to ruthlessly scrutinize, always under a doctor's supervision and care, the specific necessity of any mind- altering or mood-altering medications that our clients are taking. As soon as any non essential drugs are out of their systems, the feelings they were trying to suppress usually emerge. When that happens, we can see what symptoms the client was masking with drugs or alcohol.
— Chris Prentiss, The Alcoholism and Addiction Cure
There is a valid reason why they say live everyday as if it were your last, the truth is...., there is no tomorrow - just today
— Uneñ Ameji
The treatment must fit the malady and the malady is not alcoholism or addiction, or addictive drugs and alcohol. Once the correct cause is diagnosed, healing will take place and hoped-for cure will come about.
— Chris Prentiss, The Alcoholism and Addiction Cure
Whether the underlying cause of your dependency is a chemical imbalance, unresolved events from the past, beliefs you hold that are inconsistent with what is true, an inability to cope with current conditions, or a combination of these four causes, know this: not only are all the causes of dependency within you, but all the solutions are within you as well.
— Chris Prentiss, The Alcoholism and Addiction Cure
Unless you are rich and can convalesce in a sanatorium estate (where visitors came down a tiered, oceanside lawn to find you at your easel) you have to keep going when you're depressed. That means phone calls, appointments, errands, holidays, family, friends, and colleagues.
— Virginia Heffernan
The night was blustery and raw, with a chill wet wind blowing down the avenues, and when Rose and I met Françoise and her son and a friend at La Lorraine, a glittering brassiere not far from L'Étoile, rain was descending from the heavens in torrents. Someone in the group, sensing my state of mind, apologized for the evil night, but I recall thinking that even if this were one of those warmly scented and passionate evenings for which Paris is celebrated I would respond like the zombie I had become. The weather of depression is unmodulated, its light a brownout.
— William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness
Unless you are rich and can convalesce in a sanatorium estate (where visitors came down a tiered, oceanside lawn to found you at your easel) you have to keep going when you're depressed. That means phone calls, appointments errands, holidays, family, friends, and colleagues.
— Virginia Heffernan
Unless you are rich, and can con vales center in a sanatorium estate (where visitors came down a tiered, oceanside lawn to found you ato your easel) you have to keep going when you're depressed. That means phone calls, appointments errands, holidays, family, friends, and colleagues.
— Virginia Heffernan
The punishment approach and bad consequences approach to treatment is the kind of thinking that is prevalent in every residential substance abuse treatment center in the United States of which I'm aware.
— Chris Prentiss, The Alcoholism and Addiction Cure
They say grief occurs in five stages. First there's denial followed by anger. Then comes bargaining, depression and acceptance. But grief is a merciless master. Just when you think you're free you realize you never stood a chance.
— Emily Thorne
The people you think are the happiest are usually the saddest; that's because they see more and feel deeper than others do. They are the sensitive and they see beyond the veil of what's tangible and what's not. They wear no masks and can see through the masks of others. The sensitive to life are few in number, which is why they feel so alone...because they are all alone.
— Donna Lynn Hope
Robin Williams is one more example, that genius people are genius for a reason, and that reason is feeling without reasoning. Depression is for sensitive people. Sensitive people sense the world as it is, and they can't cope with it. Sensitive people need a better, more tender world to live in. Matter of fact, we all do.
— Aleksandra Ninkovic
You know those afternoons," he asks, drawing a shaking breath, "where you’re just going along, doing fine, and then afternoon comes and it feels like you’ve just got the wind knocked out of you and everything is wrong?" He sighs and slowly pushes himself so he’s sitting upright. His shoulders are slumped. "That’s all," he says. "It’s just one of those afternoons."We are silent for a minute. Then he lies back down on the couch.I should say I love him. I should say it will be all right. But it won’t.I walk down the hall to my bedroom. I lie down on my side and stare at the wall, the blue-flowered wallpaper next to my nose. Despite my best efforts, I start to cry.I know those afternoons.
— Marya Hornbacher, Madness: A Bipolar Life
People are screwed up in this world. I'd rather be with someone screwed and open about it than somebody perfect and...you know... ready to explode.
— Ned Vizzini It's kind of a Funny Story
Discouragement, fear, and depression—three villains who lurk in the dark.They slip inside souls with a blindfold and goals to shatter your dreams and extinguish your spark.Their tactics are highly effective.They crush a great many each day.And under their spell it is easy to dwellOn fiascoes and failures that end in dismay.The heart and the mind are left heavy.The last speck of will is erased.And nothing stays on when these villains are gonebut a mouthful of bile with the bitterest taste.Alas! You must conquer the scoundrels!Elude, dodge, and keep them at bay!To feel fear slink in, boring under your skin,is a sign that his brothers are well on their way.So reach for your weapons against them!Take hope and hard work in each hand!Strap faith on your hips and a prayer on your lipsand show those debasers how firmly you stand!Discouragement, fear and depression—the truth should be known of these cads.They’re empty and weak; it is your strength they seek.Deny them and life is your wish in the bag.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Making Wishes
It is in my head! That's why it's called Mental Illness.
— Roni Askey-Doran, I'm Bipolar And I Know It
He’s afraid," Graber said."Yes, naturally. But he’s a good dog.""And a man-eater.""We’re all that.""Why?""We are. And we think, just like that dog, that we are still good. And just like him we are looking for a bit of warmth and light and friendship.
— Erich Maria Remarque, A Time to Love and a Time to Die
Mental illness is not in the business of making sense of itself.
— Roni Askey-Doran, I'm Bipolar And I Know It
One thing is undeniably clear. We have all had bad experiences, we have all had tragedies in our lives which help to shape who we are.
— J. Loren Norris
Was James bipolar?”The tears returned, and I watched her battle them. “We don’t use that word in our family.”I stared at her for a moment. “Why not?”“Mum and Dad don’t believe in it.” She kept walking. “James was always … troubled. But there was nothing wrong with him, nothing more than anyone else anyway, everyone feels a bit down sometimes.”“Olivia! It was more than feeling down.”She laughed, bitterly. “I know, Dee, fuck, do I know that. I’m just telling you how it goes. The party line—what we told people when they asked.
— Hazel Butler, Chasing Azrael
I almost said, you’re not broken, you’re just going through something. But I couldn’t. She knew. There was something terribly wrong with her, all the way inside. She was like a big diamond with a dead spot in the middle. I was supposed to breathe life into that dead spot, but it hadn’t worked.
— Janet Fitch, White Oleander
And she would like to cry, but she is unable to; and she would like to disappear but she won't; and she would like to stop feeling this despair and so she thinks that she will go to the movies see friends shop eat barter fuck the neighbor's husband: she is like a sow in her mud (of loneliness) and covers herself in it and what of it--it is the disease of her country, and the late night television shows the magazines and movies in cheap collusion with it.
— Micheline Aharonian Marcom, The Mirror in the Well
I swore as the knife I’d been using to dice our dinner bit into my finger. I dropped it on the floor, blood spattering the counter and cupboard doors a furious red. I watched, mesmerised, as the blood welled up and began to seep down my hand; I tried to catalogue the amount of pain I was in. Surprisingly little, I concluded, pushing at the edges of the wound to see how deep it went. Deep enough. I was starting to feel it now, but it didn’t hurt so much. I’d endured far worse.If it came to it, I could do it. There was comfort in that knowledge.
— Hazel Butler, Chasing Azrael
James had taken his own life, but the need to do so was not something easily explained. He had the life he wanted: money, a home, a job, a wife, a good friend. I’d known people who died at their own hand because life became unbearable, or because something happened, something terrible. That wasn’t so for James—there was something inside him, something a part of him, something over which he had no control, but which had absolute control over him.
— Hazel Butler, Chasing Azrael
However vivid they might be, past images and future delights did not protect Sylvia from the present, which "rules despotic over pale shadows of past and future". That was Sylvia's genius and her Panic Bird- her total lack of nostalgia. She had no armor. This left her especially vulnerable in New York, where she was removed from the context of her life, severed from that reassuring arc.
— Elizabeth Winder, Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953
Death begins before birth. I have always found this an odd notion, but were it not for the death of certain cells during our initial development, humans would be born with webbed toes. Death moulds our physical being from the very start of our existence. It sculpts us, determines how we begin, and where we end. The events in life that define us, that break us and remake us, all stem from death—the death of a place, a time, a relationship, of those we hold most dear, and finally ourselves. Death is the one inescapable aspect of life, the only immutable force, the single thing in this world that cannot and should not be changed.But death is never the end.It is the beginning.
— Hazel Butler, Chasing Azrael
It was a fact that had become the focus of my entire life, a whisper in my heartbeat, a permanent, insidious presence that punctuated my every breath. I couldn’t escape it, that persistent voice, lingering in the blood pulsing through my veins. It said only one thing, over and over, a repetition of inescapable anguish, the knowledge of a thing that could never be undone.James is dead. James is dead. James is dead. James is dead.
— Hazel Butler, Chasing Azrael
Dishonoring what we feel is an epidemic that has us self-medicating as a culture and trying to numb ourselves.
— Abiola Abrams, The Sacred Bombshell Handbook of Self-Love
Sylvia had begun her month in New York with princessy pomp and fanfare….Her departure on June 27 was entirely different. She left New York shaken, depleted, and utterly alone.
— Elizabeth Winder, Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953
The one who sees thought as a thought is the witness to mind and no longer subject to suffering.
— Vivian Amis, The Essentials of Life
Sharing a burdened heart with another who has the wisdom, strength, and knowledge to carry it, frees us from its weight long enough to focus on solutions
— Gayathri Ramprasad, Shadows in the Sun: Healing from Depression and Finding the Light Within
Where there is light, darkness must cease.
— Vivian Amis, The Essentials of Life
I lied, but by his reaction I think he liked what I had said. I had told Shreya about Sudeshna and she was okay with our relationship, but there were a few things that I hadn’t told even her…..secrets.I wasn’t proud to keep it away from her but it could have been a deal breaker for us. Some things are best left unsaid, I had heard someone say. Now I knew how true it is, because even with the best of intentions, some things are bound to be misunderstood. Shreya wouldn’t understand why I did those things, and nor would Priya. They wouldn’t understand that it needed to be done. It was best to keep it sealed and leave everyone at their happy states – in dark….but happy.
— Bhaskaryya Deka, The Unwanted Shadow
You haunt my days and dreams.
— Jennifer Elisabeth
I wanted to say all these things about how you just have to hold on to the things you love and let go of all the rest.
— Charlotte Eriksson
My unhappiness precluded all else; unhappiness is a kind of narcissism, in which nothing that does not resonate with your unhappiness can interest you.
— Caroline Kettlewell, Skin Game
Why can't I remember our family Christmas, or a warm spring day, or anything that might have been pleasant? It is as though the filter of recall is itself altered, so that it blocks out everything but the darkest colors of the spectrum.
— Caroline Kettlewell, Skin Game
The more you engage in any type of emotion or behavior, the greater your desire for it will become.
— Chris Prentiss, Zen and the Art of Happiness
Again, all of life presents us with two basic ways to treat events. We can either label them "god for us" or "bad for us." The event is only an event. It's how we treat the event that determines what it becomes in our lives. The event doesn't make that determination- we do.
— Chris Prentiss, Zen and the Art of Happiness
From this vantage point he came to a realization that everything that had happened to him before this had been a journey upward through time, everything that occurred after it a descent. If he could not control his fate, why be born?
— Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy
There is no cell culture for depression. You can't see it on a bone scan or an x-ray. Not everyone with depression will show the same behavioral symptoms.
— Chris Prentiss, The Alcoholism and Addiction Cure
The world always seems like it's going to hell when you're depressed. And, of course, it always is going to hell in some way. That's what makes it so hard to tell the difference between Armageddon and the blues.
— Andrew Klavan, Empire of Lies
Every day you feel like you can't control the forces affecting your fate-your job,the government,your addiction,your depression,your money. So you stage micro-revolts. You customise your ringtone,you paint your room,you collect stamps. You choose.Choices,even small ones,can hold back the crushing weight of helplessness,but you can't stop there. You must fight back your behavoir and learn to fail with pride. Failing often is the only way to ever get the things you want out of life. Besides death your destiny is not inescapable.You are not so smart,but you are smarter than dogs and rats. Don't give in yet.
— David McRaney, You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself
If you feel depressed for an hour, you've produced approximately eighteen billion new cells that have more receptors calling out for depressed-type peptides and fewer calling out for feel-good peptides.
— Chris Prentiss, Zen and the Art of Happiness
The greatest and the best Christians when they are physically weak are more prone to an attack of spiritual depression than at any other time and there are great illustrations of this in the Scriptures.
— Martyn Llyod-Jones
I'd wasted so much of my life. So many of my days, and all of my promise, all of my dreams, lost to hospitals, to depression, to wanting to die. This wasn't how it was supposed to be. This is not who I am.Except, of course, it was. It was all there was left to be.
— Alexis  Hall, Glitterland
When I was lost in the fog, it was as though nothing else existed. And, afterwards, it seemed incomprehensible that I had ever really thought like that. Self-recrimination inevitably followed.
— Alexis  Hall, Glitterland
Sometimes I though about killing myself. The idea of it circled my head, shining and lovely like a tinsel halo. How beautiful it would be if everything could just stop. If I could stop. If I didn't have to feel like this. Yes, I thought about it and thought about it, but I was too exhausted to do anything about it. That should have been funny, right?
— Alexis  Hall, Glitterland
The tapestry of my life was a ruin of unravelling threads. The brightest parts were a nonsensical madman's weaving. And now every day was a grey stitch, laid down with an outpatient's patience, one following the next following the next, a story in lines, like a railway track to nowhere, telling absolutely nothing.
— Alexis  Hall, Glitterland
Days passed in a grey fog. I was becalmed. Without energy, without hope, with no sight of land, I could remember feeling better but I somehow couldn't believe in it. There was nothing but this.
— Alexis  Hall, Glitterland
There had been a subtle realignment of the spheres. The world was somehow a place I could endure again. If life was a grey corridor lined with doors, it was now within my power to open some of them.
— Alexis  Hall, Glitterland
I would if somebody would want to but of course nobody would want to so I wouldn't want to force anybody to want to.
— Susanna Kaysen
If I was feeling depressed or frustrated about my lot in life, all I had to do was tap the Player One button, and my worries would instantly slip away as my mind focused itself on the relentless pixelated onslaught on the screen in front of me.
— Ernest Cline, Ready Player One
You make me want things that I can't have.
— Kendare Blake, Anna Dressed in Blood
Whenever I feel like this, I am gentle with myself, pretend like I'm someone else, someone good. I walk on eggshells around myself, like I'm some fragile piece of porcelain you have to place quietly, deliberately back on the shelf.
— Andrea Portes, Hick
Well, enough of this introspection. It’s depressing, quite frankly.
— Sol Luckman, Snooze: A Story of Awakening
Prideful fool. It hurt his feelings that he couldn’t make my crazy go away. You know how men are. Always trying to fix things can’t be fixed.
— Ken  Wheaton, Sweet as Cane, Salty as Tears
That’s why; he’s worried about how his life is turning out, and he’s lonely, and lonely people are the bitterest of them all.
— Nick Hornby, High Fidelity
All these years, her sole objective had been to keep still and hope no one would ever know. She had been a mistress of stillness. She had mastered the simulation of peace without a wisp of real peace, like a nun from a silent order who was screaming inside her head, or a yogi racked with pain. How she had managed to fool anyone, let alone everyone, mystified her (how obtuse people were!) and, oddly, made her extraordinarily bitter. Because the price of her gift for evasion was to have no one, not one person, who understood how horrible she felt. All the time. Absolutely all the time.
— Jean Hanff Korelitz, Admission
Disappointment and Depression are terrorists that kidnap people's original peace for no good reason. The Holy Spirit of God is a dependable army to drive them away! May you be free from being disappointed and depressed. May you have and share peace as long as you live!
— Israelmore Ayivor, The Great Hand Book of Quotes
The core of your true self is never lost. Let go of all the pretending and the becoming you've done just to belong.Curl up with your rawness and come home. You don't have to find yourself
—  you just have to let yourself in.
I want to celebrate the sadness that makes you feel everything so deeply. I want to throw a party for the wounds that make you so unabashedly human.
— D. Antoinette Foy
When we criticize the suicidal for being selfish, we are actually criticizing them for not enduring their pain with grace and good manners. These are nice qualities; we may be correct to reproach average citizens for not having them. But to expect everyone in pain to have them is unrealistic. Bearing pain quietly is what moralists call a supererogatory act--an act that is above the call of duty. Expecting everyone to who is suicidal to behave in a way that is morally above average is simply abusive.
— David L. Conroy, Out of the Nightmare: Recovery from Depression and Suicidal Pain
No, it really isn't, but trust me, getting divorced and having to start over is the least in life that isn't fair. I had to watch the parents of a way too young girl realize that their daughter died for no other reason than people can't figure out how to be nice to each other. It isn't that hard, just be nice and people might not have to suffer needlessly, but that isn't the world we live in, so young girls die. That isn't fair, Mom. People falling out of love is vicious and it sucks, but there are far worse things you could be going through. I know that sounds harsh but it's very true.
— Jay Crownover, Nash
If you tell someone you have depression, they will often say, "Oh, I've been depressed before, too." The difference lies between being depressed and having depression. Everyone's been depressed at one time or another, but these are far from being the same things. One is a passing mood. The other is a chronic illness that does not come and go, ebb and flow, is here one day and gone the next.The difference between being depressed and having depression is that one is a mood and the other is an illness. One is a momentary bout of melancholy. The other is a debilitating condition that requires medical treatment. Would you feel better about having a cancerous lesion if I likened it to the rash I had last week?The difference between being depressed and having depression is the difference between a mood that will soon pass, and a serious illness that disrupts your ability to function and will take years to treat. The difference between being depressed and having depression is the difference between Cleveland and Bangkok, or your frying pan and the surface of the sun.So, no, we (depressives) do not feel better when you tell us about your rash. We'll do our best to be polite about it, but no, it really doesn't help at all.
— Northern Adams, Mickey and the Gargoyle
Discouragement is like a scorpion in your shoe
—  it takes courage to toss it out so you can move on.
It ended by my almost believing (perhaps actually believing) that this was perhaps my normal condition. But at first, in the beginning, what agonies I endured in that struggle! I did not believe it was the same with other people, and all my life I hid this fact about myself as a secret. I was ashamed (even now, perhaps, I am ashamed): I got to the point of feeling a sort of secret abnormal, despicable enjoyment in returning home to my corner on some disgusting Petersburg night, acutely conscious that that day I had committed a loathsome action again, that what was done could never be undone, and secretly, inwardly gnawing, gnawing at myself for it, tearing and consuming myself till at last the bitterness turned into a sort of shameful accursed sweetness, and at last—into positive real enjoyment! Yes, into enjoyment, into enjoyment! I insist upon that. I have spoken of this because I keep wanting to know for a fact whether other people feel such enjoyment? I will explain; the enjoyment was just from the too intense consciousness of one’s own degradation; it was from feeling oneself that one had reached the last barrier, that it was horrible, but that it could not be otherwise; that there was no escape for you; that you never could become a different man; that even if time and faith were still left you to change into something different you would most likely not wish to change; or if you did wish to, even then you would do nothing; because perhaps in reality there was nothing for you to change into.And the worst of it was, and the root of it all, that it was all in accord with the normal fundamental laws of over-acute consciousness, and with the inertia that was the direct result of those laws, and that consequently one was not only unable to change but could do absolutely nothing. Thus it would follow, as the result of acute consciousness, that one is not to blame in being a scoundrel; as though that were any consolation to the scoundrel once he has come to realise that he actually is a scoundrel.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead
I’m haunted. We all are, I guess. We’re parentless, friendless, unloved, abandoned. The spirits of our deceased emotional anchors and proofs of existence will follow and demean us until we too roam a quiet lifeless world alongside them — unable to speak — our histories written in beach sand.
— Jason S. Hornsby, Eleven Twenty-Three
It occurred to me that grief is like a tunnel. You enter it without a choice because you must get to the other side. The darkness of it plays tricks on you and sometimes you can even forget where you are or what your purpose is. I believe that people, now and again, get lost or stuck in that tunnel and never find their way out.
— Loretta Nyhan, Empire Girls
One reason we're not winning the fight against depression is that our available treatments leave so many in partial recovery limbo.
— Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic
You know what you have to do, you just can't do it", Sara says wearily. "It's like you have bricks on your feet.
— Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic
I’ve been married but I’m not anymore. And I still believe in love.
— Nick Saint Clair
When I noticed other people, I wondered what it was like to be alive. They did not know, could not know, how I felt inside. My shell still passed for normal. I felt like I should scream for help, someone should help, but I knew that the time for screaming had passed. Best to just keep on walking, walking dead, one of the few things I could still do. So I kept walking.
— Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic
As she lay awake, she reminded herself that she was beating the depression; she was winning her life back. She had survived, and now she was going to be better than ever before.
— Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic
Diversion is pernicious to depressives. Our lives are like waking dreams--correction, nightmares--where monsters chase us, never breaking off pursuit in order to rest or to eat or to look for easier prey. Diversion prevents us from confronting those monsters. If we never confront them, we have no hope of ever defeating them. Diversion does NOT work.
— Northern Adams, Mickey and the Gargoyle
Diversion is the absolute worst remedy for depression. When we ignore the things that haunt us or taunt us, not only do they keep coming back, but they’re bigger and stronger each time they return. Stop shoving us depressives in that direction.
— Northern Adams, Mickey and the Gargoyle
I am willing to be vulnerable and embrace the natural flow of life rather than trying to direct it to my own course and yet it has given me new courage because there is no consequence that could come as close as wanting to die… The ver worst thing that can happen in a life is wanting to end it. So I live more bravely than ever with more respect for others and myself.
— Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic
I don't want to ruin your life," Leonard said in a gentler tone."You're not ruining it.""The drugs just slow the process down. But the end's inevitable. The question is, how to turn this thing off?" He jabbed at his head with his index finger. "It's cutting me up, and I can't turn it off. Madeleine, listen to me. Listen. I'm not going to get better.
— Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot
The genre of self-help for depression is littered with well-intentioned books that overpraise solutions and raise false hopes. It would be nice to defeat your depression in ten easy steps, but rarely is it so easy. Books that overpraise solutions produce frustrated, disappointed and demoralized readers and damage the credibility of experts.
— Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic
Just as a stressful life can make you depressed, continuing exposure to stressors maintains depression.
— Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic
Depressed people don't end up lying in bed because they are undercommitted to goals. They end up lying in bed because they are overcommitted to goals that are failing.
— Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic
I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between...I am still so naïve; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
I chose fat and functional over slender and miserable.
— Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
There is so much pain in the world, and most of these people keep theirs secret, rolling through agonizing lives in invisible wheelchairs, dressed in invisible bodycasts.
— Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
The bigness of the world is redemption. Despair compresses you into a small space, and a depression is literally a hollow in the ground. To dig deeper into the self, to go underground, is sometimes necessary, but so is the other route of getting out of yourself, into the larger world, into the openness in which you need not clutch your story and your troubles so tightly to your chest.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
Sleep was a vehicle for passing the time, for avoiding the present. It was a trolley for the depressed, the impatient, and the dying.
— Hugh Howey, Dust
When I felt as though I had reached land, it was like I was on a deserted sandy beach, feeling isolated and afraid to share with anyone the memories that haunted me.
— Erin Merryn, Living for Today: From Incest and Molestation to Fearlessness and Forgiveness
Misery is a routine you can learn to live with. It's like rain. Once you're soaked to the skin, you can't get any wetter.
— Alan Gibbons, The Dark Beneath
When I recall memories, it all seems like a film, not a reality.
— Rukhsar Din
I was in way too deep. I was cut in so many places that I felt like I was bleeding out from every part of my body. Being outside and watching people live their normal lives took me out of my head, but the minute I stepped back into the apartment, I was muted inside. No words, no actions, no me. - Unsettled
— Alisa Mullen
It/ll be better tomorrow...
— Hubert Selby Jr., The Demon
The iron bolt which so mysteriously fastens the door of hope and holds our spirits in gloomy prison, needs a heavenly hand to push it back.
— Charles Haddon Spurgeon
I sometimes think that I don't have a purpose in this world.  I am simply useless and wandering.
— Ginger and Rosa
When you know truly know just how much God loves you it won't matter when others don't and if you know truly know God accepts you it won't matter when others won't
— Julie Chapus, Your Feelings and What God Says about Them
I finally understood what could drive kids to show up with guns and shoot up their schools.
— Nenia Campbell, Freaky Freshman
When you know truly know that God loves you it won't matter when others don't. And when you know truly know that God accepts you it won't matter when others won't.
— Julie Chapus
If depression was a choice, no one would choose it. Depression is not a choice.
— Northern Adams, Mickey and the Gargoyle
Unhappiness in a child accumulates because he sees no end to the dark tunnel. The thirteen weeks of a term might just as well be thirteen years.
— Graeme Greene
If only sorrow could bring hope, I'd learn to live again
— Britany Lopez
Being depressed is one thing when your life can be seen by outsiders as justifiably hard, but it is a whole different shameful story when you have everything and still feel like you can't bear to get out of bed in the morning. People can't really be sympathetic to you when they can begin to fathom what you could be so upset about.
— Boyd Varty, Cathedral of the Wild: An African Journey Home
Together we proceeded on our way towards catastrophe. [Depressed lawyer and his unsuspecting clients.]
— Gianrico Carofiglio, Testimone inconsapevole
Depression is an imagery of our heart's sickness.
— Rizky Adam Rifai
love meget lost in mebut bewareside effects includea lot of shivering, babya lot of drinking, maybea lot of sinking, baby
— Casey Renee Kiser, Darkness Plays Favorites
My vocal chords fought to contain the memories that leaked out
—  I felt the weight off it all pressing down on me.
Remember if it's not happy then it's not the end so babe keep fighting, you'll win this war.
— Paola Marie M.
If I were you I'd put that away. See you're just wasted and thinking about the past again, darling you'll be okay.
— Pierce the Veil
I do not think we were afraid of death
—  life had become such an infinitely boring alternation between a period of stimulation which failed to stimulate and of depression which hardly even depressed.
I feel impossibly sad and like I'll die, what can we do?
— Jack Kerouac, The Subterraneans
I dye my jeans jet black once a week, but they never seem dark enough. I bleach my hair bright white twice a month but it never seems light enough. I drink two and a half bottles of champagne every night but I never seem drunk enough. And I know I’m not high enough until someone grabs my face to check my vision to see if I’m still responsive— And even then, I’m thinking to myself that I should probably do one more line, you know, just to be safe.
— Kris Kidd, I Can't Feel My Face
You wanted to become a doctor to help people and feel better at the end of your job, I think, watching them, as the nurse takes my hand. But I don't think you do feel better at the end of the day. You look like humans have constantly disappointed you.
— Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman
If the one who gave me life wants the real me to die... then all I can do is die.
— Setona Mizushiro, After School Nightmare, Volume 8
One way to be sure you are not making the wrong decision, is to lookvertically upwards
— Oche Otorkpa, The Unseen Terrorist
In the old days the worst part of my depression used to be the astonishment it caused me, the scandalized way in which I fought against it. Nowadays, on the other hand, I accept it cheerfully enough, like an old familiar friend.
— Simone de Beauvoir, Prime of Life
if adversity and hopeless grief have quite taken away the taste for life; if an unfortunate man, strong of soul and more indignant about his fate than despondent or dejected, wishes for death and yet preserves his life without loving it, not from inclination or fear but from duty, then his maxim has moral content.
— Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
How did I not see it? Pain is everywhere. I'm just another sorry story. All these people wearing smiles, dragging themselves around--do they all know already? Do they realize how fast the world can change?
— Amy McNamara, Lovely, Dark and Deep