c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I'm all these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with no ground for their settling, no sky for their dispersing, coming together to say, fleeing one another to say, that I am they, all of them, those that merge, those that part, those that never meet, and nothing else, yes, something else, that I'm something quite different, a quite different thing, a wordless thing in an empty place, a hard shut dry cold black place, where nothing stirs, nothing speaks, and that I listen, and that I seek, like a caged beast born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born in a cage and dead in a cage, born and then dead, born in a cage and then dead in a cage, in a word like a beast, in one of their words, like such a beast, and that I seek, like such a beast, with my little strength, such a beast, with nothing of its species left but fear and fury, no, the fury is past, nothing but fear, nothing of all its due but fear centupled, fear of its shadow, no, blind from birth, of sound then, if you like, we'll have that, one must have something, it's a pity, but there it is, fear of sound, fear of sounds, the sounds of beasts, the sounds of men, sounds in the daytime and sounds at night, that's enough, fear of sounds all sounds, more or less, more or less fear, all sounds, there's only one, continuous, day and night, what is it, it's steps coming and going, it's voices speaking for a moment, it's bodies groping their way, it's the air, it's things, it's the air among the things, that's enough, that I seek, like it, no, not like it, like me, in my own way, what am I saying, after my fashion, that I seek, what do I seek now, what it is, it must be that, it can only be that, what it is, what it can be, what what can be, what I seek, no, what I hear, I hear them, now it comes back to me, they say I seek what it is I hear, I hear them, now it comes back to me, what it can possibly be, and where it can possibly come from, since all is silent here, and the walls thick, and how I manage, without feeling an ear on me, or a head, or a body, or a soul, how I manage, to do what, how I manage, it's not clear, dear dear, you say it's not clear, something is wanting to make it clear, I'll seek, what is wanting, to make everything clear, I'm always seeking something, it's tiring in the end, and it's only the beginning.
— Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable
I like the sounds of words. Words are very enjoyable. I like words because they are... seductive. And I like words because they can contain... fantasies.
— James Lusarde, The Train of Arousal
His voice was like soothing melted chocolate. I wanted him to ooze his lovely voice all over my naked body.
— James Lusarde, The Train of Arousal
No words. Just my finger pointing in silence. My finger silently saying, ’Unwrap me, darling.
— James Lusarde, The Apartment of Sex
Sometimes you want to say things, and you're missing an idea to make them with, and missing a word to make the idea with. In the beginning was the word. That's how somebody tried to explain it once. Until something is named, it doesn't exist.
— Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17
They said a lot of things to each other that night, but nothing that involved words.
— Michael  Grant
Perhaps it was only that when you try to put it into words you cannot express it truly, it never sounds as you dream it.
— Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels
When you draw, you copy the world don't you? You remake it on paper, but it isn't the same. It's yours. No one else could have created it just like that. When I make poems, I use the words we all use, but the order and the sound create a new power. This wood is someone's creation. We stumble through it's tendrils, as if we're crawling through the synapses of his mind.
— Catherine Fisher, Darkhenge
From her dubious tone alone, I could see how Karin had no idea how terrifying words spoken quietly could be. How words chosen precisely to wreak maximum damage ticked like a bomb in your head, but exploded in your heart hours later, leaving you scarred and changed.
— Justina Chen, North of Beautiful
My only defense is the acquisition of vocabulary.
— Margaret Edson, Wit
There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.
— John Updike
He'd call me false and faithless and I've always had a weakness for those two words; next to cruel, they're the nicest words for a woman to hear, and not so hard to earn.
— Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses
...come lie beside me again and understand - the others can show by actions, but I alone will immortalize you in words...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
But he had turned, little by little, a disturbance into words, he had made a pillow of old words, for his head.
— Samuel Beckett, Watt
At certain moments, words are nothing; it is thetone in which they are uttered.
— Paul Bourget
The words explain us all, each having a meaning in a meantime: every time for a lifetime.
— Aporva Kala, Life... Love... Kumbh...
Chameleonesque, hobbitish, unicorned, stompled, selfishism, and unwakeable may not be real words, but you do know what they mean.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway
Words can't fix my life.Words can't give me a family.Words can't do jack.You may be a teacher, Ms. Leone, but face it: You don't know squat.
— Wendelin Van Draanen, Runaway
The more words you know, the more clearly and powerfully you will think...and the more ideas you will invite into your mind.
— Wilfred Funk
You ask me what it feels like to have wings. I can only tell you the feeling with words. And words have neither feelings nor wings. Words are leaky vessels into which a cargo of meaning and emotion are placed, and when they leave you and reach the farther shore of another mind a considerable portion of that cargo has been lost at sea. Fallen overboard, gone to rot, consumed by vermin, decayed to a state unlike its original form.
— Steven R. Boyett, Mortality Bridge
:Paintings are easy to see," he said after a moment. "Open, presented flat to the eye. Words are not easy. Words have to be discovered, deep in their pages, deciphered, translated, read. Words are symbols to be encoded, their letters trees in a forest, enmeshed, their tangled meanings never finally picked apart.
— Catherine Fisher, Darkhenge
‎Without a knowledge of where words come from, things disappear, history is lost.
— Patrick Lane, There Is A Season
A tongue is about the size of a bullet, but much more fierce and powerful.
— Anthony Liccione
...perhaps in actions I'm less of a man - but, oh the words - such lovely words...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
I won’t ever tell someone to never hold on for what might be gone; because if they don’t see it for themselves, my words will be just words.
— Rayvon L. Browne
You know your heart and soul are stapled to that manuscript, but what we see are the words on the paper
— Teresa Nielsen Haydense
Our words were a shaky ladder; all I could do was climb, uncertain if I was about to surmount a glorious peak or fall and smash myself on the rocks below.
— Deva Fagan, The Magical Misadventures of Prunella Bogthistle
I loathe my childhood and all that remains of it.Jean-Paul Sartre, Words
— Carole Seymour-Jones, A Dangerous Liaison
I didn't know how to say goodbye. Words were stupid. They said so little. Yet they opened up holes you could fall into and never climb out of again.
— Ann Rinaldi, A Stitch in Time
Words.I’m surrounded by thousands of words. Maybe millions. Cathedral. Mayonnaise. Pomegranate.Mississippi. Neapolitan. Hippopotamus.Silky. Terrifying. Iridescent.Tickle. Sneeze. Wish. Worry.Words have always swirled around me like snowflakes—each one delicate and different, each one melting untouched in my hands.Deep within me, words pile up in huge drifts. Mountains of phrases and sentences and connected ideas. Clever expressions. Jokes. Love songs.From the time I was really little—maybe just a few months old—words were like sweet, liquid gifts, and I drank them like lemonade. I could almost taste them. They made my jumbled thoughts and feelings have substance. My parents have always blanketed me with conversation. They chattered and babbled. They verbalized and vocalized. My father sang to me. My mother whispered her strength into my ear.Every word my parents spoke to me or about me I absorbed and kept and remembered. All of them.I have no idea how I untangled the complicated process of words and thought, but it happened quickly and naturally. By the time I was two, all my memories had words, and all my words had meanings.But only in my head.I have never spoken one single word. I am almost eleven years old.
— Sharon M. Draper, Out of My Mind
There are only 3 things that can make your dreams come true: your thoughts, your words, and your actions.
— Mike Dooley
When you're having an asthma attack, you don't have any breath. When you don't have any breath, it's hard to speak. You're limited by the amount of air you can spend from your lungs. That's not much, something between three to six words. It gives the word a meaning. You're searching through the piles of words in your head, picking the most important ones. And they have a cost. It's not like the healthy people that take out every word that has accumulated in their head like garbage. When someone, while having an asthma attack, says "I love you" or "I really love you", there's a difference. A word difference. And a word is a lot, because that word could have been "sit", "Ventolin" or even "ambulance".
— Etgar Keret, צינורות
Gods? Don't let that impress you. Anyone can be a god if they have enough worshippers. You don't even have to have powers anymore. In my time I've seen theatre gods, gladiator gods, even storyteller gods - you people see gods everywhere. Gives you an excuse for not thinking for yourselves.God is just a word. Like Fury. like demon, Just words people use for things they don't understand. Reverse it and you get dog. It's just as appropriate.
— Joanne Harris, Runemarks
You can get much further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.
— Al Capone
Words only reveal half of your heart. Service defines the other half. Character is the combination of the two.
— Shannon L. Alder
Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
People talk a lot but they rarely say anything.
— Sandra Chami Kassis
And after that, and also for each word, there should be sentences that show the twists and turns of meanings—the way almost every word slips in its silvery, fishlike way, weaving this way and that, adding subtleties of nuance to itself, and then perhaps shedding them as public mood dictates.
— Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary
Words themselves are all the ghosts we need.
— Donald Harington, Ekaterina
Words - take her with youlet her rest in your rhymesWords - take her awaysomewhere beyond timeWords - ease her breathinglay her softly on the floorthere - let her lingerand listen like ever beforeLeave her windows uncovered at nightand fill her room with the citylightsas they illuminate the skyit reminds her of the people outsidecause she won't sleep unless she heals her lonelinessWalk with her beneath the treetopscreate new paths and memoriesshow her how the sunlightglances through the gaps between the leavesWords - help her change the worldin only one versetell her to reach for the starsand to always put love firstLeave her windows uncovered at nightand fill her rooms with the citylightsas they illuminate the skyit reminds her of the people outsideit reminds her of the peopleit reminds her of the peopleit reminds her of the people outside.
— Ane Brun
Words form the sinew and muscle that hold societies upright, he argued. Consider the Koran, the Bible, the American Constitution, but also letters from fathers to sons, last wills, blessings, curses. Thousands upon thousands of words infused with the full spectrum of emotions fill in the nooks and corners of human life.
— National Geographic Society
At first, that's who I was. I wanted to know more about this boy who lives among us, but who never truly speaks... But now I feel like finding out about him is one of the ways I found out about myself. I did not expect to love his words. I did no expect to find myself in the.
— Ally Condie, Matched
She walked rather quickly; she liked to be active, though at times she gave an impression of repose that was at once static and evocative. This was because she knew few words and believed in none, and in the world she was rather silent, contributing just her share of urbane humor with a precision that approached meagreness. But at the moment when strangers tended to grow uncomfortable in the presence of this economy she would seize the topic and rush off with it, feverishly surprised with herself-- then bring it back and relinquish it abruptly, almost timidly, like an obedient retriever, having been adequate and something more.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night
Words are not brains, you know.
— Deepak Chopra, The Return of Merlin
When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don’t expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie.
— Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
All words, then, belonging to the inner world of the mind, are of the imagination, are originally poetic words.
— George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts
Your words have the power of life and death. Choose them wisely.
— Orrin Woodward
Don't let yourself be amazed by the imagination of a writer and his words, writers are almost all the time in a love-hate relationship with words.
— Nema Al-Araby
I liked old time music but what i meant by that was the period from the 1930s through the 60s, nothing before and little after. Performers like fats waller, Sinatra, billie holiday, louis armstrong, rosemary clooney, ella, sammy Davis Jr, dean martin... If the lyrics weren't stupid. Words were important.
— Jeffery Deaver, Edge
The night before, I'd gone overboard with my Lila poems, and maybe it's true that I was hoping that in them he'd see the genius of me, the beauty of my words in his hands.
— Beth Kephart, Undercover
...because if there was one thing he didn't like it was big words, they just lied and covered things up, those big words, they didn't let what really was live and breathe but just carried it off into something that wanted to be big, that's what he thought...
— Jon Fosse, Aliss at the Fire
Words can be a fortress or a drawbridge to disaster
— Benny Bellamacina, Philosophical Uplifting Quotes and Poems
Words will only ruin you, if you allow them.
— Anthony Liccione
Every poet knows that the gift of the gods is not fire but language. “Man dwells poetically on this earth,” Hölderin wrote. Language is the essence of being human. We can think, thanks to language, for thought exists only by the grace of words. Our experiences and emotions are molded by language. It is language that allows us to name and know the world. We ourselves are known by language, through prayer, confession, poetry. Language gives us a world that reaches beyond the reality of the moment, to a past (there was…) and a future (there shall be…). It is through language that eternity has a space and that the dead continue to speak: “Defunctus adhuc loquitur” (Hebrews 11:4). Thanks to language, there is meaning, there is truth.
— Rob Riemen, Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal
It's ridiculous to think that taking out words will heal hearts,because a palm-sized box is just not enough for the anger of this world.
— Nema Al-Araby, Remnants and Ashes
As a writer, you must truly possess a love for words.""Yes, that's right," I agreed."I've noticed that some authors favor particular words, making frequent use of them. Do you have a favorite?"I nodded assuredly and shared my answer. "BECAUSE."My interviewer looked surprised, as though he'd expected an impressive adjective or some rare verb. "That's your favorite word? Why?"I tried not to smirk. "Because.
— Richelle E. Goodrich
In such troubled times, we must remember the value writers have—the value of inventing new language to keep pace with the rapidly transforming world around us.
— Jonathan Stalling
... but I love language. It is a living, breathing, evolving thing, and language has power. Whether in a song lyric, a poem, a speech, or a simple conversation, we’ve all experienced words that resonate with us. They may make us recall a powerful moment, inspire us, move us, or perhaps, comfort us…. But at the same time, we don’t think in words. We think in pictures. If I say the word ‘dog’ to you, you aren’t picturing the letters, d-o-g, you’re picturing a dog from your memory...
— Lily Velden, Animal Magnetism
Sometimes it's not what you say, Valkyrie, it's just the fact that you're saying it.
— Derek Landy, Mortal Coil
I never knew words could be so confusing," Milo said to Tock as he bent down to scratch the dog's ear."Only when you use a lot to say a little," answered Tock.Milo thought this was quite the wisest thing he'd heard all day.
— Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
If you have to use the words, “deep down” all that means is you're fooling yourself. You're seeing what you want to see and not what's really there.
— Nyrae Dawn, What a Boy Wants
Because all the words in the world won't do much good if they're just rattling around in your head.
— Kristin Levine, The Lions of Little Rock
Sometimes words come out of me and I don't know where they come from or why. They're like falling stars tumbling through the universe; bright, burning things that can't be stopped.
— Glenda Millard, A Small Free Kiss in the Dark
Words are precious things meant to create, to imagine, to dream with.
— Elizabeth Chandler, Summer in the City
Trust is a thing you know without words.
— Juliet Marillier
If my words don't flow out of a heart that rests in God's control, sovereignty, then they come out of the heart that seeks control so I can get what I want.
— Mark Driscoll, Real Marriage: The Truth About Sex, Friendship, and Life Together
I would rather my heart be without words than my words be without heart.
— LaMar Boschman
Silence made space for other people's words, which was important for those who needed to be listened to.
— Rachel Simon, The Story of Beautiful Girl
I saw pearls in her mouth and the velvet cushion of her tongue and I heard the magic words come out of her.
— Glenda Millard, A Small Free Kiss in the Dark
Then you must tell them that love isn't something like a grindstone that's the same thing everywhere and do the same thing to everything it touches. Love is like the sea. It is a moving thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from the shore it meets, and its different with every shore." (written properly and not in slang)
— Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
I wish I didn’t need words to speak to her. They sometimes hold very different meanings for us both.
— Darnell Lamont Walker
Words can be powerful allies. Or enemies
— Yasmine Galenorn, Songs of Love and Death: All-Original Tales of Star-Crossed Love
I know that sentence is long and has too many joining words in it but sometimes, when I'm angry, words burst out of me like a shout, or, if I'm sad, they spill out of me like tears, and if I'm happy my words are like a song. If that happens it's one of my rules not to change them because they're coming out of my heart and not my head, and that's the way they're meant to be.
— Glenda Millard, A Small Free Kiss in the Dark
I didn't understand right away what she meant. But her words soaked through my skull like warm oil, behind my eyes, down my spine and into the empty space inside me.
— Glenda Millard, A Small Free Kiss in the Dark
Contrary to what is generally believed, meaning and sense were never the same thing, meaning shows itself at once, direct, literal, explicit, enclosed in itself, univocal, if you like, while sense cannot stay still, it seethes with second, third and fourth senses, radiating out in different directions that divide and subdivide into branches and branchlets, until they disappear from view, the sense of every word is like a star hurling spring tides out into space, cosmic winds, magnetic perturbations, afflictions.
— José Saramago, All the Names
Silence is a great companion when words are devoid of meanings.
— Nema Al-Araby
There is great worth in holding universal truths and timelessly beautiful words in your heart, which will stay there forever, infusing your thoughts and speech…
— Dan Stevens
What words cannot convey ... the mind can read.
— Stephen Richards
since words are all we have of wings.
— Mark O'Connor in the poem 'Mutton Birds', The Olive Tree: Collected Poems 1972 2000
Some people make tunes, but it is lines that run like moving messages through my head. Whatever else I am saying and doing often has no bearing on this inner, verbal life.
— Susan Hill, The Boy Who Taught the Beekeeper to Read: and Other Stories
You have to have a plot too, you know? Because without it, your life is less of a story and more of an empty paper.
— Nema Al-Araby
Language is the expression of ideas by means of speech-sounds combined into words. Words are combined into sentences, this combination answering to that of ideas into thoughts.
— Henry Sweet
Every utterance is an event, and no two events are precisely alike. The extreme view, therefore, is that no word ever means the same thing twice.
— Louis B. Saloman
Words have always swirled around me like snowflakes-each one delicate and different, each one melting untouched in my hands.
— Sharon M. Draper, Out of My Mind
Words are the thread in the fabric of the universe.
— Tiffany Reisz, The Siren
What do you think was the first sound to become a word, a meaning?...I imagined two people without words, unable to speak to each other. I imagined the need: The color of the sky that meant 'storm.' The smell of fire taht meant 'Flee.' The sound of a tiger about to pounce. Who would worry about these things?And then I realized what the first word must have been: ma, the sound of a baby smacking its lips in search of her mother's breast. For a long time, that was the only word the baby needed. Ma, ma, ma. Then the mother decided that was her name and she began to speak, too. She taught the baby to be careful: sky, fire, tiger. A mother is always the beginning. She is how things begin.
— Amy Tan
You couldn’t leave words lying around where our enemies might find them.
— Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood
There is no use indicting words, they are no shoddier than what they peddle.
— Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies
I looked up fairness in the dictionary and it was not there.
— William Giraldi
I like the sound of words, but I don't ever really expect my slow, slanted impression of the world to change by what I read.
— Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
words...To lure the tribal shoals to epigram / And order.
— Seamus Heaney
From time to time I try to imagine this world of which he spoke--a culture in whose mythology words might be that precious, in which words were conceived as vessels for communications from the heart; a society in which words are holy, and the challenge of life is based upon the quest for gentle words, holy words, gentle truths, holy truths.I try to imagine for myself a world in which the words one gives one's children are the shell into which they shall grow, so one chooses one's children are the shell into which they shall grow, so one chooses one's words carefully, like precious gifts, like magnificent gifts, like magnificent inheritances, for they convey an excess of what we have imagined, they bear gifts beyond imagination, they reveal and revisit the wealth of history.How carefully, how slowly, and how lovingly we might step into our expectations of each other in such a world.
— Patricia J. Williams, The Rooster's Egg: On the Persistence of Prejudice
Words are Hamlet's constant companions, his weapons, and his defenses. ...And yet, words also serve as Hamlet's prison. He analyzes and examines every nuance of his situation until he has exhausted every angle. They cause him to be indecisive. He dallies in his own wit, intoxicated by the mix of words he can concoct; he frustrates his own burning desire to be more like his father, the Hyperion. When he says that Claudius is "... no more like my father than I to Hercules" he recognizes his enslavement to words, his inability to thrust home his sword of truth. No mythic character is Hamlet. He is stuck, unable to avenge his father's death because words control him.
— Carla Lynn Stockton, Cliffs Notes on Shakespeare's Hamlet
How can anyone underestimate the ballistic quality of words? Invisible things happen in intangible moments. What should keep us writing is precisely that possibility of explosions
— Miguel Syjuco
In the process, what must be spoken meets what cannot be said. Each word is a catalyst, requiring the writer to break out forcefully from another story, from the primitive camp where history, society, and politics converge, to touch upon that 'what' and that 'who.' At that touch, one finds the unlimited boundaries of man, concealed by words.
— Duo Duo
Each word's evocative value or virtue, its individual power of touching springs in the mind and of initiating visions, becomes a treasure to revel in. Besides this hold on affection a word may well have about it the glamorous prestige of high adventures in great company. Think of that the plain word "dust" calls to mind. "Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was." "Dust hath closed Helen's eye." "All follow this and come to dust." "The way to dusty death." So, to the lover of words, each word may be not a precious stone only, but one that has shone on Solomon's temple or in Cleopatra's hair.
— C.E. Montague, A Writer's Notes On His Trade
I can feel the power of the words doing the work. Must trust language more.
— Antony Sher, Year of the King: An Actor's Diary and Sketchbook
I didn't want to wake up. I was having a much better time asleep. And that's really sad. It was almost like a reverse nightmare, like when you wake up from a nightmare you're so relieved. I woke up into a nightmare.
— Ned Vizzini, It's Kind of a Funny Story
The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.
— David Foster Wallace
That's the thing about depression: A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight. But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it's impossible to ever see the end.
— Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
I can't eat and I can't sleep. I'm not doing well in terms of being a functional human, you know?
— Ned Vizzini, It's Kind of a Funny Story
Some friends don't understand this. They don't understand how desperate I am to have someone say, I love you and I support you just the way you are because you're wonderful just the way you are. They don't understand that I can't remember anyone ever saying that to me. I am so demanding and difficult for my friends because I want to crumble and fall apart before them so that they will love me even though I am no fun, lying in bed, crying all the time, not moving. Depression is all about If you loved me you would.
— Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
There is no point treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, 'There now, hang on, you'll get over it.' Sadness is more or less like a head cold- with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
— Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees
Noble deeds and hot baths are the best cures for depression.
— Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful.
— Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
I didn’t want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn’t know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I’d cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.
— Sylvia Plath
I'm the girl who is lost in space, the girl who is disappearing always, forever fading away and receding farther and farther into the background. Just like the Cheshire cat, someday I will suddenly leave, but the artificial warmth of my smile, that phony, clownish curve, the kind you see on miserably sad people and villains in Disney movies, will remain behind as an ironic remnant. I am the girl you see in the photograph from some party someplace or some picnic in the park, the one who is in fact soon to be gone. When you look at the picture again, I want to assure you, I will no longer be there. I will be erased from history, like a traitor in the Soviet Union. Because with every day that goes by, I feel myself becoming more and more invisible...
— Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
I don't want to see anyone. I lie in the bedroom with the curtains drawn and nothingness washing over me like a sluggish wave. Whatever is happening to me is my own fault. I have done something wrong, something so huge I can't even see it, something that's drowning me. I am inadequate and stupid, without worth. I might as well be dead.
— Margaret Atwood, CAT'S EYE.
I waste at least an hour every day lying in bed. Then I waste time pacing. I waste time thinking. I waste time being quiet and not saying anything because I'm afraid I'll stutter.
— Ned Vizzini, It's Kind of a Funny Story
Its so hard to talk when you want to kill yourself. That's above and beyond everything else, and it's not a mental complaint-it's a physical thing, like it's physically hard to open your mouth and make the words come out. They don't come out smooth and in conjunction with your brain the way normal people's words do; they come out in chunks as if from a crushed-ice dispenser; you stumble on them as they gather behind your lower lip. So you just keep quiet.
— Ned Vizzini, It's Kind of a Funny Story
because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.
— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
I don't want any more of this try, try again stuff. I just want out. I’ve had it. I am so tired. I am twenty and I am already exhausted.
— Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
I'll never forget how the depression and loneliness felt good and bad at the same time. Still does.
— Henry Rollins, The Portable Henry Rollins
Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or broken up with someone. But these experiences carry with them feelings. Depression, instead, is flat, hollow, and unendurable. It is also tiresome. People cannot abide being around you when you are depressed. They might think that they ought to, and they might even try, but you know and they know that you are tedious beyond belief: you are irritable and paranoid and humorless and lifeless and critical and demanding and no reassurance is ever enough. You're frightened, and you're frightening, and you're "not at all like yourself but will be soon," but you know you won't.
— Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
Killing oneself is, anyway, a misnomer. We don't kill ourselves. We are simply defeated by the long, hard struggle to stay alive. When somebody dies after a long illness, people are apt to say, with a note of approval, "He fought so hard." And they are inclined to think, about a suicide, that no fight was involved, that somebody simply gave up. This is quite wrong.
— Sally Brampton, Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression
The sun stopped shining for me is all. The whole story is: I am sad. I am sad all the time and the sadness is so heavy that I can't get away from it. Not ever.
— Nina LaCour, Hold Still
And I felt like my heart had been so thoroughly and irreparably broken that there could be no real joy again, that at best there might eventually be a little contentment. Everyone wanted me to get help and rejoin life, pick up the pieces and move on, and I tried to, I wanted to, but I just had to lie in the mud with my arms wrapped around myself, eyes closed, grieving, until I didn’t have to anymore.
— Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year
It's my experience that people are a lot more sympathetic if they can see you hurting, and for the millionth time in my life I wish for measles or smallpox or some other easily understood disease just to make it easier on me and also on them.
— Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places
You say you're 'depressed' - all i see is resilience. You are allowed to feel messed up and inside out. It doesn't mean you're defective - it just means you're human.
— David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
I feel like a defective model, like I came off the assembly line flat-out fucked and my parents should have taken me back for repairs before the warranty ran out.
— Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
Depression is the most unpleasant thing I have ever experienced. . . . It is that absence of being able to envisage that you will ever be cheerful again. The absence of hope. That very deadened feeling, which is so very different from feeling sad. Sad hurts but it's a healthy feeling. It is a necessary thing to feel. Depression is very different.
— J.K. Rowling
If you are chronically down, it is a lifelong fight to keep from sinking 
— Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
At heart, I have always been a coper, I've mostly been able to walk around with my wounds safely hidden, and I've always stored up my deep depressive episodes for the weeks off when there was time to have an abbreviated version of a complete breakdown. But in the end, I'd be able to get up and on with it, could always do what little must be done to scratch by.
— Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
I've got a bad case of the 3:00 am guilts - you know, when you lie in bed awake and replay all those things you didn't do right? Because, as we all know, nothing solves insomnia like a nice warm glass of regret, depression and self-loathing.
— D.D. Barant, Dying Bites
Some people are just not meant to be in this world. It's just too much for them.
— Phoebe Stone, The Boy on Cinnamon Street
I'm fine. Well, I'm not fine - I'm here.""Is there something wrong with that?""Absolutely.
— Ned Vizzini, It's Kind of a Funny Story
If I can't feel, if I can't move, if I can't think, and I can't care, then what conceivable point is there in living?
— Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
I just want to sleep. A coma would be nice. Or amnesia. Anything, just to get rid of this, these thoughts, whispers in my mind. Did he rape my head, too?
— Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak
Some catastrophic moments invite clarity, explode in split moments: You smash your hand through a windowpane and then there is blood and shattered glass stained with red all over the place; you fall out a window and break some bones and scrape some skin. Stitches and casts and bandages and antiseptic solve and salve the wounds. But depression is not a sudden disaster. It is more like a cancer: At first its tumorous mass is not even noticeable to the careful eye, and then one day -- wham! -- there is a huge, deadly seven-pound lump lodged in your brain or your stomach or your shoulder blade, and this thing that your own body has produced is actually trying to kill you. Depression is a lot like that: Slowly, over the years, the data will accumulate in your heart and mind, a computer program for total negativity will build into your system, making life feel more and more unbearable. But you won't even notice it coming on, thinking that it is somehow normal, something about getting older, about turning eight or turning twelve or turning fifteen, and then one day you realize that your entire life is just awful, not worth living, a horror and a black blot on the white terrain of human existence. One morning you wake up afraid you are going to live.In my case, I was not frightened in the least bit at the thought that I might live because I was certain, quite certain, that I was already dead. The actual dying part, the withering away of my physical body, was a mere formality. My spirit, my emotional being, whatever you want to call all that inner turmoil that has nothing to do with physical existence, were long gone, dead and gone, and only a mass of the most fucking god-awful excruciating pain like a pair of boiling hot tongs clamped tight around my spine and pressing on all my nerves was left in its wake.That's the thing I want to make clear about depression: It's got nothing at all to do with life. In the course of life, there is sadness and pain and sorrow, all of which, in their right time and season, are normal -- unpleasant, but normal. Depression is an altogether different zone because it involves a complete absence: absence of affect, absence of feeling, absence of response, absence of interest. The pain you feel in the course of a major clinical depression is an attempt on nature's part (nature, after all, abhors a vacuum) to fill up the empty space. But for all intents and purposes, the deeply depressed are just the walking, waking dead.And the scariest part is that if you ask anyone in the throes of depression how he got there, to pin down the turning point, he'll never know. There is a classic moment in The Sun Also Rises when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt, and all he can say in response is, 'Gradually and then suddenly.' When someone asks how I love my mind, that is all I can say too
— Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.
— John Keats
I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people's eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth.
— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Maybe we all have darkness inside of us and some of us are better at dealing with it than others.
— Jasmine Warga, My Heart and Other Black Holes
In addition to my other numerous acquaintances, I have one more intimate confidant… My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known — no wonder, then, that I return the love.
— Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.
— Philip K. Dick
There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why,--when it did not seem worthwhile to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation.
— Kate Chopin
This fall I think you're riding for—it's a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn't permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement's designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn't supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn't supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started.
— J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
You're fucked. You thought you were going to be someone, but now it's obvious you're nobody. You haven't got as much talent as you thought you had, and there was no Plan B, and you got no skills and no education, and now you're looking at forty or fifty years of nothing. Less than nothing, probably. That's pretty heavy. That's worse than having the brain thing, because what you got now will take a lot longer to kill you. You've got the choice of a slow, painful death, or a quick, merciful one.
— Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down
Mental illness is so much more complicated than any pill that any mortal could invent 
— Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
It's brilliant, being depressed; you can behave as badly as you like.
— Nick Hornby, High Fidelity
I have had to experience so much stupidity, so many vices, so much error, so much nausea, disillusionment and sorrow, just in order to become a child again and begin anew. I had to experience despair, I had to sink to the greatest mental depths, to thoughts of suicide, in order to experience grace.
— Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
Depression on my left, Loneliness on my right. They don't need to show me thier badges. I know these guys very well.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
Even when I try to stir myself up, I just get irritated because I can't make anything come out. And in the middle of the night I lie here thinking about all this. If I don't get back on track somehow, I'm dead, that's the sense I get. There isn't a single strong emotion inside me.
— Banana Yoshimoto
Depression is melancholy minus its charms.
— Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor
It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next.It made me tired just to think of it.
— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Anyone who has actually been that sad can tell you that there's nothing beautiful or literary or mysterious about depression.
— Jasmine Warga, My Heart and Other Black Holes
This story ["The Depressed Person"] was the most painful thing I ever wrote. It's about narcissism, which is a part of depression. The character has traits of myself. I really lost friends while writing on that story, I became ugly and unhappy and just yelled at people. The cruel thing with depression is that it's such a self-centered illness - Dostoevsky shows that pretty good in his "Notes from Underground". The depression is painful, you're sapped/consumed by yourself; the worse the depression, the more you just think about yourself and the stranger and repellent you appear to others.
— David Foster Wallace
So you try to think of someone else you're mad at, and the unavoidable answer pops into your little warped brain: everyone.
— Ellen Hopkins
Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.
— Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
Depression is like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch it where it hurts. It's always there, though.
— Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot
I saw the world in black and white instead of the vibrant colours and shades I knew existed.
— Katie McGarry, Pushing the Limits
Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression's actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity. The more persuaded you are of your unique access to the rottenness, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, the more perfidiously happy-faced the rest of humanity seems for continuing to engage with it.
— Jonathan Franzen, How to Be Alone
Life is ten percent what you experience and ninety percent how you respond to it.
— Dorothy M. Neddermeyer
I’m not better, you know. The weight hasn’t left my head. I feel how easily I could fall back into it, lie down and not eat, waste my time and curse wasting my time, look at my homework and freak out and go and chill at Aaron’s, look at Nia and be jealous again, take the subway home and hope that it has an accident, go and get my bike and head to the Brooklyn Bridge. All of that is still there. The only thing is, it’s not an option now. It’s just… a possibility, like it’s a possibility that I could turn to dust in the next instant and be disseminated throughout the universe as an omniscient consciousness. It’s not a very likely possibility.
— Ned Vizzini, It's Kind of a Funny Story
All depression has its roots in self-pity, and all self-pity is rooted in people taking themselves too seriously."At the time Switters had disputed her assertion. Even at seventeen, he was aware that depression could have chemical causes."The key word here is roots," Maestra had countered. "The roots of depression. For most people, self-awareness and self-pity blossom simultaneously in early adolescence. It's about that time that we start viewing the world as something other than a whoop-de-doo playground, we start to experience personally how threatening it can e, how cruel and unjust. At the very moment when we become, for the first time, both introspective and socially conscientious, we receive the bad news that the world, by and large, doesn't give a rat's ass. Even an old tomato like me can recall how painful, scary, and disillusioning that realization was. So, there's a tendency, then, to slip into rage and self-pity, which if indulged, can fester into bouts of depression.""Yeah but Maestra - ""Don't interrupt. Now, unless someone stronger and wiser - a friend, a parent, a novelist, filmmaker, teacher, or musician - can josh us out of it, can elevate us and show us how petty and pompous and monumentally useless it is to take ourselves so seriously, then depression can become a habit, which, in tern, can produce a neurological imprint. Are you with me? Gradually, our brain chemistry becomes conditioned to react to negative stimuli in a particular, predictable way. One thing'll go wrong and it'll automatically switch on its blender and mix us that black cocktail, the ol' doomsday daiquiri, and before we know it, we're soused to the gills from the inside out. Once depression has become electrochemically integrated, it can be extremely difficult to philosophically or psychologically override it; by then it's playing by physical rules, a whole different ball game. That's why Switters my dearest, every time you've shown signs of feeling sorry for yourself, I've played my blues records really loud or read to you from The Horse's Mouth. And that's why when you've exhibited the slightest tendency toward self-importance, I've reminded you that you and me - you and I: excuse me - may be every bit as important as the President or the pope or the biggest prime-time icon in Hollywood, but none of us is much more than a pimple on the ass-end of creation, so let's not get carried away with ourselves. Preventive medicine, boy. It's preventive medicine.""But what about self-esteem?""Heh! Self-esteem is for sissies. Accept that you're a pimple and try to keep a lively sense of humor about it. That way lies grace - and maybe even glory.
— Tom Robbins, Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates
I couldn’t be with people and I didn’t want to be alone. Suddenly my perspective whooshed and I was far out in space, watching the world. I could see millions and millions of people, all slotted into their lives; then I could see me—I’d lost my place in the universe. It had closed up and there was nowhere for me to be. I was more lost than I had known it was possible for any human being to be.
— Marian Keyes, Anybody Out There?
In the meantime, I could withdraw to my room, could hide and sleep as if I were dead
— Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation