c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
When people call it that I always get pissed off because I always think depression sounds like you just get like really sad, you get quiet and melancholy and just like sit quietly by the window sighing or just lying around. A state of not caring about anything. A kind of blue kind of peaceful state.
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
I would not wish depression on anybody. And yet, it taught me a lot. I have not become suddenly mawkishly grateful for my life but I am more interested in it, more engaged you might say. When you have spent long years in the dark, there is joy in seeing the light and pleasure, above all, in the ordinary.
— Sally Brampton, Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression
I am constantly torn between killing myself and killing everyone around me. Those seem to be the two choices. Everything else is just killing time.
— John Green
An event of great agony is bearable only in the belief that it will bring about a better world. When it does not, as in the aftermath of another vast calamity in 1914-18, disillusion is deep and moves on to self-doubt and self-disgust.
— Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror:  The Calamitous 14th Century
It is two years since I emerged from depression and I no longer want myself dead. I want myself alive. I am no longer my own enemy. Depression is the enemy. The monster lives at my gate. My hope is that, with sufficient effort and luck, I can keep it there.
— Sally Brampton, Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression
Moisture falls from the sky, cleansing the world and sustaining precious life. But it's the gloom—the cold, dark air—that receives notice. We fail to see the miracle of raindrops through our own tears.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway
I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted To lie with my hands turned upand be utterly empty.How free it is, you have no idea how free - The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,And it asks for nothing. ~ Tulips (1961)
— Sylvia Plath, Plath: Poems
Everyone else has a work party,'Kate said. 'So why shouldn't we? We're working hard at not being mad.
— Sally Brampton, Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression
There was a listlessness in his gait, as if he saw no reason for taking one step further, nor felt any desire to do so, but would have been glad, could he be glad of anything, to fling himself down at the root of the nearest tree, and lie there passive for evermore. The leaves might bestrew him, and the soil gradually accumulate and form a little hillock over his frame, no matter whether there were life in it or no. Death was too definite an object to be wished for or avoided.
— Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
I often find myself grateful for the comfort of strangers; a man who gave up his seat for me on the bus, a woman who helped me out with a heavy shopping bag. Remembering small acts of kindness puts the world in a finer, sweeter order.
— Sally Brampton, Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression
I didn't answer. Just shook my head and let the tears roll. "I just want it to go away. I just want all the drama to stop. Nobody would believe me anyway," I whispered. "Nobody would care.
— Jennifer Brown, Hate List
It gets harder as times go by, because memory is the first casualty of manic depression. When I'm manic, all I remember is the moment. When I'm depressed, all I remember is the pain. The surrounding details are lost to me.
— Terry Cheney
As ofttimes as it rains on my little spot of earth, you'd think I'd grow accustomed to the gloom.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway
...you are my Lady of Shalott lost in a dream of isolation - I care too much for you - I romanticize depression...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
It was days like this when I felt it more than ever: I wasn’t a real human.
— Melanie Cusick-Jones, The Rainbow Maker's Tale
How did he get here? What drew him back? Easy answer: the monkey bars. Not-so-easy answer. . . . What took him away in the first place? Gyroscopic deflections are only partly to blame. Who can stop a revolving planet? Who can predict where on the table a spinning quarter will fall flat?
— Jay  Nichols, Monkey Bars
Author describes that a failed sea captain, "vacillated miserably between self-recrimination and defensiveness.
— Joseph Wheelan, Jefferson's War: America's First War on Terror 1801-1805
I needed somewhere that wasn't bad. I wanted to be light and happy like you, and I wanted never for you to see the dark. I was scared I would infect you with terrible feelings and pictures in my head of walking out in front of the traffic and - No. That's not for you, see? Not for you to hear. I needed you to be my sunlight, Bessi,' and here George paused and her words became very small, 'I lost mine, I lost it.
— Diana Evans, 26a
Some people can’t keep fighting. Some people want to escape. Some people are not ready—are not able—to find a way to deal with what’s in front of them. Sometimes there’s no one to help them. Sometimes they don’t know how to ask for help. Sometimes it feels like there’s no choice but to end it. No other way out. And sometimes it’s impossible to see past that.
— Sarah Fine, Sanctum
When you live with voices in your head, you are drawn inextricably to voices outside your head. Very often the voices work to confirm your worst suspicions. Or think of things you could never have imagined! There are only so many hours of the day to hate yourself.
— Emma Forrest, Your Voice in My Head
The interesting thing about grief, I think, is that it is its own size. It is not the size of you. It is its own size. And grief comes to you. You know what I mean? I’ve always liked that phrase “He was visited by grief,” because that’s really what it is. Grief is its own thing. It’s not like it’s in me and I’m going to deal with it. It’s a thing, and you have to be okay with its presence. If you try to ignore it, it will be like a wolf at your door.
— Stephen Colbert
Do you know that feeling - The feeling of being alive and dead, both at the same time? When it seems like you are just going through with different notions of life, without actually living it. I do, I know that feeling very well. I live with it, eat with it and often sleep with it.
— Bhavya Kaushik, The Other Side of the Bed
If killing yourself is not an option anymore, you have to sink into the darkness instead, and make something out of it.
— Emma Forrest, Your Voice in My Head
Now, my dear little girl, you have come to an age when the inward life develops and when some people (and on the whole those who have most of a destiny) find that all is not a bed of roses. Among other things there will be waves of terrible sadness, which last sometimes for days; irritation, insensibility, etc., etc., which taken together form a melancholy. Now, painful as it is, this is sent to us for an enlightenment. It always passes off, and we learn about life from it, and we ought to learn a great many good things if we react on it right. (For instance, you learn how good a thing your home is, and your country, and your brothers, and you may learn to be more considerate of other people, who, you now learn, may have their inner weaknesses and sufferings, too.) Many persons take a kind of sickly delight in hugging it; and some sentimental ones may even be proud of it, as showing a fine sorrowful kind of sensibility. Such persons make a regular habit of the luxury of woe. That is the worst possible reaction on it. It is usually a sort of disease, when we get it strong, arising from the organism having generated some poison in the blood; and we mustn't submit to it an hour longer than we can help, but jump at every chance to attend to anything cheerful or comic or take part in anything active that will divert us from our mean, pining inward state of feeling. When it passes off, as I said, we know more than we did before. And we must try to make it last as short as time as possible. The worst of it often is that, while we are in it, we don't want to get out of it. We hate it, and yet we prefer staying in it—that is a part of the disease. If we find ourselves like that, we must make something ourselves to some hard work, make ourselves sweat, etc.; and that is the good way of reacting that makes of us a valuable character. The disease makes you think of yourself all the time; and the way out of it is to keep as busy as we can thinking of things and of other people—no matter what's the matter with our self.
— William James
I never lie ― I am a blatantly truthful person about almost everything. My addiction (or disease as some call it) always lies. I have had very good relationships, but the addict in me always fucked them up. I fall in love quickly, it's a high that rivals drugs for a while. I am monogamous, but I always cheated with depression before the relationship fell apart. Addicts need best friends, healthy people need healthy relationships.
— Emma Forrest, Your Voice in My Head
There’s a big difference, I discovered, between wanting to die and not wanting to live. When you want to die, you at least have a goal. When you don’t want to live, you’re really just empty.
— Brian Hugh Warner
It's as if he can no longer acknowledge the love he felt or the pain I am in. I have been dismissed. I don't think I was smarter or as beautiful as the other girls he did this to. It's just that I was me. It was all I had.
— Emma Forrest, Your Voice in My Head
I'm not crazy or dangerous,just a bit eccentric and lonely.
— Emma Forrest, Your Voice in My Head
When he kisses me, I cry. I explain it's not because I wish he were someone else, it's because it's such a shock to the system to be desired after feeling so completely abandoned.
— Emma Forrest, Your Voice in My Head
While pensive poets painful vigils keep,Sleepless themselves, to give their readers sleep.
— Alexander Pope, The Dunciad
It was the face of a human being who’d been constructed exclusively of wounds. Not time or history or ambition, nothing but wounds. The face of a person who could probably kill someone without feeling anything whatsoever.
— Ryū Murakami, Audition
Where does one go from the bottom? You hit the bottom of the well and what? People say the only place to go is up, but they seem to ignore how long you can spend wallowing in the muck at the bottom of the well.
— Magenta Periwinkle, Cutting Class
What people don't understand when you've already been a suicide and pulled through is that after the sadness comes fear: Where is my mind going with this? I don't want to die. I do not want to die. When you don't have so much control over your own thoughts, over the myriad voices in your head, you don't know where they could go.
— Emma Forrest, Your Voice in My Head
I wanted to tell her not to entertain despair like this. Despair wasn't a guest, you didn't play its favourite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy.
— Janet Fitch, White Oleander
I feel like, I was going somehow with my life, holding myself together and then these blasts happened, and then suddenly I was paralyzed. I was not able to move, or to even hold myself intact. As if like I was fallen into this unconscious state, of eternal sleep. When I was asleep, somebody came and disassembled me into thousands of pieces and then hurriedly put me back together in a second, losing some of my pieces on the ground, or placing some of them incorrectly – you know, that kind of feeling” “How do you feel?” She added. Apparently, she was asking me back everything.“I’m still not able to sleep on her side of the bed” I faked a smile.
— Bhavya Kaushik, The Other Side of the Bed
I am lonely, I am lonely, I am lonely, I am lonely, I am lonely. How appropriate that I write this to myself.
— Richard Paul Evans, Lost December
The sadness ― the general sadness that squats and pees inside my brain ― isn't over. It never will be. I know how best to chase it away, though. It usually works. Sometimes it doesn't. But I pray and say, fuck it, then. I choose this. It chooses me. I choose it back.
— Emma Forrest, Your Voice in My Head
I think I've lost my faith and I can't stop writingbecause I don't know howmuch longer I can hold on.
— Emma Forrest, Your Voice in My Head
The goal was to get sane, to get whole, to be complete enough to support someone else.
— Emma Forrest, Your Voice in My Head
I spend a lot of time trying to convince myself that nothing really matters except being alive.
— Sarah Miller, Inside the Mind of Gideon Rayburn
He meant everything he said, when he said it. But this is his default. And it won out. Right now you're depressed about one thing. Before you were depressed about everything. These are good times for you.""I'm afraid of loving again. I'm afraid I've lost my faith.""You haven't.""The trapdoor I have in my mind? That can go to those bad places? It's almost gave way again.""You know the ways to keep it nailed shut.
— Emma Forrest, Your Voice in My Head
It's always too soon to quit! Believe in the goodness of God practically speaking.
— Eric C. Maynard
You do it how you can do it, so long as it's getting done, you're okay.
— Emma Forrest, Your Voice in My Head
and it was the pretending that might explain how she could smile so brightly while her mind felt nothing - as if, at these times, there existed a disconnection between outer and inner, a shutting off, and the key to her happiness lay in warding off pain, or dodging it, or pushing it into the shape of something else - like shame or anger or even hope.
— Sue Saliba, Alaska
Bruce has wrestled with his moods, and a psyche genetically prone to extremes, for most of his adult life. Decades of psychotherapy helped reveal and cast light on some of his most primal traumas and conflicts, but his raw moods, and occasional descents into full-blown depression, never quite went away. "You go through periods of being good, then something stimulates it," he says. "The clock, some memory. You never know. The mind wants to link all your feelings to a cause. I'm feeling that because I'm doing this, or because that happened."Eventually Bruce realized that his worst moods had nothing to do with what was actually taking place in his life. Awful, stressful things could happen - conflicts, stress, disappointments, death - and he'd be unflappable. Then things would be peaceful and easy and he'd find himself on his knees. "You're going along fine, and then boom, it hits you. Things that just come from way down in the well. Completely noncasual, but it's part of your DNA, part of the way your body cycles."Bruce knows his particular brain chemistry will never leave him completely in the clear. "You manage it, you learn and evolve, but another recognition you gotta have is that these are the cards you were dealt," he says. "These things are never going to be out of your life. You gotta be constantly vigilant and realistic about these things.
— Peter Ames Carlin, Bruce
mia knew the weight that said nothing will ever be different from what it is now, that the world has lost all dimension and has turned to stone.
— Sue Saliba, Alaska
My only relief is to sleep. When I'm sleeping, I'm not sad, I'm not angry, I'm not lonely, I'm nothing.
— Jillian Medoff, Hunger Point
She felt happy these days, yet there was always an undercurrent of sadness just below the surface
— Diane Chamberlain, The Lost Daughter
I'm in love with someone good and kind and gentle, and he's seen the darkness too, but somehow we've become each other's light.
— Emma Forrest, Your Voice in My Head
Sometimes I think I won't ever feel safe until I can count my last days on one hand. Three more days to get through until I don't have to worry about life anymore.
— Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects
It would be nice if life worked this way, stripping the dirt from our lives and sending us back out into the world clean. But some dirt is destined to lingered.
— Veronica Roth, Insurgent
There are times when I'm caught up in everything and I have to say to myself, "Please feel good; please feel better; everything's okay; you're fine; things aren't falling apart; take a second; get back to a place where you realize that you don't actually have real problems." That happens. You never know when those tables are gonna turn... For me, confidence is something that can come crashing down in one second.
— Taylor Swift
But I saw the pain and sadness in everything, and swirled it round my mouth like a fine wine.
— Emma Forrest, Your Voice in My Head
Billy covered his head with his blanket. He always covered his head when his mother came to see him in the mental ward - always got much sicker until she went away. It wasn’t that she was ugly, or had bad breath or a bad personality. She was a perfectly nice, standard-issue, brown-haired, white woman with a high school education.She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone through so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn’t really like life at all.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five
Like if Leonardo from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles started being all bummed out about everything. How were we going to kick arse if our Leonardo was wearing a black eye-band instead of a blue one?
— Dougie Poynter, McFly: Unsaid Things... Our Story
I want to escape from myself. For when I do start up and stare myself seedily in the face, as happens to be my case at present, my blankness is inconceivable--indescribable--my misery amazing.
— Charles Dickens
It is madness. And if you don't know who you are, or if your real self has drifted away from you with the undertow, madness at least gives you an identity. It's the same with self-loathing. You're probably just normal and normal-looking but that's not a real identity, not the way ugliness is. Normality, just accepting that you're probably normal-looking, lacks the force field of self-disgust. If you don't know who you are, madness gives you something to believe in.
— Emma Forrest, Your Voice in My Head
In bed our yesterdays are too oppressive: if a man can only get up, though it be but to whistle or to smoke, he has a present which offers some resistance to the past—sensations which assert themselves against tyrannous memories.
— George Eliot, Adam Bede
You seem to look upon depression as the hand of an enemy trying to crush you…Do you think you could see it instead as the hand of a friend, pressing you down to the ground on which it is safe to stand?
— Parker J. Palmer
Believe me. Your hardship, tears and sorrows you are facing now are the training of your spirit. The strength you learn from there brings you more love and smiles in your future. Wherever you are, love all the people around you like your family. then you are not alone anymore.
— Hiroko Sakai
Like Sylvia Plath, Natalie Jeanne Champagne invites you so close to the pain and agony of her life of mental illness and addiction, which leaves you gasping from shock and laughing moments later: this is both the beauty and unique nature of her storytelling. With brilliance and courage, the author's brave and candid chronicle travels where no other memoir about mental illness and addiction has gone before. The Third Sunrise is an incredible triumph and Natalie Jeanne Champagne is without a doubt the most important new voice in this genre.
— Andy Behrman, Electroboy: A Memoir of Mania
The train blows through towndelivering reality,slapping my face and screaming,“You are alone”Rose colored memories drown,taking their last breath.
— Kellie Elmore, Magic in the Backyard
My life was a wreck. I had nothing, no material possessions, unless debts counts. Fourteen pairs of shoes that were too small for me was all I had to show after a lifetime of profligate spending. I hadn’t a job. I hadn’t any qualifications. I’d achieved nothing with my life. I’d never been happy. I had no husband or boyfriend.
— Marian Keyes, Rachel's Holiday
An intensely gripping narrative...expertly crafted and totally addictive...a must read!
— Maggie Reese, Runaway Mind
Bodily haste and exertion usually leave our thoughts very much at the mercy of our feelings and imagination.
— George Eliot, Adam Bede
…depressive realism. Depression is not the near death experience described by so many, [Kayla Dunn] suggests, but a rebirth in which the new psyche has removed self-delusion. Compared with so-called healthy individuals, depressives are more realistic in their worldview.
— Jan Wong, Out of the Blue
There is nothing for you in this bleak hospital room but a cold and empty nothingness that has no answers, can give no peace, will provide no comfort to the living.
— Rebecca James, Beautiful Malice
The lesson of the Funk Dog: “You can forget what it used to feel like to feel good about life
—  feeling rotten—or just a low-grad funk—seems normal and therefore acceptable. I just don’t believe that God intended for any of his creatures to be petted with sticks.
When I need some striking inspiration about deep depression for my new painting, I just need to go to check my bank account...
— Hiroko Sakai
There's a boy whose affection I am determined to hunt down and kill. It used to be material objects I felt I needed to be happy. It would make me feel stable if I had him. If I had someone like him, it would prove that I'm stable, and then I wouldn't have to do the work to get there. I am constantly looking for ways to cede control of my worries to someone, anyone.
— Emma Forrest, Your Voice in My Head
Keedwell cites a study of depression in the Netherlands that found that most people coped better with adversity after experiencing depression.
— Jan Wong
The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation p
— Robert Hughes
The world isn’t perfect, and some days it wears you down. You can either accept that, and face it, and be a help to others instead of a hindrance. Or you can decide the rules are too tough and they shouldn’t apply to you, and you can ignore them and make things harder for everybody else. Sometimes life is about being sad and doing things anyway. Sometimes it’s about being hurt and doing things anyway. The point isn’t perfection. The point is doing it anyway.
— Chloe Neill, Biting Cold
Every lineament of the girl's wasted body is a testament to her inner turmoil. Willow can only imagine what kind of pain she must be in to destroy herself that way. She knows there's something ironic in her compassion for the other girl, but she can't help feeling that this utter mortification of the flesh is far worse than anything that she herself has done.
— Julia Hoban, Willow
We may seem fine, even when the pain remains right there beneath our surface.
— Ashly Lorenzana
You cannot move forward if you are always thinking backwards
— Bathsheba Dailey
Oddly enough I never used to suffer from depression on cold, gray, cloudy days like this. I feel as if nature is in harmony with me, that it reflected my soul. On the other hand, when the sun appeared, the children would come out to play in the streets, and everyone was happy that it was such a lovely day, and then I would feel terrible, as if that display of exuberance in which i could not participate was somehow unfair.
— Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides to Die
It's so hard to find the place somewhere in the middle of the best and worst I've felt.
— Ashly Lorenzana
Pain, too, comes from depths that cannot be revealed. We do not know whether those depths are in ourselves or elsewhere, in a graveyard, in a scarcely dug grave, only recently inhabited by withered flesh. This truth, which is banal enough, unravels time and the face, holds up a mirror to me in which I cannot see myself without being overcome by a profound sadness that undermines one's whole being. The mirror has become the route through which my body reaches that state, in which it is crushed into the ground, digs a temporary grave, and allows itself to be drawn by the living roots that swarm beneath the stones. It is flattened beneath the weight of that immense sadness which few people have the privilege of knowing. So I avoid mirrors.
— Tahar ben Jelloun, The Sand Child
To the extent that I had come to understand that despair does not necessarily result in annihilation, that one can go on as usual in spite of it, I had become hardened. Was this what it means to be an adult, to live with ugly ambiguities? I didn't like it, but it made it easier to go on.
— Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen
Indigo has a purifying, stabilizing, cleansing effect when fear, repression, and obsessions have disturbed your mental body. Indigo food vibrations are: blackberries, blue plums, blueberries, purple brocoli, beetroot, and purple grapes.
— Tae Yun Kim, The First Element: Secrets to Maximizing Your Energy
Just remember that those who feel profoundly depressed are those whose happiness is likewise intense. What's so wrong with that?
— Ashly Lorenzana
It's always almost Autumn, down here at Rock Bottom.
— Ashly Lorenzana
I would prefer to die than to be depressed for depression can hurt you everyday and it'll last for a lifetime while on dying, you can only feel pain the moment you'll die.
— Cedric Go
If you love yourself the most at your happiest moments, there is no reason not to be fond of who you are in the dark.
— Ashly Lorenzana
Between death and hell a bridge shining silver wings offers his soul hope.
— Aberjhani, The River of Winged Dreams
What came first, the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and pain and misery and loss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives.
— Nick Hornby, High Fidelity
Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.
— Wendell Berry
The sun hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true-- not true, or undeveloped. With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe.
— Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale
Feeling sorry for myself was an art.
— Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Does he know about me? George wonders; do any of them? Oh yes, probably. It wouldn't interest them. They don't want to know about my feelings or my glands or anything below my neck. I could just as well be a severed head carried into the classroom to lecture to them from a dish.
— Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man
There are no windows within the dark house of depression through which to see others, only mirrors.
— Miriam Toews, Swing Low: A Life
Never take the first brick out of the wall unless you know it is meant to fall
— Bathsheba Dailey
By the time it has gotten dressed, it has become he; has become already more or less George — though still not the whole George they demand and are prepared to recognize. Those who call him on the phone at this hour of the morning would be bewildered, maybe even scared, if they could realize what this three-quarters-human thing is what they are talking to. But, of course, they never could—its voice's mimicry of their George is nearly perfect.
— Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man
It was more that he did better being busy, keeping to a routine. It helped hold the black dogs of thought at bay. Also he had learned that a person could be happy with having done the best they could under the circumstances. It didn't always have to be bright and shiny and impressive to the outside observer.
— Ellen Airgood, South of Superior
Midland City had a goddess of discord all its own. This was a goddess who could not dance, would not dance, and hated everybody at the high school. She would like to claw away her face, she told us, so that people would stop seeing things in it that had nothing to do with what she was like inside. She was ready to die at any time, she said, because what men and boys thought about her and tried to do to her made her so ashamed. One of the first things she was going to do when she got to heaven, she said, was to ask somebody what was written on her face and why had it been put there.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Deadeye Dick
Since you act as though God is dead, I wanted to join you in the mourning."The reply of Martin Luther's wife, in full funeral regalia, in trying to illustrate the folly of his depressed state.
— Mark Driscoll, Real Marriage: The Truth About Sex, Friendship, and Life Together
Often he had the impression that the person answering questions from the scratchy armchair was a dummy he was controlling, that this had been true throughout his life, and that his life had become so involved with operating the dummy that he, the ventriloquist, had ceased to have a personality, becoming just an arm stuffed up the puppet's back.
— Jeffrey Eugenides
All agree that, the first responsibility for the alleviation of poverty and distress and for the care of the victims of the depression rests upon the locality — its individuals, organizations and Government. It rests, first of all, perhaps, upon the private agencies of philanthropy, secondly, other social organizations, and last, but not least, the Church. Yet all agree that to leave to the locality the entire responsibility would result in placing the heaviest burden in most cases upon those who are the least able to bear it. In other words, the communities that have the most difficult problem, like Detroit, would be the communities that would have to bear the heaviest of the burdens. And so the State should step in to equalize the burden by providing for a large portion of the care of the victims of poverty and by providing assistance and guidance for local communities. Above and beyond that duty of the States the national Government has a responsibility.
— Franklin D. Roosevelt
I thought I was dreaming and I dreamed.
— Марко Соколовић
There are edges around the black and every now and then a flash of color streaks out of the gray. But I can never really grasp any of the slivers of memories that emerge.
— Katie McGarry, Pushing the Limits
It felt like this was never going to end. The world wasn't going to stop crashing down until there was nothing left of me but dust.
— Keary Taylor, What I Didn't Say
Depression isn't just being a bit sad. It's feeling nothing. It's not wanting to be alive anymore.
— J.K. Rowling
Emma is not a person
—  Emma is a place that you get stuck in
The red washingdown the bathtubcan't change the color of the seaat all.
— Derrick Brown
There was a lot of pain in that kiss. There was so much hurt and so much fear in it. I felt tears rolling down the both of our faces. But, in that kiss, there was even more want. We both wanted to smother out that pain, to not have so many horrible things in the all too recent past, to just be normal, to do the types of things we were supposed to be dealing with besides death and disability.
— Keary Taylor, What I Didn't Say
It was strange how in that moment of tragedy, it had seemed so unreal, like an old-fashioned movie reel playing on a screen for my eyes only. The pain and broken heart were blocked off for a little while, leaving me numb with disbelief. Shock is what Dad called it. But after a while, the cruel reality started to seep into my tissues, and my body became a sponge, just sucking it all up until, finally, there was so much grief inside, I couldn't help feeling it.That's how it happened for me. First, the numbness right after she died, next the agonising pain and then the place I was at now—the land of perpetual depression.
— Karen Ann Hopkins, Temptation
Lincoln's story confounds those who see depression as a collection of symptoms to be eliminated. But it resonates with those who see suffering as a potential catalyst of emotional growth. "What man actually needs," the psychiatrist Victor Frankl argued,"is not a tension-less state but rather the striving and struggling of a worthwhile goal." Many believe that psychological health comes with the relief of distress. But Frankl proposed that all people-- and particularly those under some emotional weight-- need a purpose that will both draw on their talents and transcend their lives. For Lincoln, this sense of purpose was indeed the key that unlocked the gates of a mental prison. This doesn't mean his suffering went away. In fact, as his life became richer and more satisfying, his melancholy exerted a stronger pull. He now responded to that pull by tying it to his newly defined sense of purpose. From a place of trouble, he looked for meaning. He looked at imperfection and sought redemption.
— Joshua Wolf Shenk, Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness
Sometimes I feel like all the crap in the world is building up inside me, like all the bad is just filling me like a balloon. I push it all back, live my happy life.But sometimes that balloon exposed and all the crap lands on everything around me.
— Keary Taylor, What I Didn't Say
All my joys resemble more a momentary intoxication than the real gold of happiness. It was all but an illusion.
— Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: The Case Histories
I wanted to scream as I stood there, my toes hanging over the edge of the dock. I wanted to let a gut-wrenching howl rip from my disfigured throat toward those clouded skies. I wanted to say every swear word my mother had ever taught me not to say.I would have settled for a cut-off whimper, just as long as some kind of sound came from my lips.
— Keary Taylor, What I Didn't Say
Madness is too glamorous a term to convey what happens to most people who are losing their minds. That word is too exciting,too literary, too interesting in its connotations, to convey the boredom, the slowness, the dreariness, the dampness of depression.
— Elizabeth Wurtzel
It kind of scares me though, to keep wearing it every day like I do. What happens when I run out of it? Will I forget what she looked like? What it looked like when the sun reflected on her hair? The way her pillow always smelled like her? Will my memory of her run out too?
— Keary Taylor, What I Didn't Say
The problem with growing up fearing and expecting rejection is that you cannot enter into adult relationship in the expectation of happiness.
— Dorothy Rowe, Depression: The Way Out of Your Prison
He was a simple honest man. He never strayed,He never drank, he never smoked, and he never kissed a maid.And when he passed away his insurance was denied,Because he never lived, they claimed he never died.
— Ted Gup, A Secret Gift: How One Man's Kindness & a Trove of Letters Revealed the Hidden History of the Great Depression
People often say “Just look for the silver lining.” But what do you say to the person surrounded by fog? They don’t see a fluffy object in the sky, blocking the sun for a moment or two. But instead, they see everything as it was before, but through the murky, un-clarity of hopelessness. As if they were standing at the bottom of a grimy lake except able to breathe. But not wanting to because with each breath they grow numb from the cold loneliness. What if they’re surrounded by a dreary blanket of darkness, made up of their own thoughts, too impenetrable for any light to break through? So what do you tell that person who, as far as the eye could see, only sees fog? A place where there is no silver lining peeking around the corner. Imagine a place where your only companion is the confusion you walk around with.
— Sadie Turner
I believe that it may be normal, healthy, and even productive to experience mild to moderate depression from time to time as part of the variable emotional spectrum, either as an appropriate response to situations or as a way of turning inward and mentally chewing over problems to find solutions.
— Andrew Weil, M.D., Spontaneous Healing
the evil thing is inside, not out.
— Suzanne Collins
There was a lot about my life that was crappy, now that I couldn't talk. But if I hadn't gotten drunk that night, if I hadn't gotten in that accident, would I have ever had this moment? Lying there in the sun, holding Sam's hand like time didn't exist and the real world couldn't touch us? Somehow I didn't think so.
— Keary Taylor, What I Didn't Say
In my view, prescribing antidepressant drugs is too often a quick and easy substitute for developing treatment plans that address the totality of health concerns and lifestyle factors that have an impact on wellness, including emotional wellness.
— Andrew Weil, M.D., Spontaneous Healing
Of course I began to see Nikki, which was strange because I was staring into Danny's eyes, and Danny is a six-foot-three black man who looks nothing like my ex-wife.
— Matthew Quick, The Silver Linings Playbook
Somebody stop the world. I'm scared and I want to get off.
— James Delano
...for if we try to go on protecting them we prevent them from growing up to be ordinary, confident adults, capable of looking after themselves.
— Dorothy Rowe, Depression: The Way Out of Your Prison
I hadn't thought about Mom as much as I probably should have lately. It was a relief not to have all those emotional waves rolling through me at the mere vision of her face in my mind. Letting go of all the negative thoughts was like blowing out a giant gulp of air that I'd been holding in for what seemed like eternity.
— Karen Ann Hopkins, Temptation
Do not pray for an easy life, pray for the strength to endure a difficult one
— Bruce Lee
Forgive me my nonsense as I also forgive the nonsense of those who think they talk sense.
— Robert Frost
Prayer is not asking. Prayer is putting oneself in the hands of God, at His disposition, and listening to His voice in the depth of our hearts.
— Mother Teresa
If the only prayer you said was thank you, that would be enough.
— Meister Eckhart
You pray in your distress and in your need
—  would that you might pray also in the fullness of your joy and in your days of abundance.
Prayer of an Anonymous Abbess:Lord, thou knowest better than myself that I am growing older and will soon be old. Keep me from becoming too talkative, and especially from the unfortunate habit of thinking that I must say something on every subject and at every opportunity.Release me from the idea that I must straighten out other peoples' affairs. With my immense treasure of experience and wisdom, it seems a pity not to let everybody partake of it. But thou knowest, Lord, that in the end I will need a few friends.Keep me from the recital of endless details; give me wings to get to the point.Grant me the patience to listen to the complaints of others; help me to endure them with charity. But seal my lips on my own aches and pains -- they increase with the increasing years and my inclination to recount them is also increasing.I will not ask thee for improved memory, only for a little more humility and less self-assurance when my own memory doesn't agree with that of others. Teach me the glorious lesson that occasionally I may be wrong.Keep me reasonably gentle. I do not have the ambition to become a saint -- it is so hard to live with some of them -- but a harsh old person is one of the devil's masterpieces.Make me sympathetic without being sentimental, helpful but not bossy. Let me discover merits where I had not expected them, and talents in people whom I had not thought to possess any. And, Lord, give me the grace to tell them so.Amen
— Margot Benary-Isbert
The more you pray, the less you'll panic. The more you worship, the less you worry. You'll feel more patient and less pressured.
— Rick Warren, The Purpose of Christmas
We tend to use prayer as a last resort, but God wants it to be our first line of defense. We pray when there's nothing else we can do, but God wants us to pray before we do anything at all.Most of us would prefer, however, to spend our time doing something that will get immediate results. We don't want to wait for God to resolve matters in His good time because His idea of 'good time' is seldom in sync with ours.
— Oswald Chambers
May God break my heart so completely that the whole world falls in.
— Mother Teresa
Any concern too small to be turned into a prayer is too small to be made into a burden.
— Corrie ten Boom
In the silence of the heart God speaks. If you face God in prayer and silence, God will speak to you. Then you will know that you are nothing. It is only when you realize your nothingness, your emptiness, that God can fill you with Himself. Souls of prayer are souls of great silence.
— Mother Teresa, In the Heart of the World: Thoughts, Stories and Prayers
Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to pr
— Mark Twain
Prayer may just be the most powerful tool mankind has.”~Blink
— Ted Dekker
Dear Jesus, do something.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
A prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages.
— Tennessee Williams, Stairs to the Roof
Goodness is about what you do. Not who you pray to.
— Terry Pratchett, Snuff
Lord, Give me the strength not to bitch slap this woman.
— J.D. Robb
I prayed for freedom for twenty years, but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.
— Frederick Douglass, Autobiographies
Be not forgetful of prayer. Every time you pray, if your prayer is sincere, there will be new feeling and new meaning in it, which will give you fresh courage, and you will understand that prayer is an education.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Never pray for justice, because you might get some.
— Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye
The man who prays is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks that he can instruct god how to put them right.
— Christopher Hitchens, Mortality
Those blessings are sweetest that are won with prayer and worn with thanks.
— Thomas Goodwin
Those who pray for your downfall are concentrating negative thoughts towards you, without taking cognisance of the slippery ground in which they are standing, which could lead to their downfall.
— Michael Bassey Johnson
He who kneels the most, stands the best.
— Dwight L. Moody
The Ego is a veil between humans and God’.”“In prayer all are equal.
— Jalaluddin Rumi
The inner voice is something which cannot be described in words. But sometimes we have a positive feeling that something in us prompts us to do a certain thing. The time when I learnt to recognise this voice was, I may say, the time when I started praying regularly.
— Mahatma Gandhi
No man is greater than his prayer life. The pastor who is not praying is playing; the people who are not praying are straying. We have many organizers, but few agonizers; many players and payers, few pray-ers; many singers, few clingers; lots of pastors, few wrestlers; many fears, few tears; much fashion, little passion; many interferers, few intercessors; many writers, but few fighters. Failing here, we fail everywhere.
— Leonard Ravenhill
The wise man in the storm prays God not for safety from danger but for deliverance from fear.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
For me, prayer is a surge of the heart; it is a simple look turned toward heaven, it is a cry of recognition and of love, embracing both trial and joy.
— Thérèse de Lisieux
Why is it that when we talk to God we’re said to be praying, but when God talks to us we’re schizophrenic?
— Lily Tomlin
God's in His heaven, alls right with the world', whispered Anne softly.
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.
— Ernest Hemingway, A Clean Well Lighted Place
Today Lord I am going to do my best with Your help and for Your glory. I realize that there are many different people in the world with a variety of opinions and expectations. I will concentrate on being a God-pleaser and not a self-pleaser or man-pleaser. The rest I leave in Your hands lord. Grant me favor with You and with men and continue transforming me into the image of Your dear Son. Thank You Lord.
— Joyce Meyer, Beauty for Ashes: Receiving Emotional Healing
Prayer makes your heart bigger, until it is capable of containing the gift of God himself. Prayer begets faith, faith begets love, and love begets service on behalf of the poor.
— Mother Teresa
We should seek not so much to pray but to become prayer.
— Francis of Assisi
God, teach me to be patient, teach me to go slow,Teach me how to wait on You when my way I do not know.Teach me sweet forbearance when things do not go rightSo I remain unruffled when others grow uptight.Teach me how to quiet my racing, rising heartSo I might hear the answer You are trying to impart.Teach me to let go, dear God, and pray undisturbed untilMy heart is filled with inner peace and I learn to know your will.
— Helen Steiner Rice
He does not ask much of us, merely a thought of Him from time to time, a little act of adoration, sometimes to ask for His grace, sometimes to offer Him your sufferings, at other times to thank Him for the graces, past and present, He has bestowed on you, in the midst of your troubles to take solace in Him as often as you can. Lift up your heart to Him during your meals and in company; the least little remembrance will always be the most pleasing to Him. One need not cry out very loudly; He is nearer to us than we think.
— Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God
God bless us, every one!
— Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace;where there is hatred, let me sow love;when there is injury, pardon;where there is doubt, faith;where there is despair, hope;where there is darkness, light;and where there is sadness, joy.Grant that I may not so much seekto be consoled as to console;to be understood, as to understand,to be loved as to love;for it is in giving that we receive,it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,and it is in dying [to ourselves] that we are born to eternal life.
— Francis of Assisi
What the Church needs to-day is not more machinery or better, not new organizations or more and novel methods, but men whom the Holy Ghost can use -- men of prayer, men mighty in prayer. The Holy Ghost does not flow through methods, but through men. He does not come on machinery, but on men. He does not anoint plans, but men -- men of prayer.
— E.M. Bounds, Power Through Prayer
Lord, make me a blessing to someone today.
— Jan Karon, At Home in Mitford
the real "work" of prayer is to become silent and listen to the voice that says good things about me.To gently push aside and silence the many voices that question my goodness and to trust that I will hear the voice of blessing-- that demands real effort. 
— Henri J.M. Nouwen, Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular World
Do not have your concert first, and then tune your instrument afterwards. Begin the day with the Word of God and prayer, and get first of all into harmony with Him.
— James Hudson Taylor
And shall I pray Thee change Thy will, my Father,Until it be according unto mine?But, no, Lord, no, that never shall be, ratherI pray Thee blend my human will with Thine.I pray Thee hush the hurrying, eager longing,I pray Thee soothe the pangs of keen desire—See in my quiet places, wishes thronging—Forbid them, Lord, purge, though it be with fire.
— Amy Carmichael
If you want to protect me, prayer is just as powerful a weapon as that gun you carry.
— Karen Witemeyer, Short-Straw Bride
Your desire is your prayer. Picture the fulfillment of your desire now and feel its reality and you will experience the joy of the answered.Dr. Joseph Murphy
— Joseph Murphy
Pounce had it easier than any of us. No one noticed a black cat in the street. He stopped here and there to sniff aught of interest. Wherever our Rat stopped, Pounce was there, close enough to see up the Rat's nose. I was so proud. Now there was a proper god, making himself useful!Since my thought might be deemed blasphemy, I said silent prayers to the Goddess and to Mithros. I begged forgiveness and asked them not to misunderstand. Since I wasn't blasted where I stood, I guess they forgave me, or they hadn't heard my blasphemy.
— Tamora Pierce, Terrier
The best way to obtain truth and wisdom is not to ask from books, but to go to God in prayer, and obtain divine teaching.
— Joseph Smith Jr.