c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
She said she couldn't handle it,’ he told me. ‘I’m about to lose my eyesight and she can’t handle it.’I was thinking about the word handle, and all the unholdable things that get handled. . . .'Well, to be fair,' I said, 'I mean, she probably can't handle it. Neither can you, but she doesn't have to handle it. And you do.''I kept saying “always” to her today, “always always always”, and she just kept talking over me and not saying it back. It was like I was already gone, you know? “Always” was a promise! How can you just break a promise?''Sometimes people don't understand the promises they're making when they make them', I said.Isaac shot me a look. ‘Right, of course. But you keep them anyway. That’s what love is. Love is keeping the promises anyway. Don’t you believe in true love?’I didn’t answer. I didn’t have an answer. But I thought that if true love did exist, that was a pretty good definition of it.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
That year, when the trees burned the fire of late summer into their leaves and the ground mist was a ghost of the river, long and wet and cold, the aunt looked from her windows to the walls around her and imagined another winter inside them. She began to see the world as a bird sees bars, and she scratched her arms beneath her sleeves.
— Shannon Hale, The Goose Girl
Since I am suffering with type 2 bipolar disorder mainly on the depressive side of the bipolar disorder.I am not afraid nor am I disappointed with it; if this is what God Almighty want me to have; I will make sure that I will make good use of this disorder; and, be the best person that I can be.
— Temitope Owosela
Since her retirement from teaching Miss Beryl's health had in many respects greatly improved, despite her advancing years. An eighth-grade classroom was an excellent place to snag whatever was in the air in the way of illness. Also depression, which, Miss Beryl believed, in conjunction with guilt, opened the door to illness. Miss Beryl didn't know any teachers who weren't habitually guilty and depressed--guilty they hadn't accomplished more with their students, depressed that very little more was possible.
— Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool
When it is all too much; when the news is so bad meditation itself feels useless, and a single life feels too small a stone to offer on the altar of Peace, find a Human Sunrise. Find those people who are committed to changing our scary reality. Human sunrises are happening all over the earth, at every moment. People gathering, people working to change the intolerable, people coming in their robes and sandals or in their rags and bare feet, and they are singing, or not, and they are chanting, or not. But they are working to bring peace, light, compassion, to the infinitely frightening downhill slide of Human life.
— Alice Walker
There were times when I would sob until I shook, until my eyelids were so swollen that it pained me to open them, and through hiccoughs, trembling, I would hiss, don’t touch me! as he moved to place a gentle hand on my shoulder. There were times when we seemed locked into our chairs, discrete, the static between us more eloquent than words. But there was never a moment when I doubted Peter’s ability to heal me.
— Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love
Through the eyes of a happy girl lies guilt and destruction.
— Britany Lopez
There are only two profound ways to reach enlightenment: Laugh by yourself, or get tickled.
— Saurabh Sharma
Some days I am the flower beneath the machine. And the machine rolls slowly on, blocking the sun, without a care for what it tramples beneath.
— Craig  Stone, The Squirrel that Dreamt of Madness
In the mirror I stand, an injured deer in headlights, or maybe high beams, judging by the way my eyes water. I measure my wrists with my fingers, and I clutch at my rib cage, fingering it languidly, tracing the rise and fall of sharp bones until my heartbeat slows, and I dream of a faraway ocean.
— Kris Kidd, I Can't Feel My Face
I looked hard out the window and understood suddenly that what I saw was full of color. A watercolor wash of summer light lay on the Catalina Mountains. The end of a depression is that clear: it’s as if you have been living underwater, but never realized it until you came up for air.
— Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
I’ve memorized the best angles in the bathroom mirror from which to see how badly I’ve disintegrated. I truly do go from sixty to zero.
— Kris Kidd
Its emotional character … is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency —sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying— are not just unpleasant but literally horrible.
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Bad thoughts can be dangerous if left to simmer and weaken the heart slowly and invisibly. Like termites that destroy the beams of a house, secretly, in the dark until it's too late and everything collapses.
— Massimo Marino, Daimones
In those years when their mother disappeared into herself, and old Mrs Jeffrey next door turned into Frannie, their honorary grandmother, Alice also taught herself how to change light bulbs, fix running toilets and cook chops and veggies while Elisabeth learned how to demand refunds, pay bills, fill in forms and talk to strangers.
— Liane Moriarty, What Alice Forgot
Sheridan’s eyes fell to the watery gateway as he begrudgingly donned the novel wetsuit and pulled on the crown of arc lamps. Following Kunchen’s lead, he cinched it tightly around his waist, feet, and neck. And all the while his eyes returned to the teeming portal.Kunchen took notice.“This whirlpool is like the mighty river of life.” Kunchen said.Sheridan watched as Kunchen dipped his right hand into a shallow pool of ice-crusted water, scooping up the pristine liquid in his cupped fingers. He submitted the handful of water to Sheridan. With the gentle tilt of his right hand he poured it out, watching it trickle into his left hand.With unerring kindness in his eyes, Kunchen became the teacher and Sheridan the pupil: “Observe the water. It is soft, easily bending and transforming to its circumstance.”He poured the water from his left hand. It fell into the writhing water and disappeared in an instant.“But when it joins with the force of the whirlpool it becomes powerful and unstoppable. You must be flexible like the water, feeling the flow of life, tapping into its current. This is the only way.
— Phillip R. White
The days and the light feel like brief moments of torture, put here to remind us of what we don’t have any more. Joy is instantaneous, that, is the wonder of joy. Misery and suffering sneak up on someone like a bastard. They drip into your brain slowly, over time. Until one morning you wake up crying and you have no idea why.
— Craig  Stone, Deep In The Bin Of Bob
I know what it's like to sleep in fear, to starve myself to be worthy, to be ashamed of my voice, to want to sleep forever. To question why I deserve to live.
— Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith
It is as if I were made of stone, as if I were my own tombstone, there is no loophole for doubt or for faith, for love or repugnance, for courage or anxiety, in particular or in general, only a vague hope lives on, but no better than the inscriptions on tombstones.
— Franz Kafka, Diaries of Franz Kafka
In the end, it was the secrets that held me hostage and fuelled my depression, but, once released, emancipation - from fear, shame, guilt and judgement - was finally possible.
— B.G. Bowers, Death and Life
Household objects lost meaning. A bedside clock became a hunk of molded plastic, telling something called time, in a world marking its passage for some reason.
— Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides
I name you today, heart fears. I am small, but you are smaller. You will not stop me. You have a voice, fears, and I must listen, but then I will open my heart. I will love you right to death.
— Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith
I was lost in a void of perpetual darkness. Disconnected from myself. Turned inside out. No sign of life. Eventually, the darkness was my light and the void a haven – a quiet place where I could nurse my secret and lick my wounds.
— B.G. Bowers, Death and Life
I felt like I was being carried over the threshold of a sisterhood of loss. I knew I was not walking alone, and that eventually I would bob back up to the surface of the deep, because the women around me showed me what healing looks like.
— Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith
When the door to suicide opens it becomes a viable option that you never considered before, but, once ajar, it initiates an invasion strategy. Day by day thoughts blacken under the occupation of the new inhabitant. It becomes an all-consuming addiction that makes its home in your head and heart and, before you know it, the whole neighbourhood is talking and thinking about suicide. Eventually, the mind is overwhelmed by the conspiracy of its own darkness and begins to wage war against the body. At this point, the body is powerless.
— B.G. Bowers, Death and Life
Those who nurse secrets, nurse a chaotic world of amplified silence.
— B.G. Bowers, Death and Life
I am not enough in myself
—  I can barely make it through buying milk and school supplies. Thank goodness there is a Guardian to come before me and throw off the dark.
Breathe. Relax. This too shall pass.
— Lee Horbachewski, A Quiet Strong Voice: A Voice of Hope Amidst Depression, Anxiety, and Suicidal Thoughts
The loss of innocence is inevitable, but the death of innocence disturbs the natural order. The death of innocence causes an imbalance and initiates an internal war that manifests differently in each individual, but almost always includes anger, withdrawal and severe depression.
— B.G. Bowers, Death and Life
Sometimes you have to cross the boundaries of Death in order to discover the meaning of Life.
— B.G. Bowers, Death and Life
It's not a mental complaint-it's a physical thing, like it's physically hard to open your mouth and make the words come out. ... you stumble on them as they gather behind your lower lip. So you just keep quiet.
— Ned Vizzini, It's Kind of a Funny Story
I began to get a feeling familiar to me from my bartending days of being the only sane man in a nuthouse. It doesn't make you feel superior but depressed and scared, because there is nobody you can contact.
— William S. Burroughs, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks
But that’s depression, isn’t it? It makes you selfish. It…it shrinks your world down. Like you’re inside a tornado or something. How are you supposed to care about the things outside that storm? When it’s all you can do to just survive it?
— Rebecca Rogers Maher, The Bridge
The fact is, I have been dead so long and it has been simply such a grim shoving of the hours behind me…since the hideous summer of ’78, when I went down to the deep sea, its dark waters closed over me and I knew neither hope nor peace.
— Alice James, The Diary of Alice James
I've had a lot of therapists, so I've had the opportunity to approach my fear in many different ways. I've faced it head on and sideways and tried to tiptoe up behind it.
— Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith
The most amazing thing is that all my sorrows, all of my darkest moments, are becoming my gifts.
— Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith
She had a sense of herself being brain dead: running on tubes and machines.
— Caroline B. Cooney, The Face on the Milk Carton
The shadow is dark and the woods are cold, but they are not endless. No matter how lost you are now, you are not lost forever. You are findable.Love just keeps on looking. Love is forever tries.
— Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith
In our circle, stress was a valuable status marker: I stress, therefore I am.
— Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love
God wants to take the fears that you and I are holding onto with both hands. He throws them aside, effortless, and then takes our empty hands in His and fills them with his love. He is not a hard driver. He wants to provide.
— Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith
I walked to Mairangi Bay beach, day after day, seeking companionship in the roar of the ocean, and contemplating the shipwreck of my life. There, in that isolated wilderness, amidst the screaming gulls, and consistent rhythm of the tides, I channeled my chaotic thoughts through my pen and released them into poetry, until the quiet desperation passed and I was secure in the knowledge that I had made it through another day.
— B.G. Bowers, Death and Life
They used to tell me if you’re depressed anyway, why not be depressed and take a walk instead of being depressed and staying in bed? If it makes no difference, why not get up and go out?
— Rebecca Rogers Maher, The Bridge
For years, I worked seven-day weeks, through birthdays and most public holidays, Christmases and New Year’s Eves included. I worked mornings and afternoons, resuming work after dinner. I remember feeling as if life were a protracted exercise in pulling myself out of a well by a rope, and that rope was work.
— Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love
When you're depressed you retreat and you go into a smaller world. This is why Brighton worked well for the story, because it's a smaller world than London.
— Sara Sheridan
There is no loss, if you cannot remember what you have lost.
— Claire North, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
A woman who had fallen out of love with her life
— Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies
Hit the bottom and get back up
—  or hit the bottle and stay down.
A night of crying has silenced me. This morning it seems the whole world is against me. I've never before felt so barren, so empty. I've never before thought the daylight to be ... my enemy. My enemy.
— Shaun Hick
Alcohol has its own well-know defects as a medication for depression but no one has ever suggested - ask any doctor - that it is not the most effective anti-anxiety agent yet known.
— Joan Didion, Blue Nights
Truly, a life in constant pain is the life of the damned.
— Christopher Pike, Thirst No. 1: The Last Vampire, Black Blood, and Red Dice
But what were you supposed to do with that weight? Once it was on you? Just be a man? Just suck it up? Maybe you were. Maybe that was the real test. Maybe that is exactly the thing that made you a man: the ability to function with the worst possible secrets in your brain. Which was why so many grown-up men seemed so ridiculous. They never felt that responsibility. They were untested, unproven; they were boys in grown-up clothes.
— Blake Nelson, Paranoid Park
Depression can be a form of self hatred. We don't feel comfortable in our own skin.
— Michele McKnight Baker, Sandpaper Sisters
Things must be done, life must go on. Life would go on, even if every breath she took hurt, even if her joints ached when she moved. Sorry and loneliness were an insidious evil, for they lived in the mind. One could not take a tonic and see them dissipate.
— Kristen Callihan, Moonglow
Love is like a piece of chocalate. It's looks and tastes good, but it's dark. What really matters is the inside.
— Touaxia Vang
There are friends, but they are people to spend time with, not people to share time with. There's a false beast that takes the form of instinct and harps on the pointlessness of everything that happens.
— David Levithan, Every Day
Other flowers came at the end of the summer, but by then the winter sadness had already dissipated, and the effect of the blooms was not the same.
— Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror
When people run in circles it's a very very... mad world.
— Tears For Fears
I want to re-start my life,
— pavankumar nagaraj
No one can hurt me now 'cause i have stopped permitting them.
— pavankumar nagaraj
You are rotting away, you are falling to pieces. What are you? A bag of filth. Now turn around and look into that mirror again. Do you see that thing facing you? That is the last man. If you are human, that is humanity. Now put your clothes on again.
— George Orwell, 1984
In search for love, where love is some Oxytocin,seeking happiness related to Orexin. Sensations of glory, motivation and success, They are all some precious chemicals. Our mind is greedy, and falls into depression when he is no longer satisfied. LIFE IS A DRUG STORE WE ARE ALL JUNKIES.
— Omar EL KADMIRI
The silver flask called to him.Blue Coyote Motel
— Dianne Harman
When something drops into your life that seems to threaten your future, remember this: the first shockwaves of the bomb are not sin. The real danger is yielding to them. Giving in. Putting up no spiritual fight. And the root of that surrender is unbelief - a failure to fight for faith in future grace. A failure to cherish all that God promises to be for us in Jesus.
— John Piper, Future Grace
At that moment, sitting on that park bench, The Writer was overcome by an indefinable sadness not completely ascribable to the state in which The Mother was now, nor the desperation of his decades-long creative crisis, a sadness so strong he could have peddle it to all the enthusiasts in the world and turned them into depressives, and would still have some left over. Because he no longer knew what to do with so much sadness. And sometimes he didn't even know what to do with himself.
— Filippo Bologna, The Parrots
Better live than dead.
— Touaxia Vang
An engaging examination of a painful subject, with a focus on healing and forgiveness. - Kirkus Review
— Robert Uttaro, To the Survivors: One Man's Journey as a Rape Crisis Counselor with True Stories of Sexual Violence
Some of the most effective segments are interviews with various staff members, including Aila, who works for the center’s legal department. She explains the difficulties of rape prosecution, concluding that “only the survivor” can truly define justice. - Kirkus Review
— Robert Uttaro, To the Survivors: One Man's Journey as a Rape Crisis Counselor with True Stories of Sexual Violence
First I was decayed, I was putrefied. Kept thinking I could never live on, now that I had died...
— Angelika Rust, The Girl on the Red Pillow
I had great Reason to consider it as a Determination of Heaven, that in this desolate Place, and in this desolate Manner I should end my life; the Tears would run plentifully down my Face when I made these Reflections, and sometimes I would expostulate with myself, Why Providence should thus compleately ruine its Creatures, and render them so absolutely miserable, so without Help abandon'd, so entirely depress'd, that it could be hardly rational to be thankful for such a Life.
— Daniel Defoe
Finding your "self-culture" is hero's work. I liken it to the journey of a warrior who is preparing for battle. There is no violence in the battle, but there is a plan of attack and a methodology that you need to employ to complete the journey. Page 12
— Victoria Lorient-Faibish
Every morning I sit at the kitchen table over a tall glass of water swallowing pills. (So my hands won’t shake.) (So my heart won’t race.) (So my face won’t thaw.) (So my blood won’t mold.) (So the voices won’t scream.) (So I don’t reach for knives.) (So I keep out of the oven.) (So I eat every morsel.) (So the wine goes bitter.) (So I remember the laundry.) (So I remember to call.) (So I remember the name of each pill.) (So I remember the name of each sickness.) (So I keep my hands inside my hands.) (So the city won’t rattle.) (So I don’t weep on the bus.) (So I don’t wander the guardrail.) (So the flashbacks go quiet.) (So the insomnia sleeps.) (So I don’t jump at car horns.) (So I don’t jump at cat-calls.) (So I don’t jump a bridge.) (So I don’t twitch.) (So I don’t riot.) (So I don’t slit a strange man’s throat.)
— Jeanann Verlee
There was no more meaningless phrase in all of language than "Cheer up!" The only way to get someone to cheer up was to help them forget, and saying "cheer up" had quite the opposite effect, only reminding the person why he or she was depressed in the first place.
— Kōji Suzuki, Spiral
It was impossible to sleep. Anxiety stopped me from falling asleep
—  depression woke me up.
I used to feel like I was drowning. So I stopped trying to swim.
— Oliver Sykes, Raised By Raptors
I don’t know why we take our worst moods so much more seriously than our best, crediting depression with more clarity than euphoria. We dismiss peak moments and passionate love affairs as an ephemeral chemical buzz, just endorphins or hormones, but accept those 3 A.M. bouts of despair as unsentimental insights into the truth about our lives.
— Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing
For a moment you forget how much the loss hurts. Then you remember and it buries you.
— Oliver Sykes, Raised By Raptors
The so-called 'psychotically depressed' person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote 'hopelessness' or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling 'Don't!' and 'Hang on!', can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Seriously, why aren't you on drugs?" Cath walked past her out of the room."Are you a licensed psychiatrist? Or do you just play one on TV?""I'm on drugs," Reagan said. "They're a beautiful thing.
— Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl
If you have been raped or sexually assaulted and you have been blamed, or fear that you may be blamed, I just want you to understand this: You are not to blame. There is nothing you did to make someone hurt you, nor is there anything you could have done differently to prevent or stop it.
— Robert Uttaro, To the Survivors: One Man's Journey as a Rape Crisis Counselor with True Stories of Sexual Violence
He is in no real danger. He merely suffers from a lethargy, a sickness that is common among the depressed. He has forgotten who he really is, but he will recover, for he used to know me, and all I have to do is cloud the mist that beclouds his vision.
— Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy
I felt sure of this. However much I loved him, and as beautiful as the world was, none of it was powerful enough to take the weight off his heart, that heaviness that dragged him down, into the beyond, making him yearn to be at peace.
— Banana Yoshimoto, The Lake
Being depressed and suicidal doesn't mean wanting to kill yourself every moment of every day. It may be a fixed obsession, but sometimes it gets relegated to the back of your head. Rather, it means the world takes on the very cut and dry, black and white, unilateral aspect of a flowchart.
— Nenia Campbell, Tantalized
Smiles are a funny thingand laughter is hilarious.I smile sometimeswhen I am delirious.
— Casey Renee Kiser, Swan Wreck
Misery loves companyTragically
— Kim Holden, All of It
Always know there are friends somewhere rooting for you. There are people you don’t know, always praying for you and lifting you before God. - Jenee, from "To the Survivors".
— Robert Uttaro, To the Survivors: One Man's Journey as a Rape Crisis Counselor with True Stories of Sexual Violence
I think I just said it, but I think it’s worth repeating. They gave me hope that there is good in the world out there. There really is. It really does exist. Regardless of how bad things can be, and how down on your luck you can be, or how bad your trust is broken when it comes to warming up to people and all that stuff, I know that there’s people out there that genuinely wanna help. Putting yourself in that position is a huge step, and it’s a very risky and fragile step, but it’s also a step that needs to be taken because there is help. And you can get through something like this. You really can. - Jim, from "To the Survivors
— Robert Uttaro, To the Survivors: One Man's Journey as a Rape Crisis Counselor with True Stories of Sexual Violence
Desdemona, mourning her parents, was still imprisoned by the past. And so she stood on the mountain, looking down at the emancipated city, and felt cheated by her ability to feel happy by everybody else.
— Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
When people have trouble with their emotions – a bout of anxiety or depression, say, or seasonal gloominess - they often want science to pinpoint an offending neurotransmitter in the way that a witness picks the perp out of a lineup. Is it excessive norepinephrine, too little dopamine, errant estrogen? The answer is apt to dissatisfy: no single suspect can be fingered with confidence because the question itself attributes a fallacious simplicity to the brain.(91)
— Thomas Lewis, A General Theory of Love
She was supposed to be happy... why couldn't she just be happy for a few moments? Why couldn't she just forget everything bad going on her life, and just be happy?
— Courtney Carola, Where We Belong
Persistent smile brings out hollow dimples, and persistent frowns brings out hollow wrinkles.
— Michael Bassey Johnson
She was—of course—perfectly normal—quiet and polite andreasonablyintelligent and...normal andself destructive and lonelyand terrified of everythingAnd she lovedDisaster—
— Tah the Trickster, A Collection of Carvings
This book is dedicated to all who have been affected by sexual violence.
— Robert Uttaro, To the Survivors: One Man's Journey as a Rape Crisis Counselor with True Stories of Sexual Violence
Hiding and waitingFor the worst Or the end
— Kim Holden, All of It
Do you not hear the constant victory,in the human footraceof time, slow as fire,sure, and thick and Herculeanaccumulating its volume and adding its sad fiber?
— Pablo Neruda, Residence on Earth
Lewis encourages his cancer-stricken and temporarily depressed wife that uncertainty rather than hopelessness is our cross.
— C.S. Lewis
If two people who love each other Ares soul mates, then there will always be a empty hole in my soul waiting for you..
— Trevor Lease
You must want to change. It sounds simple, but it’s obviously not. If things were easy, then something would be wrong. You must make a firm decision that this is what you want. If you want to change, if you want to free yourself from a depressed, mediocre mindset, then you must make a conscious decision to do something about it, and stick to it. If you don’t want to change, nothing will help you. Years of endless work will be lost on you unless you internalize your strength and push forward. It is how hard you push in times of difficulty that will prove your strength.
— Leigh Hershkovich
If two people who love eachother are soul mates, then there will always be a empty hole in my soul waiting for you..
— Trevor Lease
Sometimes letting go is the best solution
— Mahsati Abdul
Find your "self-culture" is hero's work. I liken it to the journey of a warrior who is preparing for battle. There is no violence in the battle, but there is a plan of attack and a methodology that you need to employ to complete the journey. Page 12
— Victoria Lorient-Faibish, Find Your "Self-Culture" Moving From Depression and Anxiety to Monumental Self-Acceptance
Nobody can guarantee that it's going to be okay, but - and I don't know if this will be comforting to anyone else - the possibility exists that there's a piece of corn on a floor somewhere that will make you just as confused about why you were laughing as you have ever been about why you are depressed.
— Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened
And finally - FINALLY - after a lifetime of feelings and anxiety and more feelings, I didn't have any feelings left. I had spent my last feeling being disappointed that I couldn't rent Jumanji.
— Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened
Depression, somehow, is much more in line with society's notions of what women are all about: passive, sensitive, hopeless, helpless, stricken, dependent, confused, rather tiresome, and with limited aspirations. Manic states, on the other hand, seem to be more the provenance of men: restless, fiery, aggressive, volatile, energetic, risk taking, grandiose and visionary, and impatient with the status quo. Anger or irritability in men, under such circumstances, is more tolerated and understandable; leaders or takers of voyages are permitted a wider latitude for being temperamental. Journalists and other writers, quite understandably, have tended to focus on women and depression, rather than women and mania. This is not surprising: depression is twice as common in women as men. But manic-depressive illness occurs equally often in women and men, and, being a relatively common condition, mania ends up affecting a large number of women. They, in turn, often are misdiagnosed, receive poor, if any, psychiatric treatment, and are at high risk for suicide, alcoholism, drug abuse, and violence. But they, like men who have manic-depressive illness, also often contribute a great deal of energy, fire, enthusiasm, and imagination to the people and world around them.
— Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
I would die for you. You know that. I would die without you. If it were not for you, I would be dead a hundred times over these past five years.
— Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince
Will stared down at his hands. "My whole life wrecked, destroyed..." "You're seventeen," Magnus said. "You can't have wrecked a life you've barely lived.
— Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince
Once you hit rock bottom, that's where you perfectly stand; That's your chance of restarting, but restarting the right way.
— Justin Kanayurak
it has to be emphasized that if the pain were readily describable most of the countless sufferers from this ancient affliction would have been able to confidently depict for their friends and loved ones (even their physicians) some of the actual dimensions of their torment, and perhaps elicit a comprehension that has been generally lacking; such incomprehension has usually been due not to a failure of sympathy but to the basic inability of healthy people to imagine a form of torment so alien to everyday experience.
— William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness
One thing they don’t tell you ’bout the blues when you got ’em, you keep on fallin’ ’cause there ain't no bottom,' sings Emmylou Harris, and she may be right. Perhaps it would help to be told that there is no bottom, save, as they say, wherever and whenever you stop digging. You have to stand there, spade in hand, cold whiskey sweat beaded on your brow, eyes misshapen and wild, some sorry-ass grave digger grown bone-tired of the trade. You have to stand there in the dirty rut you dug, alone in the darkness, in all its pulsing quiet, surrounded by the scandal of corpses.
— Maggie Nelson, Bluets
I feel no peace, I feel nothing. I think I will feel nothing forever.
— Philippa Gregory, The Kingmaker's Daughter
Like many self-help books, The Deepest Blue is full of horrifyingly simplistic language and some admittedly good advice. Somehow the women in the book learn to say: That’s my depression talking. It’s not “me.”As if we could scrape the color off the iris and still see.
— Maggie Nelson, Bluets
Maybe I just didn’t want it to be Benny because he really loves her, and if I was wrong about that, it’d be depressing. Who wants to be depressed?”“Poets,” Eve decided. “You have to think they must.”“Okay, other than poets.
— J.D. Robb, Fantasy in Death
I'll fail.""At schoool.""Failing at school is failing at life.
— Ned Vizzini, It's Kind of a Funny Story
The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.
— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
…it seemed to Kirsch that the most reliable guide to the mental landscape of a patient was the patient himself. He was better placed to explain his behaviour and his experiences than anyone else. Yet wherever Kirsch went, the patient was the very last person anyone thought to consult. Because, of course, the patient was insane.
— Philip Sington, The Einstein Girl
Selfish love hurts, selfless love heals.
— Rob Liano
Day after day, more and more medications are prescribed for depression and addiction, assuming that these things run in our blood, when really they run in our patterns of awareness.
— Vironika Tugaleva, The Love Mindset: An Unconventional Guide to Healing and Happiness
Its hard to say what's wrong when nothing is going right!
— Sherif A. El-Mawardy, The Truth Behind Truth: What Lies Beyond...
Silence is one of worst, most vocal enemies, yet people go through many bouts of depression not sharing what is happening. People don’t understand that, but as someone who suffers from it, I can tell you that it’s difficult to be objective about the gray. I described depression to my therapist as a misty fog that surrounds me, heavy on my shoulders, pervading everything and nothing at all. I liken depression to a bird stealing into the depths of your soul, pecking at your disposition until nothing is left. And that is when you break into pieces.
— Rachel  Thompson, Broken Pieces
Power as a beneficial tool for aspiring achievers is primarily made up into four folds;1. Power to control emotions,2. Power to make right decisions,3. Power to stand against depression,4. Power to excel in innovations.
— Israelmore Ayivor
Anti-depressants are just tools, one of many, which we use to try and ease the suffering, numb the pain and disperse the dark clouds in our mind in the hope that maybe, just maybe, a little sunlight will shine through.
— Samuel P Fields
I don't have problems. I am a writer. I am the problem.
— Arzum Uzun
The most important thing is to be whatever you are without shame.
— Rod Steiger
And that fear I'd felt, the disembodying confusion, seemed to be a drug I was now addicted to, because moving through the ordinary world- watching CNN, reading the Times, walking to Sant Ambroeus to have a coffee at the bar- made me feel exhausted, even depressed. Perhaps I was suffering from the same problem as the man who'd sailed around the world and now on land, facing his farmhouse, his wife and kids, understood that the constancy of home stretching out before him like a dry flat field was infinitely more terrifying than any violent squall with thirty-foot swells.
— Marisha Pessl, Night Film
She abandoned the garden, and the mums and asters that had trusted her to see them through to the first frost hung their waterlogged heads.
— Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
Depression, I've learned, is sometimes caused by anger that we keep locked up inside.
— Lynn Austin, Pilgrimage: My Journey to a Deeper Faith in the Land Where Jesus Walked
my brain had begun to endure its familiar siege: panic and dislocation, and a sense that my thought processes were being engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world.
— William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness
Dear God,what is my purpose of life?What should I do to find it?Once I found it, will I become stronger?....Oh no, my mind is blank.a strange sound kept ringing in my head.What sound is that...?Ah, I know.It's...The sound of emptiness.
— Chica Umino, Honey and Clover, Vol. 6
depression in its major stages possesses no quickly available remedy: failure of alleviation is one of the most distressing factors of the disorder as it reveals itself to the victim, and one that helps situate it squarely in the category of grave diseases.
— William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness
People aren't crazy, they’re just reacting normally to an abnormally crazy world.
— J.S.B. Morse, Now and at the Hour of Our Death
At any rate, during the few hours when the depressive state itself eased off long enough to permit the luxury of concentration, I had recently filled this vacuum with fairly extensive reading and I had absorbed many fascinating and troubling facts
— William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness
We are created for adventure, and if we cannot find one, we start blowing things out of proportion so it feels like we have one.
— John Eldredge, Love and War: Finding the Marriage You've Dreamed Of
Always remember, child... that to think bad thoughts is really the easiest thing in the world. If you leave your mind to itself it will spiral you down into ever increasing unhappiness. To think good thoughts, however, requires effort. This is one onf the things that discipline - training - is about.
— James Clavell, Shōgun
You will never attain and maintain more than you think you deserve.
— Rob Liano
People take ownership of sickness and disease by saying things like MY high blood pressure MY diabetes, MY heart disease, MY depression, MY! MY! MY! Don't own it because it doesn't belong to you!
— Stella Payton
When a child receives the message, even subtly or indirectly, that his emotions don't matter, he will grow up feeling, somewhere deep inside, that he himself doesn't matter.
— Jonice Webb
In a daydream I used to have, all these places were points of happiness to me; all these places were lifeboats to my small drowning soul, for I would imagine myself entering and leaving them, and just that - entering and leaving over and over again - would see me through a bad feeling I did not have a name for. I only knew it felt a little like sadness but heavier than that.
— Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy
Even now it comes as a shock if by chance I notice in the street a face resembling someone I know however slightly, and I am at once seized by a shivering violent enough to make me dizzy.
— Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human
Here in the bathroom with me are razor blades. Here is iodine to drink. Here are sleeping pills to swallow. You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be. Every time you don't throw yourself down the stairs, that's a choice. Every time you don't crash your car, you reenlist.
— Chuck Palahniuk
I am not depressed; my life is just shit. As a consequence of my not being depressed, I am not like them. You need to know this from the very off. You need to know I, Arch Fry, will not allow myself to be neatly pigeonholed, erroneously labelled or closed off in some tidy little box - one to be shelved away and conveniently forgotten about. No, I am not depressed: NOT. DEPRESSED.You see, I’m just not stuck in some deep unassailable chasm like all the rest, like all these other poor fuckers who’ve so readily accepted that noose of a word.
— Tom Conrad, Depressed
Is boredom anything less than the sense of one's faculties slowly dying?
— John Berger
Okay, I’ll just jump right out and say it. I have anxiety issues.
— Shannon Celebi
Hope doesn't require a massive chain where heavy links of logic hold it together. A thin wire will do...just strong enough to get us through the night until the winds die down.
— Charles R. Swindoll
She would let a speeding automobile hit her to show them all how unloved she was.
— Lisa Dierbeck, One Pill Makes You Smaller: A Novel
Clearly our current form of medicine will bankrupt us and simultaneously keep the chemical industry the number one money-maker as physicians nurture a nation of drugged zombies.
— Sherry A. Rogers, The High Blood Pressure Hoax
Oh she's alright it's just that - I don't want to get mixed up with anyone in the house. I don't want to get mixed up at all with anybody anymore.
— Lynne Reid Banks, The L-Shaped Room
Food allergy is one of the least diagnosed and most prevalent causes of symptoms, especially depression.
— Sherry A. Rogers, The High Blood Pressure Hoax
Perhaps the relevant truth- and it's one whose existence was apparent to my wife, and I'm sure to much of the world, long before it became apparent to me-is that we all find ourselves in temporal currents and unless you're paying attention you'll discover, often too late, that an undertow of weeks or of years has pulled you deep into trouble.
— Joseph O'Neill, Netherland
...even my work, the largest of the pots and pans I'd placed under my life's leaking ceiling, had become to small to contain my misery.
— Joseph O'Neill, Netherland
Some are born richWhile others poor
— Some are born freeWhile others captives
Maybe time would not feel as heavy if I didn't have this guilt - the guilt of knowing the truth and stuffing it down where no one can see it.
— Veronica Roth, Insurgent
It took me far too long to realize that lost years and relationships cannot be recovered. That damage done to oneself and others cannot always be put right again.
— Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
We don't speak of it, or react to it. Paralyzed in a reality of uncertainty and madness,this is where we are.
— Danielle Rohr, Water Falls Down
I thought to myself: if it’s true that every person has a star in the sky, mine must be distant, dim, and absurd. Perhaps I never had a star.
— Sadegh Hedayat, The Blind Owl
Everybody breaks sooner or later, Bob. Anyone can drown. Sometimes you see it. Most often, youdon’t because the body protects and the skin hides, so drowning doesn’t look like drowning and somepeople scar so nicely. Take it from an expert.
— Ilsa J. Bick, Drowning Instinct
The parts of my mind that apply logic and understanding had somehow abandoned me, and something primitive and instinctual took control.
— Danielle Rohr, Water Falls Down
She smells like spring and flowers and rain, even though it’s winter. Sometimes, he thinks he loves her so much that his mind is unable to distinguish between love and obsession. Which is worse?
— Christy A. Campbell, The Sharing Moon
Ricky just listens. He isn't shocked. He isn't surprised. He listens to me because he knows. He knows the shame and the guilt and the sorrow and the rage. And he does not judge me. He just listens.
— Emily Andrews, The Finer Points of Becoming Machine
Even the demons are encouraged when their chief is "not lost in loss itself.
— John Milton, Paradise Lost
It was Chelsea who captures our plummet before it reaches the deepest parts of our vulnerability.
— Danielle Rohr, Water Falls Down
An awfulness was deep inside me, and I couldn't fight it; forced into submission and taken hostage by it, I could only just lie there, let it wash over me, and let myself be consumed by it. If I cooperate, maybe it won't stay too long; maybe it'll let me go free. But if I fight it, it might stay longer just to spite me. So I decided to let The Feeling inhabit me as long as it desired, while I lay still, cautious not to incite me, secretly hoping it would leave me soon and bother someone else, but outwardly, pretending to be its gracious host. The most discouraging element of what I felt was my inability to understand it. Usually when I was filled with an unpleasant feeling, I could make it go away, or at least tame it, by watching a light-hearted film or reading a good book or listening to a feel good album. But this feeling was different. I knew non of those distractions could rid me of it. But I knew nothing else. I couldn't even describe it. Is this depression? Maybe once you ask someone to describe depression, he can't find the words. Maybe I'm part of the official club now. I imagined myself in a room full of people where someone in the crowd, also suffering from depression, immediately noticed me-as if he detected the scent of his own kind-walked over, and looked into my eyes. He knew that I had The Feeling inside me because he, too, da The Feeling inside him. He didn't ask me to talk about it, because he understood that our type of suffering was ineffable. He only nodded at me, and I nodded back; and then, during our moment of silence, we both shared a sad smile of recognition, knowing that we only had each other in a room filled with people who would never understand us, because they didn't have The Feeling inside them.
— Nick Miller, Isn't It Pretty To Think So?
Living is like being chained at the bottom of a shallow pond with my eyes open and no air. I can see distorted images of happiness and light, even hear muffled laughter, but everything is out of my reach as I lie in suffocating agony. If death is the opposite of living, then I hope death is like floating.
— Katie McGarry, Dare You To
I have sometimes thought that I have been burdened with a pack of ten misfortunes, any one of which if borne by my neighbor would be enough to make a murderer out of him.
— Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human
The butterflies swirl again in Sera’s stomach. Perhaps they have brought along fireflies too, to light up her soul.
— Christy A. Campbell, The Sharing Moon
And I was incapable of living all by myself in those lodgings where I didn't know a soul. It terrified me to sit by myself quietly in my room. I felt frightened, as if I might be set upon or struck by someone at any moment.
— Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human
I want to sleep in the ovenbecause I just burn in the bed.
— Casey Renee Kiser, Gutter Kisses and a Hug on Garbage Day
Show me what you've written," I said, although I wanted desperately to avoid looking at it.
— Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human
Oh, precious losing streak,you're too cute for your own good. I try to laugh about itbut my face is made of wood.
— Casey Renee Kiser, Gutter Kisses and a Hug on Garbage Day
No one realized that, being left out in the cold, I was also very much in the dark.
— Deborah Curtis, Touching from a Distance: Ian Curtis and Joy Division
How would Elijah ever understand a life that is dark more than light? Or a shadow of someone who follows her around, and when she least expects it, taps her on the back and asks, where are you going, Seraphina?
— Christy A. Campbell, The Sharing Moon
Your path might be a lonely one... but, you are NOT alone!
— Martin R. Lemieux
I know why logs spit. I know what it is to be consumed
— Winston S. Churchill
For those living in a dark cave... sometimes all it takes is for someone to throw us a lifeline.
— Martin R. Lemieux
He wondered how sick in heart a woman needed to be for her to forsake a delight in flowers.
— Vann Turner, To Forestall the Darkness: A Novel of Ancient Rome
The vision of this massive body of water with towering monoliths jutting straight upward to the heavens, stole our ability to think.Colors that made the wildflowers look dull, streaked up and down across the great pillars of hardened rock. The clouds and sky were mirrored in the glassy surface of the deep expanse of lake.
— Danielle Rohr, Water Falls Down
There's actually a sort of comfort in the belief that things can only get worse. It gives one an appreciation for the here-and-now, knowing that each and every moment may be as good as its ever going to get. Anyways, I can't imagine living too happy a life - so much to lose. It only figures that the more miserable your life is, the easier it is to lose it. And, when you can lose it at any moment, any time un-enjoyed must be time well spent. (attrib: F.L. Vanderson)
— Mort W. Lumsden, Citations: A Brief Anthology
He reflects on all the times he thought she wasn’t sure of her feelings for him, when perhaps she might’ve been taking a leisurely stroll across Elijah’s heart, leaving footprints behind that he’d never seen.
— Christy A. Campbell, The Sharing Moon
The depressed person is mired in the past
—  the manic person is obsessed with the future. Both destroy the present in the process.
The words went round and round and round in my mind and my body, until I knew they were no longer my words but something that had been carved into my heart.And now my soul was crying.
— Tracey Emin, Strangeland
I hope you see what you've done to me.
— Matthew  Little, Hell in a Basket