c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Lincoln Road that sorrow is most difficult for the young because it, "takes them unawares." The old, he said, have learned to anticipate difficulty. Lincoln wrote that sorrow is most difficult for the young because it, "takes them unawares." The old, he said, have learned to anticipate difficulty.
— Richard Brookhiser, Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln
Xander stood at the end of the bed, hands on hips, the jacket she'd helped him sew thrown open, a gold-threaded waistcoat glimmering underneath. He was the Regency hero today, but she didn't feel like being saved.
— Danika Stone, All the Feels
At such times Daddy, Mummy and Margot leave me cold. I wander from one room to another, downstairs and up again, feeling like a songbird whose wings have been clipped and who is hurling himself in utter darkness against the bars of his cage. "Go outside, laugh, and take a breath of fresh air," a voice cries within me, but I don't even feel a response any more; I go and lie on the divan and sleep, to make the time pass more quickly, and the stillness and terrible fear, because there is no way of killing them.
— Anne Frank
The hardest part of life is living it.
— Kinsey
Winter in the soul is by no means a comfortable season: but there is this comfort, namely, that the Lord makes it.
— Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Morning and Evening, Based on the English Standard Version
Nostalgia was diagnosed [as a medical illness] at a time when art and science had not yet entirely severed their umbilical ties and when the mind and body internal and external well-being were treated together...Our progeny well might poeticize depression and see it as a global atmospheric condition, immune to treatment with Prozac.
— Svetlana Boym
If I can bring Him nothing but my tears, He will put them with His own tears in His own bottle for He once wept; if I can bring Christ nothing but my groans and sighs, He will accept these as an acceptable sacrifice, for He once was broken in heart, and sighed heavily in spirit.
— Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Morning and Evening, Based on the English Standard Version
During the depression, people fought each other for boxes of groceries and if you were lucky you might get a few shillings for fighting six rounds. When Jack Johnson was World Heavyweight Champ, back in the early 1900s, Hartlepool had a brilliant boxer called Jasper Carter. People today will never have heard of him, but almost 100 years ago he put Hartlepool on the fistic map.
— Stephen Richards, Born to Fight: The True Story of Richy Crazy Horse Horsley
We dig holes for ourselves, of comfortable living, and it’s hard to see just how deep down you are until you suddenly want to take a look at the world up there, some fresh airand realise you can’t get up. You’re too far down.
— Charlotte Eriksson
Your disbelief cures nothing.
— Sarah Kane, 4.48 Psychosis
There I was, casually wishing that I could stop existing in the same way you'd want to leave an empty room or mute an unbearably repetitive noise.
— Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened
Depression is our way of telling ourselves that something is seriously wrong and needs working through and changing.
— Neel Burton, Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions
I wonder, with all the flowers in the garden, how many of them ever think of hanging themselves with the garden hose, if ever they can.
— Anthony Liccione
I can tell you that "Just cheer up" is almost universally looked at as the most unhelpful depression cure ever. It's pretty much the equivalent of telling someone who just had their legs amputated to "just walk it off.
— Jenny  Lawson
Unfortunately, the most significant moments of our lives are often unpleasant.
— Andrea Cremer, The Conjurer's Riddle
Things weren’t always as good as they are now. In school we learned that in the old days, the dark days, people didn’t realize how deadly a disease love was.For a long time they even viewed it as a good thing, something to be celebrated and pursued. Of course that’s one of the reasons it’s so dangerous: It affects your mind so that you cannot think clearly, or make rational decisions about your own well-being. (That’s symptom number twelve, listed in the amor deliria nervosa section of the twelfth edition of The Safety, Health, and Happiness Handbook, or The Book of Shhh, as we call it.) Instead people back then named other diseases—stress, heart disease, anxiety, depression, hypertension, insomnia, bipolar disorder—never realizing that these were, in fact, only symptoms that in the majority of cases could be traced back to the effects of amor deliria nervosa.
— Lauren Oliver, Delirium
Depression is not the lack of happiness, it's the imbalance of it.
— Joshua Wimbush
In such moments of precious, invaluable misery, she rejoiced in tears of agony...
— Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
How tiring is residency? So tiring. When Jude and I went out to eat, I avoided ordering salad; I didn't have the energy to chew that much.
— Frances Southwick, D.O
Sometimes things do not go the way one wanted them to go... At times like this, one would wish that one had not dreamt so much. Just hang in there... destination is just a mile away.
— K. Hari Kumar
Depression feels a bit like that, it creeps in on you and settles, until you think it’ll never lift, but in time it always does. That’s why it’s so tragic if people don’t reach out to anyone when they feel low, because if they do, the mist will usually lift in the end.
— Sita Brahmachari, Kite Spirit
The inclusion of dreams is the only viable supplement to the absence of more favourable outcomes.
— Benjamin Meadows
John Hay points to our our history of getting lost in suffering when, "so close together were pain and antidote.
— John Taliaferro, All the Great Prizes : The Life of John Hay, from Lincoln to Roosevelt
The next significant incident would change Steven forever: an apartment building fire. Steven and another officer arrived to the sounds of the screams of parents desperately trying to find their children. They ran inside believing there were three children trapped; they scooped them up and ran outside with a feeling of elation and relief. They had saved the children from certain death. The feeling was short lived. A frantic mother approached them, “Where’s my daughter?”Steven and the other officer tried to reenter the building but the fire had become too intense. All they could do was watch in horror as a partial wall of the building collapsed, revealing the child’s location. They could see and hear her, but they couldn’t save her. Her screams were mixed with the screams of her mother. Eventually her screams were silenced and she was no longer visible. Her mother continued to wail in pain, others dropped to their knees and sobbed while the first responders choked back their own tears and finished their jobs, the emotion overwhelming. Every person on the scene was altered that day. A piece of every one of them became part of the ashes.
— Karen Rodwill Solomon, The Price They Pay
Imagine this garden; one you’ve planted from seed, cultivated with love. When the seeds break the ground, they seek sunshine, warmth, and nutrients. The seeds have no control over the weather.They are as dependent on it as we are on our minds. You may have control over the location of your garden, the frequency with which you tend to it, and the amount of care you give it, but you can’t control the weather.It may be sunny one day, rainy the next. You prop the vines in the hopes they will flourish once the rain passes. And they may, until the next rain comes. The weather changes, sometimes without warning. Sometimes you can see it coming, much like the triggers a depressed person avoids, and you try to protect the plants before the storm. The intensity of the labor can get frustrating, especially if there is no relief in sight.One day, a tornado or hurricane passes through. Even though you see it on the horizon, you can’t stop it and you may not be able to seek shelter soon enough. The plants are torn from their roots, the garden completely destroyed. You may have thought you could protect it yourself, that the storm wouldn’t be that bad, or you simply didn’t know how or were afraid to ask for help. Your neighbors and family couldn’t help or didn’t know you needed help. The garden is gone. This is the way of depression; if you don’t have it, it’s very difficult to understand this cycle.
— Karen Rodwill Solomon, Hearts Beneath the Badge
Depression is not the lack of happiness, it' the imbalance of it.
— Joshua Wimbush
Cast the burden of the present along with the sin of the past and the fear of the future upon the Lord.
— Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students
There's no shame in honest suffering, my dear.
— Andrea Cremer, The Conjurer's Riddle
Most of your unhappiness in life comes from the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself.
— John Piper, When I Don't Desire God: How to Fight for Joy
DOING is often God's remedy for despair.
— John Piper, When I Don't Desire God: How to Fight for Joy
Thinking about going to the balcony and jumping off.
— JJM
The saddest part is, no one has missed me, no one would even know if I had died couple of days ago. So my dead body would just lay here, abandoned, without anyone noticing or thinking about where I am. Maybe I am not just important…just mistake, outcast, person who is easy to forget and leave behind
— JJM
Depression is not always feeling sad. Most of the time it is feeling no
— Various
Life to be bearable must be lived intensely. Through it a continuous stream of emotion passes. Though that emotion is ever changing as flowing water changes, it at least bears us along on a current that gives the illusion of continuity and permanence. But analyze life, tear its trappings off, lay it bare with thought, with logic, with philosophy, and its emptiness is revealed as a bottomless pit; its nothingness frankly confesses to nothingness, and Despair comes to perch in the soul.
— Giovanni Papini
Poppies in JulyLittle poppies, little hell flames,Do you do no harm?You flicker. I cannot touch you.I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns.And it exhausts me to watch youFlickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth.A mouth just bloodied.Little bloody skirts!There are fumes that I cannot touch.Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules?If I could bleed, or sleep!If my mouth could marry a hurt like that!Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule,Dulling and stilling.But colorless. Colorless.
— Sylvia Plath
I'm sorry...I just don't know what's wrong with me..
— JJM
When you feel sad, you are participating in a venerable experience, to which I, this monument, am dedicated. Your sense of loss and disappointment, of frustrated hopes and grief at your own inadequacy, elevate you to serious company. Do not ignore of throw away your grief
— Alain de Botton, Art as Therapy
She compares the deepest wells of depression to gestation, to a time enclosed, a secluded lightlessness in which, unknown and unforced, we grow.
— Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year
Long time ago I had this thing called hope, but like I said it was long ago
— JJM
Absolute statements of our unbelief that we make in the darkness are notoriously unreliable.
— John Piper, When I Don't Desire God: How to Fight for Joy
There's a quote from 'The Breakfast Club' that goes "We're all pretty bizarre. Some of us are just better at hiding it." I have it on a poster but I took a Sharpie to it and scratched out the word "hiding" because it reminds me that there's a certain pride and freedom that comes from wearing your unique bizarreness like a badge of honor.
Depression is focusing on yourself
—  on your troubles and what is not right. You can't be depressed if you are focusing on others. It's impossible.
Cried myself to sleep-woke up crying…
— JJM
Defeating depression is like playing the carnival game Whac-a-mole. You have to give it your all and be on target to beat that sucker down when it pops up again and again. If you pay attention, learn from your past efforts, and keep at it, you can win." -Mel. Edwards
— Mel Edwards
In the mornings, my pain was magnified by about a thousand. In the morning there weren’t only those sad facts about my life. Now there was also the additional fact that I was a pile of shit.
— Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
Even when everything's going your way you can still be sad. Or anxious. Or uncomfortably numb. Because you can't always control your brain or your emotions even when things are perfect.
— Jenny  Lawson
I can’t move, can’t get up,My arms are chained,My head’s not straight,I can’t see anyone at the end of the tunnel,I can’t move, can get up,My head’s not straight, My dreams have left,I feel empty and hollow, My arms are chained,The angel of fear is here with me,To give me a message “soon you’ll be free”There’s not light at the end of the tunnel,I feel empty and hollow.
— Quetzal
Waking up breaks my heart.Getting dressed breaks my arms.Joining the crowd breaks my legs.Letting someone in...does me in.
— Casey Renee Kiser, Darkness Plays Favorites
They rolled up the maps of their bodies until they were two continents of interlocking roads and rivers and dreams, and she thought, ‘This is how I will learn to live again’.
— Kate Scelsa, Fans of the Impossible Life
If you often feel alone, ignored, or forgotten, think about this: closing the door and locking yourself in won't change anything—literally and figuratively.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Slaying Dragons
It wasn't merely fatigue. although it continued to worry me how tired i was all the time. I had a strange sense of missing something, of being in the wrong place - no matter where I was.
— Josh Lanyon, The Dark Tide
As it stands, the diagnostic criteria for depression are so loose that two people with absolutely no symptoms in common can both end up with the same unitary diagnosis of depression. For this reason especially, the concept of depression as a mental disorder has been charged with being little more than a socially constructed dustbin for all manner of human suffering.
— Neel Burton, The Meaning of Madness
Gratitude is the antidote for misery. When you are counting your blessings you are too busy to be counting your problems.
— Miya Yamanouchi, Embrace Your Sexual Self: A Practical Guide for Women
Hell was what you made it
— Charles Bukowski, Pulp
I think that the power over death and life is the greatest strength that any person can have. It trumps sex and wealth. If I'm willing to die no one can master me.
— Walter Mosley, Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore
But then one time, you track down an email address and you're near a computer with Internet access so you don't have that nice cushion and you type what you're feeling and press send before you have a chance to talk yourself out of it. And then you wait, and wait, and wait, and nothing comes back, so all those things you thought were so important to say, really, they weren't. They weren't worth saying at all.
— Gayle Forman, I Was Here
It’s voyeuristic the way you searchfor answers in these cries for help,and how you see Death’s fingersbut always think they’re paintbrushes.
— Miriam Joy, Broken Body Fragile Heart
It's like a door open at the side of the house and this cool breeze is blowing in over the back of my neck. The breeze is Death whispering and that door is open for me to go through anytime I want. And I want to go through. I want the confusion to stop--no, not only confusion but pain too.
— Walter Mosley, Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore
I have found that sometimes when a person gives up on 'humankind' they can often find trust and love in animal kind. André Chevalier
— Nikki Sex, Abuse
Life is a battle, so do not give up fighting.
— Savannah Harris
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.
— Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
As for his look, it was a natural cheerfulness striving against depression without, and not quite succeeding. The look suggested issolation, but it revealed something more. As Usual with bright natures, the deity that lies ignominiously chained within a ephemeral human carcase shone out of him like a ray.
— Thomas Hardy
Have you heard or been told that chemical imbalances occur in depression? If so, you have been seriously misinformed.
— Terry  Lynch, Depression Delusion Volume One: The Myth of the Brain Chemical Imbalance
I felt happier yesterday. I do not feel happy today – I feelabandoned and godless and brokenin a church built for the damnedwith artificial light through stained glassand warped wooden doors.
— Miriam Joy, Broken Body Fragile Heart
Consciousness returns to its own dark thoughts and bad memories as reliably as kids to their own scabs, and maybe it's not so difficult to understand why. The mind doesn't like unresolved issues. Except that moods don't get resolved, they get forgotten – but just try forgetting the free-fall through depression's vacuum in a hurry. Worse than that, depression isn't just a memory, it's a state of mind. If you remember it, you're in it.
— Mark Crutchfield, The Last Best Gift: Eye Witnesses to the Celebrity Sabbath Massacre
I love rainstorms...the thunder, lightning, wind, all of it. So much going on at once, so many emotions...just like me.
— April Mae Monterrosa
Maybe tranquility is the dirt under my nails. I know it's there but I never feel like digging it out.
— Casey Renee Kiser, Gutter Kisses and a Hug on Garbage Day
Hope that had sparked in my chest now lit a fire, and I fanned it, wanting it to burn hot and bright, because hope… hope was not the enemy. It was a friend, a savior. Hope was more than a new beginning. Hope was tomorrow, and hope was the symbol that I would get better, that I would undo the bad choices that I’d made, and that I would never make them again. Hope was more than a chance of redemption. It was the promise of one day finding absolution, of forgiving my
— Jennifer L. Armentrout, Scorched
It seems it has been my fate to sadden those I should have made happy.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther
The beginning of my depression had been nothing but feelings, so the emotional deadening that followed was a welcome relief. I had always viewed feelings as a weakness-annoying obstacles on my quest for total power over myself. And I finally didn't have to feel them anymore.
— Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened
Depression is very real. It'll back you into a dark room, slap you across the face, spit in your eyes, scream in your ears, and punch you in the gut - Until you give in.
— Anonymous
Mental imbalance is about as acceptable as herpes. It’s never going to be accepted. But really, it’s a disease just like cancer. It just happens, and eats away all the good parts of your brain, like judgment and happiness and perception and memory and life. And you can die from depression just like any other disease. And it’s not as if people choose it. So why is it still a joke of medicine? “She died of cancer.” is a lot more socially acceptable to people than “She committed suicide.
— Sarahbeth Purcell, Love Is the Drug
It's okay to be sad, but it's not okay to be ungrateful. Cultivating gratitude is the attitude that makes room for happiness; given the space for happiness to grow, gratitude has a way of surmounting the misery of disaster and adversity, and healing our soul. Take heart, the future is brighter when you look for and seek the light in it.
— Michael Brent Jones, Dinner Party
I was trapped in an awful spiral of insecure narcissism
— Amy Poehler
…Look, I’m real sorry about Cheryl, I know you loved her a lot,” Mandy apologized gloomily. “It’s wrong that people have to keep killing off Pollution.”“It’s alright, I think she wants to be remediated,” Alecto told her calmly, though his grief-stricken and depressed expression said more to Mandy than his words did. “You don’t have to forget Cheryl, no matter what Mearth said to you,” Mandy pointed out. “People shouldn’t be forced to forget what they love, or to just get over the death of what they love. Cheryl was your friend and nobody can make you forget her if you don’t want to.
— Rebecca McNutt, Super 8: The Sequel to Smog City
A scar had been beaten into his mind which would only heal by experience.
— Ian Fleming, Casino Royale
In the deep, wet tangled, wild jungle where even natives won't go is a mystical, dangerous river. The river's got no name because naming it would make it real, and no one wanted to believe that river be real. They say you get there only inside a dream-but don't you think of it at bedtime, now, 'cause not everyone who goes there be able to leave! That jungle canopy, it so leafy true daylight can never break in the riverbank, it be wet muck thick with creatures that eat you alive if you stay still too long. To miss that fate, you gots to go into the black water. But the water be heavy as hot tar; once you in, it bind you and pull you along, bit by bit, 'til you come to the end of the land, and then over the water goes in a dark, slow cascade, the highest falls in the history of the world ever. There be demons in that cascading water, and snakes, and wraiths that whisper in your ears. They love you, they say. You should give yourself to them, stay with them, become one of them, they say. 'Isn't it good here?' they say. 'No pain, no trouble.' But also no light and no love and no joy and no ground. You tumble and tumble as you fall, and you try and choose, but your mind be topsy-turvy and maybe you can't think so well, and maybe you can't choose right, and maybe you never wake up. "It felt like that," I tell Tootsie, "even after you got me out and Scott moved me to Highland. I couldn't choose. I couldn't shut out the wraiths...But you would say, 'Hang on, sweetie,' and Scottie would say, 'I miss you, Mama,' and Scott would hold me, just hold me and say nothing at all." Tootsie snorts. "Scott was useless the whole while." "Scott was in the river, too.
— Therese Anne Fowler, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald
My blackness is spreading, Alice. I’ve been seeing and hearing things that can’t be there or anywhere. At night, when I’m not hallucinating mad women, I can feel depression starting to burn me around the edges. If I sink into it, I’ll have to give this thing up and write a novel.
— Hanif Kureishi, The Last Word
So far gone am I in the dark side of earth, that its other side, the theoretic bright one, seems but uncertain twilight to me.
— Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale
Good Lord didn't mean for us to hate ourself. He made us to love ourself like He do, with wide open arms.
— Rebecca Wells, Little Altars Everywhere
I'm not sure what happened to me over the last few days. I lost myself, I think. I sank down into a hole for a while. They're tricky things, holes. You don't know you're in one until you get out.
— Kevin Brooks
And that's the most frustrating thing about depression. It isn't always something you can fight back against with hope. It isn't even something-it's nothing. And you can't combat nothing.
— Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened
The difference between a conventional counsellor and an empowerment counsellor is that a conventional therapist will allow you to dwell in your pit of misery for months, years and possibly even decades; whereas an empowerment counsellor will challenge you to recognise that your past pains and seemingly negative experiences are the very key to accessing your greatest self.
— Miya Yamanouchi, Embrace Your Sexual Self: A Practical Guide for Women
She had thought that 'depression' would be like sitting in a rocking chair and not being able to make it move. She had thought it would descend over her like a fog, turning things fuzzy, coloring them gray. But depression was active, it paced back and forth wringing its hands. She couldn't stop thinking; she couldn't find her way free from apprehension.
— Elin Hilderbrand, The Island
Depression, the Cancer that gnaws at your Body,Mind and Soul.
— Marlene Davis
The monsters were neverunder my bed.Because the monsterswere inside my head.I fear no monsters,for no monsters I see.Because all this timethe monster has been me.
— Nikita Gill
If you could read my mind, you wouldn't be smiling.
— Tamara Ireland Stone, Every Last Word
Nobody would believe what an effort it is to do what little I am able, - to dress and entertain, and order things
— Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper
Deep in her soul, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a sailor in distress, she would gaze out over the solitude of her life with desperate eyes, seeking some white sail in the mists of the far-off horizon. She did not know what this chance event would be, what wind would drive it to her, what shore it would carry her to, whether it was a longboat or a three-decked vessel, loaded with anguish or filled with happiness up to the portholes. But each morning, when she awoke, she hoped it would arrive that day, and she would listen to every sound, spring to her feet, feel surprised that it had not come; then at sunset, always more sorrowful, she would wish the next day were already there.
— Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Negative experiences don't create fears, doubts, anger, grudges, low self-esteem, low self-confidence, jealousy, stress or depression; one's repeated negative interpretations of them do.
Don’t underestimate your tears. They have the power to strengthen your commitment to your life’s purpose and to direct you towards your goal. So, when you cry because of the people who mock or taunt you, be positive and make promises with yourself that you will prove them wrong.
— Saad  Salman
I needed some space to lay myself out, so that I could decide which pieces I wanted to pick up.
— Fennel Hudson, A Writer's Year - Fennel's Journal - No. 3
Only you can make yourself strong. Nobody else can do it for you.
— Kim Pape
Following the death of his wife, Sam Johnson wrote to the Reverend Mr. Thomas Warton, "I have ever since seemed to myself broken off from mankind; a kind of solitary wanderer in the wilds of life, without any certain direction, or fixed point of view: a gloomy gazer on a world to which I have little relation." But my wife wasn't dead, merely absent.
— Mordecai Richler, Barney's Version
The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating them, till they are left living with half a heart and half a lung.
— Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale
Let's stop kidding ourselves that Greek debt is the Euro's key problem. With Greece gone, who's next ?
— Alex Morritt, Impromptu Scribe
No. Depression is the unseen, unheard, silent killer. It is the pain that is too much to cope with, too hard to deal with and never understood. It is something that you can’t escape, no matter how hard you try it ALWAYS swallows you again. It constantly follows you around, like black smoke choking you from the inside out. Like a lion clawing at your heart and mind, eating pieces of you until there is nothing left.
— Astrid Lee Miles, Recovering is an Art
He needed her so badly, to reassure himself of his own existence, that he never comprehended the desperation in her dazzling, permanent smile, the terror in the brightness with which she faced the world, or the reasons why she hid when she couldn't manage to beam... every moment she spent in the world was full of panic, so she smiled and smiled and maybe once a week she locked the door and shook and felt like a husk, like an empty peanut-shell, a monkey without a nut.
— Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
Oddly enough I never used to suffer from depression on cold, gray, cloudy days like this. I felt as if nature was in harmony with me, that it reflected my soul.
— Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides to Die
Whether it's sleeping or playing video games or riding my bike or studying. Giving my brain up. That's what's important.
— Ned Vizzini, It's Kind of a Funny Story
How about we never talk about what happened and why I feel the way I feel. We just pretend that everything is fine and I just scrub myself red every night, allowing my mind and body to retreat into oblivion. Yup sounds like the perfect plan.
— Astrid Lee Miles, Recovering is an Art
Aunt Léonie who, after the death of her husband, my Uncle Octave, no longer wished to leave, first Combray, then within Combray her house, then her bedroom, then her bed and no longer 'came down', always lying in an uncertain state of grief, physical debility, illness, obsession and piety.
— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
You will ever depress the devil if you always love those who spit hatred into your face. The devil loves vengeance and anything contrary to this is an agenda to bring down his temporal kingdom!
— Israelmore Ayivor, Daily Drive 365
Work, Mrs. Hill knew, might not be a cure for all ailments, but it was a sovereign remedy against the more brooding kinds.
— Jo Baker
If real experience has triggered your descent into depression, you have a human yen to understand it even when you have ceased to experience it; the limited of experience that is achieved with chemical pills is not tantamount to a cure.
— Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
Once I had been introduced to depression, I realized if I wanted to help my friend and preserve our friendship, I needed to understand what the illness was all about.
— Carlos Wallace, Life Is Not Complicated-You Are: Turning Your Biggest Disappointments Into Your Greatest Blessings
When inhibition has become the de facto setting in a person's manner, stiffness and lack of spontaneity produces an unnatural self-repression. Life looks gray, dull, and rigid, without space for relaxation or play to burst forth in natural ways.
— Alexandra Katehakis
Magically, hopelessness gives rise to profound hope.
— Stefan Emunds
She had been desperate to feel something, anything. She needed a window, because she had broken her heart throwing it at locked doors.
— Amy Zhang, Falling into Place
I didn't have that kind of friendship, the forever kind of friendship that will last your whole life through, no matter what.
— Jenny Han
In that moment, Liz Emerson felt that she was forever looking up at people who were much, much better than she could ever be, and the only thing she was really good at was pulling them down to her level.
— Amy Zhang, Falling into Place
Do you remember? Do you remember the world before the dark? Do you remember the world with mothers and fathers and stillness that did not feel like death?
— Amy Reed, Clean
My wretched passions were acute, smarting, from my continual, sickly irritability I had hysterical impulses, with tears and convulsions. I had no resource except reading, that is, there was nothing in my surroundings which I could respect and which attracted me. I was overwhelmed with depression, too; I had an hysterical craving for incongruity and for contrast, and so I took to vice.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Bouncing on beds, I remember from childhood, is a great depression reliever.
— Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
My greatest urge in life is to do nothing. It's not even an absence of motivation, a lack, for I do have a strong urge: to do nothing. To down tools, to stop. Except I know that if I do that I will fall into despair, and I know that it is worth doing anything in one's power to avoid depression because from there, from being depressed, it is only an imperceptible step to despair: the last refuge of the ego.
— Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence
No matter how dark the night may get, your light will never burn out.
— Jeanette LeBlanc
I hated being around people, couldn’t pay attention to what anyone was saying, couldn’t talk to clients, couldn’t tag my pieces, couldn’t ride the subway, human activity seemed pointless, incomprehensible, some blackly swarming ant hill in the wilderness, there was not a squeak of light anywhere I looked, the antidepressants I’d been dutifully swallowing for eight weeks hadn’t helped a bit, nor had the ones before that (but then, I’d tried them all; apparently I was among the twenty unfortunates who didn’t get the daisy fields and the butterflies but the Sever Headaches and the Suicidal Thoughts); and though the darkness sometimes lifted just enough so I could construe my surroundings, familiar shapes solidifying the bedroom furniture at dawn, my relief was never more than temporary because somehow the full morning never came, things always went black before I could orient myself and there I was again with ink poured in my eyes, guttering around in the dark.
— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
It is in the nest of disappointment where depression lays its eggs.
— Chloe Thurlow, Katie in Love
I am a sick man - oh, not my body. It is my soul, my brain. I seem to have lost all values. I care for nothing. If you had been this way a few months ago, it would have been different. It is too late, now.
— Jack London
There is no afterlife for wilted flowers like me.
— Bryant A. Loney, To Hear The Ocean Sigh
I remember a scared, young girl hiding in the guise of arrogance and rebellion. I remember feeling lost in a world where everyone else seemed to have it all figured out. I remember the tears of pain, the rants of anger and the hell that seemed to have swallowed me whole. Although I remember these things, it is now, over a decade later, more like a story that I find hard to believe. Did it all really happen? Even as I write this, my eyes begin to swell. It really did happen. I was that girl. And I’m sorry she had to suffer so. But, that is over now...
— Karen Michelle Miller, Words to Ponder About Life, Love and Men
It's not the deprivations of winter that get you, or the damp of spring, but the no-man's land between.
— Kristin Kimball
I didn't know how I could want things so badly while making it impossible to ever get them.
— Mary Miller
The orange turns to dull bronze light and continues to show what it has shown all day long, but now it seems to show it without enthusiasm. Across those dry hills, within those little houses in the distance are people who've been there all day long, going about the business of the day, who now find nothing unusual or different in this strange darkening landscape, as we do. If we were to come upon them early in the day they might be curious about us and what we're here for. but now in the evening they'd just resent our presence. The workday is over. It's time for supper and family and relaxation and turning inward at home. We ride unnoticed down this empty highway through this strange country I've never seen before, and now a heavy feeling of isolation and loneliness becomes dominant and my spirits wane with the sun.
— Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
The minutes felt as long as years and I couldn't be in the sort of time that didn't move, that instead stood still and all I could think of was being allowed to die, being allowed to cut the thread of time forever.
— Linda Boström Knausgård
There is a difference between depression and sadness. I am happy to be sad.
— Amanda Mosher, Better to be able to love than to be loveable
Repeated positive interpretations of one's negative experiences are the greatest medicines for stress and depression.
Before the state of stress or depression comes some frequent negative interpretations of one's experiences.
Sometimes I Curse My Love Affair with Life
— Damond Jiniya
When you are depressed you feel alone, and that no one is going through quite what you are going through. You are so scared of appearing in any way mad you internalise everything, and you are so scared that people will alienate you further you clam up and don’t speak about it, which is a shame, as speaking about it helps.
— Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive
Why not risk your life, if you don't want to live anyway? Why not risk your life if you'll never be happy no matter what you do?
— Cassandra Clare, City of Glass
How confusing to live in the shadow of a shadow.
— Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects
Out of the seven billion people sharing the planet with her, not one of them knew what was going through her head. Not one of them knew she was lost. Not one of them asked.
— Amy Zhang
There's memory clutter, which reminds you of an important person, achievement, or event from your past. I think memory clutter often gathers in the homes of people with some degree of depression. And then there's "I might need it one day clutter, in which people hang on to stuff in anticipation of an imagined future. Among these folks, I've noticed a recurring theme of anxiety...Maybe it's possible that the stuff we own and obsess over is the physical manifestation of the mental health issues that challenge our minds. --p29.
— Peter Walsh
It was clear to her now, Happiness was a seductive illusion. No one as fucked up as her deserved one drop of joy. But oh god was it delicious when it fell into her lap for a little while. (Such a pretty face) she muses (with such a bruised and battered soul). When the dawn of a promise fades into the dusk of reality, all that remains is the nightmare. Sweet, sweet loneliness. Shadows come to play and prey on her beaten mind. Her lovely little dreams of poison.
— Solange nicole, Dreams of Poison
You have a light in you that’s almost blinding. But in me there’s only darkness. Sometimes I think it’s like the darkness that infected you that night in the inn when you began to cry and to tremble. You were so helpless, so unprepared for it. I try to keep the darkness from you because I need your light. I need it desperately, but you don’t need the darkness.
— Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat
I couldn't even muster the enthusiasm to hate myself anymore.
— Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened
Procrastination is the best friend of depression.
— Debasish Mridha
Slowly, my feelings started to shrivel up. The few that managed to survive the constant beatings staggered around like wounded baby deer, just biding their time until they could die and join all the other carcasses strewn across the wasteland of my soul.
— Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened
Depression means self-loathing, self-disgust, and the kind of emotional numbness that feels like psychic death.
— William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life
I lost myself in the burden of trying to be your savior.
— Alexandria Hampton
Life itself seemed so alarmingly exigent, to require so much of the self. It was too difficult to remember and think and express and understand - all things I needed to be able to do to talk. To keep my face animated at the same time was insult added to injury. It was like trying to cook and roller-skate and sing and type all at once.
— Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
I always fill the chat box, almost every day, and end up deleting my heart.
— Esteban Urayoán
Inside my house, nobody was home, except everybody, but it was easy to feel like those were one and the same.
— Alison Espach, The Adults
Mild depression is a gradual and sometimes permanent thing that undermines people the way rust weakens iron. It is too much grief at too slight a cause, pain that takes over from the other emotions and crowds them out. Such depression takes up bodily occupancy in the eyelids and in the muscles that keep the spine erect. It hurts your heart and lungs, making the contraction of involuntary muscles harder than it needs to be. Like physical pain that becomes chronic, it is miserable not so much because it is intolerable in the moment as because it is intolerable to have known it in the moments gone and to look forward only to knowing it in the moments to come. The present tense of mild depression envisages no alleviation because it feels like knowledge.
— Andrew Solomon
The feeling of the wind, the sound of rushing water, the sense of sunlight breaking through the clouds, the colors of flowers as the seasons changed - everything around him felt changed, as if they had all been recast.
— Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
Depression is not an absence of happiness, it’s a feeling that happiness may never return.
— Steven Aitchison
It was really hard to stay positive. And that's normally a talent of mine.
— Paige Harbison, New Girl
I feel great! I really mean it. I have to remember this for the next time I’m having a terrible week. Have you ever done that? You feel really bad, and then it goes away, and you don’t know why. I try to remind myself when I feel great like this that there will be another terrible week coming someday, so I should store up as many great details as I can, so during the next terrible week, I can remember those details and believe that I’ll feel great again. It doesn’t work a lot, but I think it’s very important to try.
— Stephen Chbosky
I'd laugh, only my stupid lizard brain has disabled the laugh button for now. I'm too frozen up with tension.I am owed so much laughter. Sometimes I hope I'm building up a stockpile of missing laughs, and when I've recovered, they'll all come exploding out in one gigantic fit that last twenty-four hours.
— Sophie Kinsella
BERNARD. (To DONALD.) Donald, read any new libraries lately?DONALD. One or three. I did the complete works of Doris Lessing this week. I've been depressed.[. . .]BERNARD. Some people eat, some people drink, and some take dope.DONALD. I read.MICHAEL. And read and read and read. It's a wonder your eyes don't turn back in your head at the sight of a book jacket.HANK. Well, at least he's a constructive escapist.
— Mart Crowley
Part of the forces that sent Sam trudging across the white prairies was love of life, a gladness for health and youth that filled him as Mozart's gayest music filled him; and part of it was his belief that the earth on which he walked had been designed by the greatest of artists, and that is a man had the courage and fortitude not to fail it, it would not fail him. In Sam's rough mountain-man philosophy those persons who became the wards of sadness and melancholy had never summoned for use and trial more than a part of what they had in them, and so had failed themselves and their Creator. If it was a part of the inscrutable plan that he was to live through this ordeal, and again cover the bones of wife and child with mountain lilies, the strength was lying in him, waiting, and he had only to call on it- all of it- and use it, without flinching or whimpering. If he showed himself to be a worthy piece in the Great Architect's edifice he would live; in Sam's philosophy that was about all there was to it.
— Vardis Fisher
When you told me I didn't love youI simply thought how would you knowFor I remembered the spaces between your fingersAnd the crease between your eyesHow dare you tell meI never thought of you as mine.
— Sara Jones
It's easy to feel depressed by focusing on problems. Count your blessings while others are adding up their worries and you will be much happier. Attitude is EVERYTHING!
— Karen  Gibbs, A Gallery of Scrapbook Creations
At the fall, we became alienated not only from God and other people but also from ourselves.
— R.C. Sproul
It's hard to answer the question "what's wrong?" when nothing is right.
— Anonymous
Each time that I have felt like I might finally be figuring some things out, life has decided to change the rules and I’ve had to start all over again.
— Jennifer Elisabeth, Born Ready: Unleash Your Inner Dream Girl
This is the hour I hide everythingBehind my eyesTo see if you can seeAll the trouble my brain's been brewing. Yes, I feel I am the worst and you are the bestAnd yet, and yet, Nothing bad unfolds as we sit,Young and nervous, Alive and bursting,With futures that may not entwine.Who am I?Who am I to sabotage what may be too smallFor even chaos to noticeAnd disassemble?
— Evan Roskos, Dr. Bird's Advice for Sad Poets
There is absolutely no worse death curse than the humdrum daily existence of the living dead.
— Anthon St. Maarten
It is a fact that one man can be deliriously happy in the exact situation that causes another man to wither from depression.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Making Wishes
…Do you think there’s somewhere else, some other place to go after this one?” Mandy blurted out.“You mean when you die, where will you end up?” Alecto asked her. “…I wouldn’t know… back to whatever void there is, I suppose.”“I’ve thought about it… every living thing dies alone, it’ll be lonely after death,” Mandy sighed sadly. “That freaks me out, does it scare you?”“I don't want to be alone,” Alecto replied wearily. “We won’t be, though. We’ll be dead, so we’ll just be darkness, not much else, just memories, nostalgia and darkness.”“I don’t want to be any of that either though,” Mandy exclaimed, bursting into tears and crying, keeping her eyes to the floor, her voice shaky as she spoke to him. “When we die, we’ll still be nothing, the world will still be nothing, everything’ll just be nothing!”“You’re real though, at least that’s something,” Alecto pointed out, holding his hand out in front of her. Smiling miserably, Mandy took his hand in her own and sat there beside him quietly.
— Rebecca McNutt, Smog City
There are always those to whom all self-revelation is contemptible, unless it ends with a noble thanks to the gods for the Unconquerable Soul.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up
In times like these I always cheered myself up with a certain story. I forgot just when I first heard it, or who I heard it from... but, back when I was young it would cheer me up when I was feeling depressed. Basically, you think of life in terms of a single 24 hour day. So if you take the average human lifespan, to be around 72 years, then dividing that by 24... that comes to 3 years per hour. Meaning, that if you were 18 it'd only be 6 AM! 6 in the morning is nothing! Schools aren't even open by then! It's only been a couple of hours before sunrise, the day's just begun! So if you're 18, you can still fix you life by then! In fact even if you were 30 year old, that's still only 10 AM! The sun's still high, and there's still 2 hours until noon! You still have the whole afternoon to fix your life! You could still make something of yourself. I've always been thinking that, but... I'm now 45 years old! 45 divided by 3 is 15 meaning, that the time 3PM! Ring Ring Ring! I can hear the clock, ringing in my mind! There's only 2 hours before work is over at 5PM! I can't redo anything, it's almost time to go home already.
— Nobuyuki Fukumoto, Saikyō Densetsu Kurosawa 9
Jasper felt the sadness then. A strong sensation of being pulled underwater, of being helpless to do anything but sink. Further into the despair. Until it completely surrounded you. Until every breath you took was just swallowing more pain. Until you were in so deep that there wasn't any hope of ever breaking the surface again.
— Jessica Gadziala, Into The Green
The key to happiness is being happy with who you are and enjoying the life you are living.
— Robert Moment, How to Be Happy in Life: Easy to Use Happiness Tips, Ideas and Strategies to Be Happy
Depression is a phobia of happiness.
— Jack Deveny, Blind Triangle: A Rare Love Story from the Sixties
Ignoring to change your thoughts and beliefs wouldn't fail to cause your negative mood to remain unchanged.
I rummaged through the drawers in search of a strong poison. I thought of nothing as I looked; I had to get it over with as quickly as possible. It was as if it were an everyday task I needed to do.All I could find were things of no use to me: buttons, string, thread of various colors, notebooks—all strongly redolent of naphthalene and none capable of causing a man’s death. Buttons, thread, and string—that is what the world contained at this most tragic of moments.
— Max Blecher