c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I don't-" I shake my head. (...) "What? What were you going to say?" This is another trick of shrinks. They never let you stop in midthought. If you open your mouth, they want to know exactly what you had the intention of saying.
— Ned Vizzini, It's Kind of a Funny Story
I cried until my eyes swelled shut, and then I slept, a black, dreamless sleep from which I awoke amazingly refreshed, at least until I remembered.
— Elizabeth Berg, The Year of Pleasures
When I am high I couldn’t worry about money if I tried. So I don’t. The money will come from somewhere; I am entitled; God will provide. Credit cards are disastrous, personal checks worse. Unfortunately, for manics anyway, mania is a natural extension of the economy. What with credit cards and bank accounts there is little beyond reach. So I bought twelve snakebite kits, with a sense of urgency and importance. I bought precious stones, elegant and unnecessary furniture, three watches within an hour of one another (in the Rolex rather than Timex class: champagne tastes bubble to the surface, are the surface, in mania), and totally inappropriate sirenlike clothes. During one spree in London I spent several hundred pounds on books having titles or covers that somehow caught my fancy: books on the natural history of the mole, twenty sundry Penguin books because I thought it could be nice if the penguins could form a colony. Once I think I shoplifted a blouse because I could not wait a minute longer for the woman-with-molasses feet in front of me in line. Or maybe I just thought about shoplifting, I don’t remember, I was totally confused. I imagine I must have spent far more than thirty thousand dollars during my two major manic episodes, and God only knows how much more during my frequent milder manias.But then back on lithium and rotating on the planet at the same pace as everyone else, you find your credit is decimated, your mortification complete: mania is not a luxury one can easily afford. It is devastating to have the illness and aggravating to have to pay for medications, blood tests, and psychotherapy. They, at least, are partially deductible. But money spent while manic doesn’t fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you’re given excellent reason to be even more so.
— Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
I did the only thing I knew how to do: I built my own walls of silence to disguise my desperation and what later came to be recognized and diagnosed as depression.
— Sharon E. Rainey, Making a Pearl from the Grit of Life
Imagine saying to somebody that you have a life-threatening illness, such as cancer, and being told to pull yourself together or get over it.Imagine being terribly ill and too afraid to tell anyone lest it destroys your career.Imagine being admitted to hospital because you are too ill to function and being too ashamed to tell anyone, because it is a psychiatric hospital.Imagine telling someone that you have recently been discharged and watching them turn away, in embarrassment or disgust or fear.Comparisons are odious. Stigmatising an illness is more odious still.
— Sally Brampton, Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression
Everyone's screaming,I try to make a sound,But no one hears me
— Simple Plan
A friend called the other day.'How are you?' she said.The sun was shining, the sky a merciless blue. It was only eleven in the morning but I had been awake since three twenty. I was in bed because, as usual, I could think of nowhere else to go. I said that I was feeling low. Low is the depressive's euphemism for despair.She said: 'How can you be depressed on a day like this?'I wanted to say: 'If I had flu, would you ask me how I could be sick on a day like this?
— Sally Brampton, Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression
Look at Charlie Brown's face. Would you please hold still a minute Charlie Brown? I want Linus to study your face. Now this is what you call a failure face, Linus. Notice how it has failure written all over it. Study it carefully Linus. You rarely see such a good example. Notice the deep lines, the dull vacant look in the eyes. Yes, I would say this is one of the finest examples of a failure face that your liable to see for a long while.
— Charles M. Schulz
He felt full of a dense and sour substance that was blocking his chest, and it wasn't grief. After all those years, life now seemed like no more than a trap, a maze, not even a maze, just a room that was all walls, no door.
— Etgar Keret, Gaza Blues: Different Stories
The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne.
— William Styron
No reason to feel depressed about being depressed. A depression can be a golden opportunity to collect the pieces and build ourselves anew. Global Souls are always on the move, nomads at heart, connected to various cities, commuters between cultures, both from here and everywhere.
— Elif Shafak
The English language lacks the words to mourn an absence. For the loss of a parent, grandparent, spouse, child or friend, we have all manner of words and phrases, some helpful some not. Still we are conditioned to say something, even if it is only “I’m sorry for your loss.” But for an absence, for someone who was never there at all, we are wordless to capture that particular emptiness. For those who deeply want children and are denied them, those missing babies hover like silent ephemeral shadows over their lives. Who can describe the feel of a tiny hand that is never held?
— Laura Bush, Spoken from the Heart
Isolation and loneliness are central causes of depression and despair.
— bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
That is how I experience life, as apocalypse and cataclysm. Each day brings an increasing inability in myself to make the smallest gesture, even to imagine myself confronting clear, real situations.The presence of others - always such an unexpected event for the soul - grows daily more painful and distressing. Talking to others makes me shudder. If they show any interest in me, I flee. If they look at me, I tremble.I am constantly on the defensive. Life and other people bruise me. I can't look reality in the eye. The sun itself leaves me feeling discouraged and desolate.
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
Well it’s good to have a car like that, once in a while somebody’ll say, ‘why don’t you come over for dinner?’ and I can just say, ‘Car won’t make it.’ I don’t have to tell them that time is scarcer than young pussy around here, and I don’t mean time to write POETRY. I mean time to lay in bed, alone, and stare up at the ceiling and not think at all, not at all, not at all…
— Charles Bukowski, Screams from the Balcony
If they'd been dogs, they would have all been in the yard eating grass and trying to yak up whatever was making them feel so lousy. Not a bone gnawed, not a ball chased-all tails went unwagged. Oh, life is a fast cat, a short leash, a flea in that place where you just can't scratch.
— Christopher Moore, The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove
Gertrude’s remedy for her mood swings was to print up hundreds of black-bordered calling cards embossed with the single word “Woe,” which she handed out gaily declaring, “Woe is me.
— Ross Wetzsteon, Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia 1910-1960
Depression is not generalized pessimism, but pessimism specific to the effects of one's own skilled action.
— Robert M. Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers
To fall in the void as I fell: none of you knows what that means… I went down into the void, to the most absolute bottom conceivable, and once there I saw that the extreme limit must have been much, much farther below, very remote, and I went on falling, to reach it.
— Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics
He had the feeling that there was something physically behind his eyes, blocking the light.
— Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot
I can feel the hurt. There's something good about it. Mostly it makes me stop remembering.
— Albert Borris, Crash Into Me
I enjoy almost everything. Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say “This is it”? My depression is a harassed feeling. I’m looking: but that’s not it — that’s not it. What is it? And shall I die before I find it?
— Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary
As to whether the depression will come back, it is every depressive's fear.
— Sally Brampton, Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression
A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear,A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief,Which finds no natural outlet or relief,In word, or sigh, or tear.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The depressed person is a radical, sullen atheist.
— Julia Kristeva
The rain fell like dead bullets.
— Scott Nicholson
I was so self-critical. I still am
—  but it's not as bad anymore.
Sometimes, all you can dois lie in bed,and hope to fall asleep beforeyou fall apart.
— William C. Hannan
It’s a huge thing, this Shift, just as big as I imagined. My brain doesn’t want to think anymore; all of a sudden it wants to do.
— Ned Vizzini, It's Kind of a Funny Story
For six days I didn’t get up except to make a cup of tea, or fry an egg, or lie in the skinny bath gazing at a cracked ceiling. The days punished me with their slowness, piling up the hours on me, spreading their joylessness about the room.A doctor would have said I was suffering from depression. Everything I have read since suggests this was the case. But when you are in the grip of something like that it doesn’t usefully announce itself. No. what happens is you sit in a dark, dark cave, and you wait. If you are lucky there is a pinprick of light, and if you are especially lucky that pinprick will grow larger and larger, until one day the cave appears to slip behind, and just like that you find yourself in daylight and free. This is how it happened for me.
— Lloyd Jones, Mister Pip
. . . crazy world or maybe it's just the view we have of it, looking through a crack in the door, never being able to see the whole room, the whole picture.
— Judith Guest, Ordinary People
People talk about how fast life can go from good to bad. How on day you're happy, everything is going fine, and then something happens. Someone dies or someone leaves. There's an illness or an accident. Life as you know it slips away. But it can got the other way too. You can go from god-awful to pretty OK in a single day. That's what happened to us, and it was just as jarring.
— Laura M. Flynn, Swallow the Ocean: A Memoir
My demeanor isn't that of a woman enraged. To see me slumped, glassy-eyed, holding a sandwich someone has cut for me into four "manageable" pieces, a person might tell you I look much more like a woman subdued.
— Koren Zailckas
I keep telling you that feeling is not selective. You can't feel pain, you aren't gonna feel anything else either.
— Judith Guest
Anyone who's happy in a world this fucked-up has some serious psychological issues. You think I'm crazy because I see things as they are. You'd rather put on Disneyland goggles and watch TV and pretend it's fine. It's not crazy if I see monsters when I live in a fucking nightmare.
— Leah Raeder, Black Iris
Depression is not madness, it's just depression, the loser version, the low-energy response to bad stuff that happens in your life. When you're depressed, you think you're the only one to have ever tasted this kind of hurt. And that lonely self-regard brings with it its own painful pleasure.
— Ana Menéndez, The Last War: A Novel
It's hard to part the curtains when the dark holds such familiarity.
— Donna Lynn Hope
Like antidepressants, a substantial part of the benefit of psychotherapy depends on a placebo effect, or as Moerman calls it, the meaning response. At least part of the improvement that is produced by these treatments is due to the relationship between the therapist and the client and to the client's expectancy of getting better. That is a problem for antidepressant treatment. It is a problem because drugs are supposed to work because of their chemistry, not because of the psychological factors. But it is not a problem for psychotherapy. Psychotherapists are trained to provide a warm and caring environment in which therapeutic change can take place. Their intention is to replace the hopelessness of depression with a sense of hope and faith in the future. These tasks are part of the essence of psychotherapy. The fact that psychotherapy can mobilize the meaning response - and that it can do so without deception - is one of its strengths, no one of its weaknesses. Because hopelessness is a fundamental characteristic of depression, instilling hope is a specific treatment for it it. Invoking the meaning response is essential for the effective treatment of depression, and the best treatments are those that can do this most effectively and that can do without deception.
— Irving Kirsch, The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth
I cry and wonderhow I'm going to fall asleepbecause sleeping means wakingand going through all this again
— Samantha Schutz, I Don't Want To Be Crazy
The opposite of play isn’t work. It’s depression.
— Jane McGonigal, Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
Macbeth: How does your patient, doctor?Doctor: Not so sick, my lord, as she is troubled with thick-coming fancies that keep her from rest.Macbeth: Cure her of that! Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the brain, and with some sweet oblivious antidote cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff which weighs upon her heart.Doctor: Therein the patient must minister to himself.
— William Shakespeare, Macbeth
People with family histories of alcoholism tend to have lower levels of endorphins- the endogenous morphine that is responsible for many of our pleasure responses- than do people genetically disinclined to alcoholism. Alcohol will slightly raise the endorphin level of people without the genetic basis for alcoholism; it will dramatically raise the endorphin level of people with that genetic basis. Specialists spend a lot of time formulating exotic hypotheses to account for substance abuse. Most experts point out, strong motivations for avoiding drugs; but there are also strong motivations for taking them. People who claim not to understand why anyone would get addicted to drugs are usually people who haven't tried them or who are genetically fairly invulnerable to them.
— Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
Great griefs exhaust. They discourage us with life. The man into whom they enter feels something taken from him. In youth, their visit is sad; later on, it is ominous.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
All of us have two minds, a private one, which is usually strange, I guess, and symbolic, and a public one, a social one. Most of us stream back and forth between those two minds, drifting around in our private self and then coming forward into the public self whenever we need to. But sometimes you get a little slow making the transition, you drag out the private part of your life and people know you’re doing it. They almost always catch on, knowing that someone is standing before them thinking about things that can’t be shared, like the one monkey that knows where a freshwater pond is. And sometimes the public mind is such a total bummer and the private self is alive with beauty and danger and secrets and things that don’t make any sense but that repeat and repeat and demand to be listened to, and you find it harder and harder to come forward. The pathway between those two states of mind suddenly seems very steep, a hell of a lot of work and not really worth it. Then I think it becomes a matter of what side of the great divide you get caught on. Some people get stuck on the public, approved side and they’re all right, for what it’s worth. And some people get stuck on the completely strange and private side of the divide, and that’s what we call crazy and its not really completely wrong to call it that but it doesn’t say it as it truly is. It’s more like a lack of mobility, a transportation problem, getting stuck, being the us we are in private but not stopping…
— Scott Spencer
It's difficult. I take a low dose of lithium nightly. I take an antidepressant for my darkness because prayer isn't enough. My therapist hears confession twice a month, my shrink delivers the host, and I can stand in the woods and see the world spark.
— David Lovelace, Scattershot: My Bipolar Family
Owen: depressed people don't have the energy to kill themselves. that's what mr clark saidOwen: he said it's not when people are depressed that you have to worry about them. it's when someone depressed suddenly has energy. that means they decided to kill themselves. to actOwen: and that makes them happy
— Albert Borris, Crash Into Me
She went to the window seat and sat there, sniffling, hating them all, and herself most of all. It was all her fault, everything bad that had happened.
— George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
When you come out of the grips of a depression there is an incredible relief, but not one you feel allowed to celebrate. Instead, the feeling of victory is replaced with anxiety that it will happen again, and with shame and vulnerability when you see how your illness affected your family, your work, everything left untouched while you struggled to survive.
— Jenny  Lawson, Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things
When things get unbearable, I wrap myself into a tight ball and shut my eyes. Every muscle in my body is tense. I open my eyes and I'm still where I was when I closed them to escape. Nothing's changed.
— Elizabeth Wurtzel
I feel like I'm dropping such a long way down again." "I seem to be dropping into a cold dark wet place, where no one's been before and noone can every follow. There's no future there; just a past that sometimes fools you into thinking it's the future. It's the most alone place you can ever be and, when you go there, you not only cease to exist in real life, you also cease to exist in their consciousness and in their memories.
— John Marsden, So Much to Tell You
It still amazes him how they could have been misled by her personality in Year Eleven. It's what depression does to a person, it changes them completely.
— Melina Marchetta, The Piper's Son
But it only takes a doubt. A drop of ink falls into a clear glass of water and clouds the whole thing. So the moment after I realised I wasn't perfectly well was the moment I realised I was still very ill indeed.
— Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive
It’s been raining outside and I feel like a sad poet, hating my imagination pissing on the roof.
— Munia Khan
You have a history of starving yourself," he says gently.I lift my head. I meet his gaze. "I have a history that I don't like to talk about.
— Stephanie Kuehn, Charm & Strange
The ledge isn't even wide enough for my feet to fit on completely. I hang onto the rail tightly and do a Casper does...leaning out slowly over the water. Like this, there is no safety. No rail to catch me if I slip. I'm almost flying. Between me and death, there is...nothing. Nothing in the way but my own decision to hang on.
— Kelley York, Suicide Watch
exI feel unspeakably lonely. And I feel - drained. It is a blank state of mind and soul I cannot describe to you as I think it would not make any difference. Also it is a very private feeling I have - that of melting into a perpetual nervous breakdown. I am often questioning myself what I further want to do, who I further wish to be; which parts of me, exactly, are still functioning properly. No answers, darling. At all.
— Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters
What kids are doing are killing themselvesThey feel they have no control of their prisoner's cellAnd if you're one of them then you're one of meAnd you would do almost anything just to feel free...- From the song Fake You Out
— Twenty one pilots
I'm currently in the middle of a depression. I couldn't really tell you what set it off, but I think it stems from my cowardice, which confronts me at every turn.
— Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
I waited for the fear to hit; waited for my body to shriek to find a way to get out of this dinner, but ... nothing. Maybe it'd be a mercy to be en
— Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Mist and Fury
The return of the voices would end in a migraine that made my whole body throb. I could do nothing except lie in a blacked-out room waiting for the voices to get infected by the pains in my head and clear off. Knowing I was different with my OCD, anorexia and the voices that no one else seemed to hear made me feel isolated, disconnected. I took everything too seriously. I analysed things to death. I turned every word, and the intonation of every word over in my mind trying to decide exactly what it meant, whether there was a subtext or an implied criticism. I tried to recall the expressions on people’s faces, how those expressions changed, what they meant, whether what they said and the look on their faces matched and were therefore genuine or whether it was a sham, the kind word touched by irony or sarcasm, the smile that means pity. When people looked at me closely could they see the little girl in my head, being abused in those pornographic clips projected behind my eyes? That is what I would often be thinking and such thoughts ate away at the façade of self-confidence I was constantly raising and repairing. (describing dissociative identity disorder/mpd symptoms)
— Alice Jamieson, Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind
I thought by masking the depression with silence, the feelings might disappear.
— Sharon E. Rainey, Making a Pearl from the Grit of Life
You aren’t falling apart. You’re well beyond that. You’re just rattling along now. Elven dolls doing what little you can to gather the pieces as they fall away. But you don’t know how to properly reattach them—a doll does not repair itself. So you hug those brittle fragments to your chest until you simply cannot hug anymore. Until you’ve had to leave so many behind that you no longer remember what it is you’re missing.
— Darrell Drake, Where Madness Roosts
Bad enough to be ill, but to feel compelled to deny the very thing that, in its worst and most active state, defines you is agony indeed.
— Sally Brampton, Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression
All monsters have their fits of depression.
— Rachilde, Monsieur Venus: A Materialist Novel
In her glamorous quest for the darkest light and the lowest high, she now found herself wallowing on the bottom of a filthy garbage bin.
— Terri Blackstock, Intervention
Depression is not caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, and it is not cured by medication. Depression may not even be an illness at all. Often, it can be a normal reaction to abnormal situations. Poverty, unemployment, and the loss of loved ones can make people depressed, and these social and situational causes of depression cannot be changed by drugs.
— Irving Kirsch, The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth
And the boys were all clean, their faces freshly and brutally shaved, their hair painstakingly gelled into exquisite apparent carelessness, with this electric feeling inside of them, which matched the feelings in the girls, that they were all ascending, moving into a future that could only improve them, and I wondered what it was like - the miracle, the stupidity of feeling that.
— Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
Anna Petrovna: Kolya, my dearest, stay at home.Ivanov: My love, my unhappy darling, I beg you, don't stop me going out in the evenings. It's cruel and unjust on my part, but let me commit that injustice. It's an agony for me at home. As soon as the sun disappears, my spirit begins to be weighed down by depression. What depression! Don't ask why. I myself don't know. I swear by God's truth I don't know. Here I'm in anguish, I go to the Lebedevs and there it's still worse; I return from there and here it's depression again, and so all night... Simply despair!
— Anton Chekhov, Ivanov
The horror of the Pit lay in the emergence from it, with the return of her will, her caring, and her feeling of the need for meaning before the return of meaning itself.
— Joanne Greenberg, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden
Better to forget, better to let go of the bitterness. I say bitterness is only good in medicine, or if you fry bitter gourd with egg, then it's dlicious. I told Lan-Lan many times, we have only one life, it's important to kua kwee, to look spaciously. Not keep the eyes so narrowed down to the small dispairs.Those people who say forgive and forget, I say they not right. Not so simple. I say, find right medicine. Bitterness must be just right for problem. Then swallow it, think of good things can do when no longer sick.
— Lydia Kwa, This Place Called Absence
Anna Petrovna: Do you know what, Kolya? Try and sing, laugh, get angry, as you once did... You stay in, we'll laugh and drink fruit liqueur and we'll drive away your depression in a flash. I'll sing if you like. Or else let's go and sit in the dark in your study as we used to, and you'll tell me about your depression... You have such suffering eyes. I'll look into them and cry, and we'll both feel better.
— Anton Chekhov, Ivanov
Don't get me wrong. A good marriage, adequate financial resources, even a clean home and well-behaved children do bring some measure of happiness. However, temporal blessings, as wonderful as they may be, are only a taste of the real thing. They cannot sustain inner happiness any more than eating a scrumptious meal keeps tomorrow's hunger at bay. 
— Leslie Vernick, Lord, I Just Want to Be Happy
I was moving in a narrow range between busy distractedness and a pervasive sadness whose granules seemed to enter each cell, weighing it down... I ghosted between islands of anxiety... a fatigue that dulled my zest, decanted it. Sorrow felt like a marble coat I couldn’t shed.
— Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names for Love – A Memoir
Cartooning will destroy you
—  it will break your heart.
I never knew it was possible to be so miserable in so many ways.
— Amie Kaufman, These Broken Stars
Just a second of her laughter can get me through the darkest day.
— Megan Bostic
Except you cannot outrun insanity, anymore than you can outrun your own shadow.
— Alyssa Reyans, Letters from a Bipolar Mother
Even extreme grief may ultimately ventitself in violence--but more generally takes the form of apathy
— Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
It’s all about self-discipline. Like, self-obsession is connected completely with self-loathing, and it’s the same with, if you’ve got a weight problem. It’s all about… finding some worth in yourself, knowing that you’ve got the discipline to do it, and knowing that other people maybe can’t do it. And it’s also, I think, really connected to the fact that you almost feel, like, silent, you have no voice, you’re mute, there’s just no, you’ve got no option. Even if you could express yourself nobody would listen anyway. Things that go on inside you, there’s no other way to get rid of them.
— Richey Edwards
I wanted a heaven. And I grew up striving for that world-- an eternal world- that would wash away my temporary misery.
— Craig Thompson, Blankets
I wasn't going to have enough money to pay for a Good Lifestyle, which meant I'd feel ashamed, which meant I'd get depressed, and that was the big one because I knew what that did to me: it made it so I wouldn't get out of bed, which led to the ultimate thing—homelessness. If you can't get out of bed for long enough, people come and take your bed away.
— Ned Vizzini, It's Kind of a Funny Story
She still had her bad days, no question, when the black dog of depression sniffed her out and settled its crushing weight on her chest and breathed its pungent dog breath in her face. On those days she called in sick to the IT shop where, most days, she untangled tangled networks for a song. On those days she pulled down the shades and ran dark for twelve or twenty-four or seventy-two hours, however long it took for the black dog to go on home to its dark master.
— Lev Grossman, The Magician King
No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.Comforter, where, where is your comforting?Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief-woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing —Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No ling-ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief'.O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fallFrightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheapMay who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our smallDurance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: allLife death does end and each day dies with sleep.
— Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins
I'm waiting for her to say "Craig, what you need to do is X" and for the Shift to occur. I want there to be a Shift so bad. I want to feel my brain slide back into the slot it was meant to be in, rest there the way it did before the fall of last year, back when I was young, and witty, and my teachers said I had incredible promise, and I had incredible promise, and I spoke up in class because I was excited and smart about the world. I want the Shift so bad. I'm waiting for the phrase that will invoke it. It'll be like a miracle within my life. But is Dr. Minerva a miracle worker? No. She's a thin, tan lady from Greece with red lipstick.
— Ned Vizzini, It's Kind of a Funny Story
The sun stopped shining for me is all.
— Nina LaCour, Hold Still
As Louis Cozolino Ph. D., observes, a consistent theme of adult psychotherapy clients is that they had parents who were not curious about who they were but, instead, told them who they should be. What Cozolino explains, is that the child creates a "persona" for her parents but doesn't learn to know herself. What happens is that "the authentic self"--the part of us open to feelings, experinces, and intimicy--remains underdeveloped.
— Peg Streep, Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt
If you take action while you are mad, you will always make the wrong decision.
— Robyn Wheeler, Born Mad
If your body is screaming in pain, whether the pain is muscular contractions, anxiety, depression, asthma or arthritis, a first step in releasing the pain may be making the connection between your body pain and the cause. “Beliefs are physical. A thought held long enough and repeated enough becomes a belief. The belief then becomes biology.
— Marilyn Van Derbur, Miss America By Day: Lessons Learned From Ultimate Betrayals And Unconditional Love
The fatigue I've gathered year after year and stored inside now heaves a muted cry of helplessness. Nothing but fatigue, rounding my shoulders, heavier than ever on this late autumn day with a useless sun, a world of unforgiving disasters. So many struggles and tragedies, so much sorrow and egotism in this dark, in this rotting century of hate.
— Emil Dorian, Quality of Witness: A Romanian Diary, 1937-1944
Dear Heavenly Father, We pray for those who are living silence, locked in the room of depression to where they are taking their own lives. This is the enemy trying to take souls away before they can hear "The Word" and accept it. We pray for a breakthrough, and a releasing from the enemies grip, and that the spirit of depression is sent back into the pits of hell where it belongs! We call it done right now in the MIGHTY name of Jesus we pray, amen.
— Anita R. Sneed-Carter
...we can love someone without understanding that person.
— Dorothy Rowe
Finally, there was the impediment of his nature. In the secret parts of his peculiar brain, those unhappy and inextricable tangles which he felt at the roots, the boy was disabled by something which we cannot explain. He could not have explained either, and for us it is all too long ago. He loved Arthur and he loved Guenever and he hated himself. The best knight of the world: everybody envied the self-esteem which must surely be his. But Lancelot never believed he was good or nice. Under the grotesque, magnificent shell with a face like Quasimodo’s, there was shame and self-loathing which had been planted there when he was tiny, by something which it is now too late to trace. It is so fatally easy to make young children believe that they are horrible.
— T.H. White, The Once and Future King
Magnesium deficiency can produce symptoms of anxiety or depression, including muscle weakness, fatigue, eye twitches, insomnia, anorexia, apathy, apprehension, poor memory, confusion, anger, nervousness, and rapid pulse.
— Carolyn Dean, The Magnesium Miracle
To believe that will has power over potentiality, that the passage to actuality is the result of a decision that puts an end to the ambiguity of potentiality (which is always potentiality to do and not to do) — this is the perpetual illusion of morality.
— Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy
Punpun was just fine again today.
— Inio Asano, Oyasumi Punpun
Judy's friend that she has known the longest has just broken up with her boyfriend and is depressed. Judy likes her more now that she is depressed and feels unmotivated in life. Judy feels unmotivated in life.
— Ellen Kennedy
Someday, beyond the clouds and all the world's wrongs, there will be love, compassion and justice, and we shall all understand.
— Flavia Weedn, To Take Away the Hurt: Insights into Healing
You're all trying to figure out what went wrong inside my head. Fucking idiots. You'll never crack the code that's inside my head. You'll never get into my castle. You'll never even get past the gate.
— Brent Runyon
Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me.
— Vincent van Gogh
Sometimes I think depression should be called the coping illness. So many of us struggle on, not daring or knowing how to ask for help. More of us, terribly, go undiagnosed.
— Sally Brampton, Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression
One good thing about New York is that most people function daily while in a low-grade depression. It's not like if you're in Los Angeles, where everyone's so actively working on cheerfulness and mental and physical health that if they sense you're down, they shun you. Also, all that sunshine is a cruel joke when you're depressed. In New York, even in your misery, you feel like you belong.
— Mindy Kaling, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?
If I could just write it down in a piece of paper, then maybe she could get a decent night's sleep, eat a little of her dinner. Maybe she could have a minute's worth of peace.
— Wally Lamb, I Know This Much Is True
A drinking man's someone who wants to forget he isn't still young and believing
— Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
If you know that I am genius Then know that you made me genius Everyone don't accept me as genius Because they aren't genius to belief me as genius
— Hasil Paudyal, Blended Words
The intermittent depression that had shadowed him throughout his adult life was about to envelop him once again. 
— Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America
He says, 'I don't know if I can face this. You know. The party and the ceremony, and then the hour after that, and the hour after that.''You don't have to go to the party. You don't have to go to the ceremony. You don't have to do anything at all.''But there are still the hours, aren't there? One and then another, and then you get through that one and then, my god, there's another. I'm so sick.
— Michael Cunningham, The Hours
Moonlight filtered in through the blinds illuminating their bedroom, but the bright glow couldn’t penetrate the darkness that surrounded her heart.
— J.E.B. Spredemann, An Unforgivable Secret
I am diagnosed with not having enough insanely-addictive drugs coursing through my body.
— Sarah Silverman, The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee
People think that food cheers you up, that a doughnut cures all ills, but this only works for trivial complaints. When real disaster strikes, food chokes you.
— Helena Dela, The Count
Fella says today, 'Depression is over. I seen a jackrabbit, an' they wasn't nobody after him.' An' another fella says, 'That aint the reason. Can't afford to kill jackrabbits no more. Catch 'em and milk 'em an' turn 'em loose. One you seen prob'ly gone dry.
— John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Depression, we are told over and over again, is a brain disease, a chemical imbalance that can be adjusted by antidepressant medication. In an informational brochure issued to inform the public about depression, the US National Institute for Mental Health tells people that 'depressive illnesses are disorders of the brain' and adds that 'important neurotransmitters - chemicals that brain cells use to communicate - appear to be out of balance'. This view is so widespread that it was even proffered by the editors of PLoS [Public Library of Science] Medicine in their summary that accompanied our article. 'Depression,' they wrote, 'is a serious medical illness caused by imbalances in the brain chemicals that regulate mood', and they went on to say that antidepressants are supposed to work by correcting these imbalances.The editors wrote their comment on chemical imbalances as if it were an established fact, and this is also how it is presented by drug companies. Actually, it is not. Instead, even its proponents have to admit that it is a controversial hypothesis that has not yet been proven. Not only is the chemical-imbalance hypothesis unproven, but I will argue that it is about as close as a theory gets in science to being dis-proven by the evidence.
— Irving Kirsch, The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth
my stomach turned and burned with the acid of failure
— Heidi L. Ames
For people who are depressed, and especially for those who do not receive enough benefit from medication of for whom the side effects of antidepressants are troubling, the fact that placebos can duplicate much of the effects of antidepressants should be taken as good news. It means that there are other ways of alleviating depression. As we have seen, treatments like psychotherapy and physical exercise are at least as effective as antidepressant drugs and more effective than placebos. In particular, CBT has been shown to lower the risk of relapsing into depression for years after treatment has ended, making it particularly cost effective.
— Irving Kirsch, The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth
What people never understand is that depression isn't about the outside
—  it's about the inside.
Depression comes in bouts. Like boxing. Dad is in the blue corner.
— Joe Dunthorne, Submarine
God went out of me as if the sea dried up like sandpaper, as if the sun became a latrine. God went out of my fingers. They became stone. My body became a side of mutton and despair roamed the slaughterhouse.
— Anne Sexton, The Awful Rowing Toward God
I wonder now whether inner coldness and desolation may not be the pre-condition for making the world believe, by a kind of fraudulent showmanship, that one's own wretched heart is still aglow.
— W.G. Sebald
Somehow however just knowing that I could fully expect unhappiness to return – if not predictably then nevertheless reliably – was strangely liberating. The point was that even chaos had a structure a beginning and eventually an end. It was possible to live through it. I’d been doing as much for twenty years.
— Caroline Kettlewell, Skin Game
If we were never depressed we should not be alive
—  it is the nature of a crystal never to be depressed.
We have to take the first step as though there were no God. It is no use to wait for God to help us, He will not: but immediately we arise we find He is there.
— Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest: Traditional Updated Edition
In the morning you were never violently sorry-- you made no resolutions, but if you had overdone it and your heart was slightly out of order, you went on the wagon for a few days without saying anything about it, and waited until an accumulation of nervous boredom projected you into another party.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Short Stories
...we should all fortify ourselves against the dark hours of depression by cultivating a deep distrust of the certainties of despair. Despair is relentless in the certainties of its pessimism. But we have seen again and again, from our own experience and others', that absolute statements of hopelessness that we make in the dark are notoriously unreliable. Our dark certainties are not sureties.
— John Piper, When the Darkness Will Not Lift: Doing What We Can While We Wait for God--And Joy
Casy said, "Ol' Tom's house can't be more'n a mile from here. Ain't she over that third rise?"Sure," said Joad. "Less somebody stole it, like Pa stole it."Your pa stole it?"Sure, got it a mile an' a half east of here an' drug it. Was a family livin' there, an' they moved away. Grampa an' Pa an' my brother Noah like to took the whole house, but she wouldn't come. They only got part of her. That's why she looks so funny on one end. They cut her in two an' drug her over with twelve head of horses and two mules. They was goin' back for the other half an' stick her together again, but before they got there Wink Manley come with his boys and stole the other half. Pa an' Grampa was pretty sore, but a little later them an' Wink got drunk together an' laughed their heads off about it. Wink, he says his house is a stud, an' if we'll bring our'n over an' breed 'em we'll maybe get a litter of crap houses. Wink was a great ol' fella when he was drunk. After that him an' Pa an' Grampa was friends. Got drunk together ever' chance they got.
— John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
[W]e need not become fixated upon our own suffering, whatever its origin. We offer it up, thus participating in the well-being of the universe. When we experience an illness or depression not as our own but as the universe’s, we are one with all beings who experience this kind of suffering. (78)
— Jean-Yves Leloup, Compassion and Meditation: The Spiritual Dynamic between Buddhism and Christianity
Master Nathaniel looked at him. The fixed stare, the slightly-open mouth, the rigid motionless body, fettered by a misery too profound for restlessness — how well he knew the state of mind these things expressed! But there must surely be relief in thus allowing the mood to mould the body's attitude to its own s
— Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist
Roosevelt spoke eloquently, in his penetrating tenor, of those 'who at this very moment are denied the greater part of what the very lowest standards of today call the necessities of life . . . I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,' he told the audience, '. . . The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.
— Susan Quinn, The Furious Improvisation: How the WPA and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art out of Desperate Times
Squiffy, have you ever felt a sort of strange emptiness in the heart? A sort of aching void of the soul?''Oh, rather!''What do you do about it?''I generally take a couple of cocktails.
— P.G. Wodehouse, Doctor Sally
When people quit talking to God, they quit talking to one another. And people who quit talking to God soon get very lonely and depressed. They are actually lonely for God, hungering for communion with Him, yearning for His close love and nearness; but instead of recognizing these needs as spiritual, they blame their lack of fulfillment on their husbands or wives.
— David Wilkerson, Have You Felt Like Giving Up Lately?
The message of this lecture is that black holes ain’t as black as they are painted. They are not the eternal prisons they were once though…things can get out of a black hole both on the outside and possibly to another universe. So if you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up – there’s a way out.
— Stephen Hawking
The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality and my life, as I write this, is vital even when sad. I may wake up sometime next year without my mind again; it is not likely to stick around all the time. Meanwhile, however, I have discovered what I would have to call a soul, a part of myself I could never have imagined until one day, seven years ago, when hell came to pay me a surprise visit. It's a precious discovery. Almost every day I feel momentary flashes of hopelessness and wonder every time whether I am slipping. For a petrifying instant here and there, a lightning-quick flash, I want a car to run me over...I hate these feelings but, but I know that they have driven me to look deeper at life, to find and cling to reasons for living, I cannot find it in me to regret entirely the course my life has taken. Every day, I choose, sometimes gamely, and sometimes against the moment's reason, to be alive. Is that not a rare joy?
— Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
The doctor’s words made me understand what happened to me was a dark, evil, and shameful secret, and by association I too was dark, evil, and shameful. While it may not have been their intention, this was the message my clouded mind received. To escape the confines of the hospital, I once again disassociated myself from my emotions and numbed myself to the pain ravaging my body and mind. I acted as if nothing was wrong and went back to performing the necessary motions to get me from one day to the next. I existed but I did not live.
— Alyssa Reyans, Letters from a Bipolar Mother
Your depression is connected to your insolenceand refusal to praise. Whoever feels himself walking on the path, and refuses to praise--that man or womansteals from others every day--is a shoplifter!The sun became full of light when it got hold of itself.Angels only began shining when they achieved discipline.The sun goes out whenever the cloud of not-praising comes.The moment the foolish angel felt insolent, he heard the door close.
— Jalaluddin Rumi
She remembered how it had felt and tasted, that slowly descending depression, like a thick glass jar that closed around you, sucking away the air you needed to breathe, creating a barrier between you and the world. The hell of it was that she'd been able to see all that she was missing, but when she'd reached out, all she'd touched was cold, hard glass.
— Kristin Hannah, Summer Island
They have no idea what a bottomless pit of misery I am.
— Elizabeth Wurtzel
a depressed person doesn't want you to try and cheer them up. It makes us sick.
— Brandon Sanderson, Elantris
Empty teacups gathered around her and dictionary pages fell at her feet.
— Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
Emergencies have always been necessary to progress. It was darkness which produced the lamp. It was fog that produced the compass. It was hunger that drove us to exploration. And it took a depression to teach us the real value of a job.
— Victor Hugo
At the best of times, spring hurts depressives.
— Angela Carter, Shadow Dance
In our family "whim-wham" is code, a defanged reference to any number of moods and psychological disorders, be they depressive, manic, or schizoaffective. Back in the 1970s and '80s - when they were all straight depression - we called them "dark nights of the soul." St. John of the Cross's phrase ennobled our sickness, spiritualized it. We cut God out of it after the manic breaks started in 1986, the year my dad, brother, and I were all committed. Call it manic depression or by its new, polite name, bipolr disorder. Whichever you wish. We stick to our folklore and call it the whim-whams.
— David Lovelace, Scattershot: My Bipolar Family
Depression is a serious problem, but drugs are not the answer. In the long run, psychotherapy is both cheaper and more effective, even for very serious levels of depression. Physical exercise and self-help books based on CBT can also be useful, either alone or in combination with therapy. Reducing social and economic inequality would also reduce the incidence of depression.
— Irving Kirsch, The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth
He's following me... He needs to have a secret but he can´t help telling the heat is going out of me. The heart is going out of me, and though she cannot remember she cannot forget. Clutching a fistful of sand. What ties me to you is guilt. I crossed two rivers and wept by one I am the beast at the end of the rope Happy and free.
— Sarah Kane, Ansia - 4.48 Psicosis