c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
If you fall in darkness, there will be light. If your fall enter depression, there is some sort of happiness. Fall but get up. Weak but be strong. Life is just beginning
— Claire Lunette
I have spent years ... clinging to the understanding that Iwas a defective biological unit .... This may truly be a valuableperspective for those who observe mental illness, but forme, as a subject, this tree bore only dry and tasteless fruit ...•I have a chemical imbalance; I really didn't feel thosethings.I have a chemical imbalance; I didn't really experiencethose things.I have a chemical imbalance; I didn't really thinkthose things ...Here is an insight! The entire human drama of love, suffering,ecstasy, and joy, just chemistry.
— D. A. Granger
You can't curl up on the sofa and deny life forever. Life is always going to be a series of ouch-making moments, and the question was, was I going to go all fetal-position or was I going to woman up?
— Maureen Johnson, Madness Underneath, The
The closest thing I have to a spiritual experience anymore is a Mocha Frappe from McDonald's.
— Laura A. Lord, Wake Up a Woman
Then, after showing the pill and some graphics, those same people appeared again, looking happier.The Reb and I watched in silence. After it ended, he asked, "Do you think those pills work?"Not like that, I said."No," he agreed. "Not like that.
— Mitch Albom, Have a Little Faith: a True Story
A disability that is not apparent in the person’s appearance is no less intrusive, no less painful, no less disturbing than one that can be spotted across the room. And, yet, many people fail to respect the tremendous impact that the invisible disability has on the human enduring it.
— Sahar Abdulaziz, But You Look Just Fine: Unmasking Depression, Anxiety, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Panic Disorder and Seasonal Affective Disorder
I bet if you cut open my stomach, the black slug of depression would slide out.
— Jasmine Warga, My Heart and Other Black Holes
He knows what he'll find if he digs deeper. there's no rush to unpack my insides. he understands there is nothing special about emptiness, nothing interesting about depression.
— Jasmine Warga, My Heart and Other Black Holes
I don't know how to describe it, but the more I stare at him, the more I see his grief wrapped around him like shackles he can never take off.
— Jasmine Warga, My Heart and Other Black Holes
It's not so much that I want to die as that I'm tired of living.
— Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, The Life of a Stupid Man
Happiness is not to be found at the bottom of a bottle or from the tip of a needle; it is not to be found amidst a cloud of smoke or within a sugar-coated pill. If you look for it in these places, you will find naught but despair.
— Wayne Gerard Trotman, Kaya Abaniah and the Father of the Forest
The trick to loneliness is to spend a lot of time inside one’s head.
— Pat R, O Pijama da Gata
When your heart is broken, it’s easier to follow rules
— Betsy Cornwell, Mechanica
Everything was a broken line for me in those days. I was slipped into the empty spaces between words.
— Betsy Cornwell, Mechanica
If the praise of man elates me and his blame depresses me
—  if I cannot rest under misunderstanding without defending myself if I love to be loved more than to love...then I know nothing of Calvary love.
Our lives are a journey. As we move forward, we will not only figuratively experience the geography of life: the exhilaration of high mountains, the tranquility of calm meadows, the isolation of treacherous canyons, but we will also experience the seasons of life: the hope of spring, the abundance of summer, the harvest of autumn, and yes, the darkness and depression of winter.
— Seth Adam Smith
I’ve seen how cigarettes went from being advertised in every type of media to being something found to be deadly… they can’t kill me no matter how many of them I smoke but I’ve seen humans die from smoking them… if I were you I would stop smoking them.”“Why should I? You smoke ‘em all the time, you chain-smoke cigarettes,” Mandy pointed out.“Yeah, I started doing that back in the Sixties… for reasons you likely saw on those VHS tapes… but I’m not a person, I’m Pollution, things like that aren’t dangerous to me but they are to you,” Alecto told her. “It’s not a good idea.
— Rebecca McNutt, Smog City
One day, you will stand at the summit of a figurative mountain and look back on your life's journey. And, to your utter amazement, you will see how your experiences with depression, dark and painful as they were, only added to the overall beauty of your life.
— Seth Adam Smith
I can always get through to-day very nicely. It's to-morrow I can't live through
— L.M. Montgomery, Emily's Quest
Being in home is like magic moments, in a magic world, among magicians.
— Durgesh Satpathy
God gifted a Zoo
—  with a paralyzed care taker.
Depression is easy to wallow in and hard to fight against, but if you just give in to it completely it's a downward spiral. You skip going to class because you're feeling depressed, then you stay in the rest of the day because you've already missed one class, then you skip the next class because you already missed the first one, and you stop answering your phone because people are asking whether you're okay and you don't want to talk to them, and it just gets worse from there. That spiral doesn't have to happen, and thinking in the right ways even though you're depressed is one of the big things that halts it.
— Alexander Wales
See, it's not that I'm jealous of others. I just don't understand why they can be happy and I can't.
— Paulo Coelho, Adultery
God is a creation of human brain
— Durgesh Satpathy
Sometimes when you experience something wonderful, everything else loses its shine.
— M.E. Vaughan, The Sons of Thestian
To all who struggle with depression or suicidal thoughts: you are not alone. we are all on this journey together. I promise you that there is hope. Let us reach out to one another and walk together in the sunlight.
— Seth Adam Smith
Depression thrives in secrecy but shrinks in empathy.
— Seth Adam Smith
I'm here. I love you. I don't care if you need to stay up crying all night long, I will stay with you. If you need the medication again, go ahead and take it - I will love you through that, as well. If you don't need the medication, I will love you, too. There's nothing you can ever do to lose my love. I will protect you until you die, and after your death I will still protect you. I am stronger than Depression and I am braver than Loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
He was like a man thinking on an abstract subject all the time.
— H.W. Brands, The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace
When you're lost in those woods, it sometimes takes you a while to realize that you are lost. For the longest time, you can convince yourself that you've just wandered a few feet off the path, that you'll find your way back to the trailhead any moment now. Then night falls again and again, and you still have no idea where you are, and it's time to admit that you have bewildered yourself so far off the path that you don't even know from which direction the sun rises anymore.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
Sometimes darknessis the beauty I am made of—
— Kelli Russell Agodon, Hourglass Museum
Depression is like war. You either win or you die trying. There's no in between.
— Kota
Love is what freed me from the cell of my selfishness.
— Seth Adam Smith, Your Life Isn't for You: A Selfish Person's Guide to Being Selfless
Never bullshit a bullshitter.
— Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places
Do you know that feeling? When everything you do seems like a struggle. Where you dont wanna leave the house because you know everyone is judging you. Where you cant even ask for directions in fear that they critise you. Where everyone always seems to be picking out your flaws. That feeling where you feel so damn sick for no reason.Do you know that feeling where you look in the mirror and completly hate what you see. When you grab handfuls and handfuls of fat and just want to cut it all off. That feeling when you see other beautiful girls and just wish you looked like them. When you compare yourself to everyone you meet. When you realise why no one ever showed intrest in you. That feeling where you become so self conscious you dont even turn up at school. That feeling when you feel so disappointed in who you are and everything you have become. That feeling when every bite makes you wanna be sick. When hunger is more satifying that food. The feeling of failure when you eat a meal. Do you know that feeling when you cant run as far as your class. Fear knowing that everyone thinks of you as the"Unfit FAT BITCH" That feeling when you just wanna let it all out but you dont wanna look weak. The fear you have in class when you dont understand something but your too afraid to ask for help. The feeling of being to ashamed to stand up for yourself.  Do you know the feeling when your deepest fear becomes a reality. Fear that you will NEVER be good enough. When you feel as if you deserve all the pain you give yourself. When you finally understand why everyone hates you. FINALLY realising the harsh truth. Understanding that every cut, every burn, every bruise you have even given yourself, you deserved. In fact you deserved worse. That feeling when you believe you deserve constant and brutal pain. Do you know what it feels like to just want to give up. When you just want all the pain to end but you want it to continue? Or am i just insane
— Anonymous.
Don't try to impress a loser because If one is not happy about the things happening in their life, one cannot be happy about the things happening in someone else's life.
— Michael Bassey Johnson
The pain will always be in you — but you will not always be in pain.
— Abby Norman
Anyone who has actually been that sad can tell you that there's nothing beautiful or literary or mysterious about depression.Depression is like a heaviness that you can't ever escape. It crushes down on you, making even the smallest things like tying your shoes or chewing on toast seem like a twenty-mile hike uphill. Depression is a part of you; it's in your bones and your blood.
— Jasmine Warga
Sounds of depression remembering rejection Hope turns to despair black roses everywhereKeep hearing echoes voices in my mind repeating endless lies evil in disguise
— Diana Rasmussen, Snow White Darkness
One thing is certain, whatever choices we make: we will not miss out on some critical purgation by seeking treatment for depression or any other form of physical suffering. If we are ripe for what the dark night brings, God will find a way to bring the process to fruition no matter how hard we try to avoid it.
— Tim Farrington, A Hell of Mercy: A Meditation on Depression and the Dark Night of the Soul
I am not sure whether you could call this abuse, but when I was (long ago) abroad in the world of dry men, I saw parents, usually upscale and educated and talented and functional and white, patient and loving and supportive and concerned and involved in their children’s lives, profilgate with compliments and diplomatic with constructive criticism, loquacious in their pronouncements of unconditional love for and approval of their children, conforming to every last jot-tittle in any conceivably definition of a good parent, I saw parent after unimpeachable parent who raised kids who were (a) emotionally retarded or (b) lethally self-indulgent or (c) chronically depressed or (d) borderline psychotic or (e) consumed with narcissistic self-loathing or (f) neurotically driven/addicted or (g) variously psychosomatically Disabled or (h) some conjunctive permutation of (a) … (g).Why is this. Why do many parents who seem relentlessly bent on producing children who feel they are good persons deserving of love produce children who grow to feel they are hideous persons not deserving of love who just happen to have lucked into having parents so marvelous that the parents love them even though they are hideous?Is it a sign of abuse if a mother produces a child who believes not that he is innately beautiful and lovable and deserving of magnificent maternal treatment but somehow that he is a hideous unlovable child who has somehow lucked in to having a really magnificent mother? Probably not.But could such a mother then really be all that magnificent, if that’s the child’s view of himself?...I think, Mrs. Starkly, that I am speaking of Mrs. Avril M.-T. Incandenza, although the woman is so multileveled and indictment-proof that it is difficult to feel comfortable with any sort of univocal accusation of anything. Something just was not right, is the only way to put it. Something creepy, even on the culturally stellar surface.
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Efficient self-destruction is what it is. Clean and neat. Almost surgical in its precision.
— Joe Buckler, Later That Night
You don't need to retire to a cloister or the desert for years on end to experience a true dark night; you don't even have to be pursuing any particular "spiritual" path. Raising a challenged child, or caring for a failing parent for years on end, is at least as purgative as donning robes and shaving one's head; to endure a mediocre work situation for the sake of the paycheck that sustains a family demands at least as much in the way of daily surrender to years of pristine silence in a monastery. No one can know in advance how and where the night will come, and what form God's darkness will take.
— Tim Farrington, A Hell of Mercy: A Meditation on Depression and the Dark Night of the Soul
I tried to pick the burned ones from the bowl but I didn't get many of them because I didn't make much of an effort, and even though I was taking the burned ones out because they weren't edible, I ate them because, at the moment, I thought it would be better if everyone learned to consume their own mistakes.
— Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing
Take it from me, that kind of torment causes you to retreat to a place in your mind where you are so strong that nothing and no one can bother you. Or so you think! What you don't realize is that each time an incident occurs, you retreat inside of yourself a little bit at a time, until one day you might not recognize who YOU are.
— Yassin Hall, Journey Untold My Mother's Struggle with Mental Illnesses: Bipolar, paranoid schizophrenia, or other forms of mental illness is debilitating for everyone including the families left to try to cope
I've been depressed all day. I feel like such a fraud. People say how special and wonderful I am. I think,"Can't they tell? "—Nita, September 18, 1984
— Sarah E. Olson, Becoming One: A Story of Triumph Over Dissociative Identity Disorder
You can talk about depression as a "chemical imbalance" all you want, but it presents itself as an external antagonist - a "demon," a "beast," or a "black dog," as Samuel Johnson called it. It could pounce at any time, even in the most innocuous setting.
— Barbara Ehrenreich, Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything
John says I musn't lose my strength, and has me take cod liver oil and lots of tonics and things, to say nothing of ale and wine and rare meat.Dear John! He loves me very dearly, and hates to have me sick. I tried to have a real earnest reasonable talk with him the other day, and tell him how I wish he would let me go and make a visit to Cousin Henry and Julia.But he said I wasn't able to go, nor able to stand it after I got there; and I did not make out a very good case for myself, for I was crying before I had finished.It is getting to be a great effort for me to think straight. Just this nervous weakness I suppose.And dear John gathered me up in his arms, and just carried me upstairs and laid me on the bed, and sat by me and read to me till it tired my head.He said I was his darling and his comfort and all he had, and that I must take care of myself for his sake, and keep well.
— Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper
In the depression, was I ever suicidal; or in other words, did I ever think about taking my life? I’m not sure if I ever pondered this act but, honestly, I did not care whether I lived or died; for to me, death had already taken place—and it seemed to be worse as disbelief gave way to shock…and then reality.
— H. Kirk Rainer, A Once and Always Father
Maybe it could be depression, like you get. I can understand now how you suffer when you’re depressed; I always thought you liked it and I thought you could have snapped yourself out any time, if not alone, then by means of the mood organ. But when you get that depressed you don’t care. Apathy, because you’ve lost a sense of worth.
— Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
John says if I don't pick up faster he shall send me to Weir Mitchell in the fall.But I don't want to go there at all. I had a friend who was in his hands once, and she says he is just like John and my brother, only more so!Besides, it is such an undertaking to go so far.I don't feel as if it was worth while to turn my hand over for anything, and I'm getting dreadfully fretful and querulous.I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time.Of course I don't when John is here, or anybody else, but when I am alone.
— Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper
It's amazing the things that the heart and mind can endure. No one ever told me that growing up, so I often spent my childhood thinking something was wrong with me.
— Yassin Hall, Journey Untold My Mother's Struggle with Mental Illnesses: Bipolar, paranoid schizophrenia, or other forms of mental illness is debilitating for everyone including the families left to try to cope
God knows I often retire to my bed wishing (at times even hoping) that I might never wake up; and in the morning I open my eyes, see the sun once again, and am miserable.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther
The depression was not incapacitating. It made it hard to take a lot of my suburban life seriously, but that was inextricably mingled with a growing consciousness of the larger brutalities of the world. Ethiopian children were starving on the evening news and genocide was mushrooming in Cambodia. Was I truly depressed or just awakening to the First Noble Truth of Buddhism, the insight that samsaric life is misery? My melancholy seemed like simple realism; if you weren't depressed, you obviously didn't know what was going on.
— Tim Farrington
The day had begun to feel tinny: a pretend day, a dream day, that for some unaccountable reason she had to go on and on with as if it were real.
— Sarah Waters
Exercise is not an instant cure, but you need to get your brain working again, and if you move your body your brain won't have any choice.
— John J. Ratey
In the deepest darkness God tenderly grasps my hand and whispers that darkness is nothing more than a place that He is preparing for the arrival of light.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
While I don't equate the dark night with depression, I do think our depressive moods could be imagined spiritually rather than only psychologically.
— San Juan de la Cruz
The more you try to impress, the more you become depressed, and the more they get tired of your coercion. It doesn't make them love you, instead, they'll see you as a little child, trying to draw a senseless picture on a piece of paper, begging people to look at it and admire it by force. You can persuade someone to look at your face, but you can't persuade them to see the beauty therein.
— Michael Bassey Johnson
So that's it. That's the big secret. I tried to kill myself on New Year's eve. Just like Sadie did last night. Only she really did it. I don't know all the detatils, just the basics. She took a bunch of pills. I don't know what they were or where she got them. I'd like to think they were Wonder Drug. Then at least she could have gone thinking she was flying.
— Michael Thomas Ford, Suicide Notes
The worst thing in the world is having to go back to the dark you shook off.
— Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White
I knew I should be grateful to Mrs Guinea, only I couldn't feel a thing. If Mrs Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn't have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat - on the deck of a ship or a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.
— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
I moved in front of the medicine cabinet. If I looked in the mirror while I did it, it would be like watching somebody else, in a book or a play.
— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Like an attack this melancholy comes from time to time. I don't know at what intervals, and slowly covers my sky with clouds. It begins with an unrest in the heart, with a premonition of anxiety, probably with my dreams at night. People, houses, colors, sounds that otherwise please me become dubious and seem false. Music gives me a headache. All my mail becomes upsetting and contains hidden arrows. At such times, having to converse with people is torture and immediately leads to scenes... Anger, suffering, and complaints are directed at everything, at people, at animals, at the weather, at God, at the paper in the book one is reading, at the material of the very clothing one has on. But anger, impatience, complaints and hatred have no effect on things and are deflected from everything, back to myself.
— Hermann Hesse, Wandering
My mother smiled. "I knew my baby wasn't like that."I looked at her. "Like what?""Like those awful people. Those awful dead people at that hospital." She paused. "I knew you'd decide to be all right again.
— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
He lifted his shirt, and on his back was the White Rabbit, wearing his waistcoat and looking at his watch. It was just like the illustration from the book. Only standing next to him, back-to-back, was another White Rabbit wearing a leather motercycle jacket and boots and smoking a cigar.
— Michael Thomas Ford
I can be both of us at once so no one will have to miss her, most of all me. I I
— Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places
And with that, I’m going to crawl into bed and try to erase all that has happened today.
— Amber Silvia, Unspoken
The reason why I hadn't washed my clothes or my hair was because it seemed so silly.I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue.It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next.It made me tired just to think of it.I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it.
— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
On Major Depression, quoted by the great William Styron of Sophie's Choice & Darkness Visible:From Darkness Visible, William Styron"It is a positive and active anguish, a sort of psychical neuralgia, wholly unknown to normal life.
— William Styron
It's just a bad day, not a bad life.
— Mary Engelbreit
I wondered how many other things had flown past me into death. Perhaps many. Perhaps I was flying past them, like the grim reaper, signaling the end. This would explain so much.
— Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You
When someone close to you dies, you feel like you might die too. It takes some of the life out of you for a time.
— Lisa Bedrick, Poems about Nature, Grief and Childhood
I have suffered from depression for most of my life. It is an illness.
— Adam Ant, Stand and Deliver
I have prayed many times that God would give me wisdom and I concur with Solomon here when he says that with "much wisdom there is much grief." The more you know, the harder life is. The more pain and suffering you see, the more you come to realize that "it is a grievous task which God has given to the sons of men.
— Lisa Bedrick, On Christian Theology
She’s a gray woman with gray sayings.” “A crape-hanger.
— Benedict Freedman, Mrs. Mike
Life is a form of continuous sufferings and lies.
— Yahia Kareem
Grief denied will surface in borrowed clothes, the mad, sad clothes of paranoia, fear or loneliness
— Johnny Rich, The Human Script
We had a threesomeYou, me and my depressionDepression fucks hard
— Benedict Smith
Why, when you have a mental disease, is it always considered an act of imagination? Why is it that every organ in your body can get sick and you get sympathy except the brain?
— Ruby Wax
My pillow is as good as any oceanto drown in the nightmare of myself.I swam all the way here from the moon.
— Casey Renee Kiser, I Liked You When I Thought I was Dead
I'll say it again - mental illness is a physical illness. You wouldn't consider going up to someone suffering from Alzheimers to yell, "Come on, get with it, you remember where you left your keys?" Let us shout it from the rooftops until everyone gets the message; depression has and nothing to do with having a bad day or being sad, it's a killer if not taken seriously.
— Ruby Wax
It's an unfortunate word, 'depression', because the illness has nothing to do with feeling sad, sadness is on the human palette. Depression is a whole other beast. It's when your old personality has left town and been replaced by a block of cement with black tar oozing through your veins and mind. This is when you can't decide whether to get a manicure or jump off a cliff. It's all the same. When I was institutionalised I sat on a chair unable to move for three months, frozen in fear. To take a shower was inconceivable. What made it tolerable was while I was inside, I found my tribe - my people. They understood and unlike those who don't suffer, never get bored of you asking if it will ever go away? They can talk medication all hours, day and night; heaven to my ears.
— Ruby Wax
Some might say that suicide is for cowards. I dare them to hold a razor to their wrists and say it as they slice into their own flesh.
— Aubrey Dark, His
What was wrong with me? Why could I not just flip the switch and see all the brightness ahead if only I chose the correct path? Or rather, why could I see the correct path but not choose to tread upon it?
— Hanne Arts, Just Perfect
True friends never turn you away when all you need is someone to talk to. Ever. It's not the only thing that helps, but it's the only thing that works. Real friends never walk away, letting you slip deeper into the pit of despair.
— Northern Adams, Mickey and the Gargoyle
Avoidance therapy does not work. One major reason for that is because Avoidance Therapy (diversion, think yourself happy, positive affirmations) is predicated on the validity of 'Failure of Will.' Depression is not a choice.
— Northern Adams, Mickey and the Gargoyle
Caught in the center of a soundless fieldWhile hot inexplicable hours go byWhat trap is this? Where were its teeth concealed?You seem to ask.I make a sharp reply,Then clean my stick. I'm glad I can't explainJust in what jaws you were to suppurate:You may have thought things would come right againIf you could only keep quite still and wait.
— Philip Larkin
It's so common, it could be anyone. The trouble is, nobody wants to talk about it. And that makes everything worse.
— Ruby Wax
If, however, I am allowed to think that you and yours feel an interest in my fate and actions, it may be the means—it may put me on my guard—at least, it may be something to live for.
— Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
Yes, even in your mouse moods you only play with the idea of not being." She cleared her throat again. "Biology, you see. It’s because of biology that we want to live and not to die. And it is because of biology that we come to a time when we want to die and not to live.
— Aidan Chambers, Postcards from No Man's Land
It almost occurred; It almost got hold of my purity, Just as it headed for the war within my being,I fed it a light so bright; It thought it almost had control of me. Depression is just a dis-ease, So; Let your mind be free
— Nikki Rowe, Once a Girl, Now a Woman
Part of me was afraid that if I raised my fist to the sky and demanded an answer now, I would hear a thundering and calloused, 'Because I said so," from God in heaven. And I may not ever want to speak to Him again.
— Sarah Thebarge
He was troubled; this brain, so limpid in its blindness, had lost its transparency; there was a cloud in this crystal.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
A big part of dealing with depression is realizing that you are in control of your own happiness.
— Brian Michael Good
Some of us will experience some form of mental illness in their lifetime... I rather have depression that can be treated with a pill and my free will to conquer it
—  than have a physical illness that results in my demise because no matter what I did I could not conquer it.
It isn't discomfort, or dis-ease as he put it. It's this aching, throbbing, god-awful incurable pain - and it's known as life. When will the doctors learn: It isn't death that's the disease.
— Wendy Law-Yone
I just wanna have fun and breathe, but I can’t do either one of them when I suffocate myself with depression.
— Lisa M. Cronkhite, Disconnected
Leo and the Notmuch, the five-year old Leo Loses his best friend (is death for children like moving away?). For a whole summer he sits in his room and makes up stories. When his mother knocks and asks what he’s doing in his room, he answers: not much. Does his miss his friend? Not much, always: not much. Leo’s stories are the Notmuch (what kind of an idea is a Notmuch? It’s not nothing, at least). Leo and fips turned the world into a fun and exciting place. They stayed together through thick and thin. Leo is despondent without Fips, he hides away in his room. His mother gets worried and asks how he’s doing and what he’s up to in there. Not much, answers Leo, not much. He lies on the bed and grieves for Fips (a childlike depression). Then Leo begins to create a friend in his mind, a cheeky, brave, and honest friend like Fips. Leo dubs this “good monster” the notmuch (a childlike mania). Now the two of them play, they’re cheeky and brave together, Leo now answers his mother: Notmuch. The notmuch is half memory of Fips, the other half is imagination, the two halves together enable Leo to overcome grief.
— Thomas Pletzinger
The opposite of depression isn't feeling happy but being fully alive, however painful
— Gwyneth Lewis
From that altitude, the world looked calm and vivid and possible. But by the time we landed at Prestwick the clouds were down like the black cap on a hanging judge.
— Al Álvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide
Depression's a mood killer. People crowding you, asking if you're okay. Deperssion; the world's worst thing.
— TheKatAttack
We can’t handle absence anymore, anything is better than the blankness; the quiet of nothingness. People fight to put images of love and hate – both equally nauseating – between themselves and the blank space that surrounds us. It’s the only escape, and yet we feel the pressure of the blankness pressing in against us, forcing the violent display ever closer, forcing us to demand images brighter, more graphic until they scorch our senses badly enough that we no longer feel the void and the images become our reality. But it’s ok. Most people don’t need to fear absence anymore – we’re blinded, permanently. There’s no need to seek out the light show that protects us either; inoculation precedes the sickness now. Sedation isn’t an option, it’s a shared reality. Most people don’t see the beauty of the system, how perfect our salvation is.
— Matthew Selwyn, ****: The Anatomy of Melancholy
Marianne had now been brought by degrees, so much into the habit of going out every day, that it was become a matter of indifference to her, whether she went or not: and she prepared quietly and mechanically for every evening's engagement, though without expecting the smallest amusement from any, and very often without knowing, till the last moment, where it was to take her.
— Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
Can you admit on here that you have an affliction for millions of other people to see? Then that is great and a huge step towards your recovery.
— Stanley Victor Paskavich, Stantasyland: Quips Quotes and Quandaries
This will sound strange, and yet I'm sure it was the point: it was a bit like being high. That, for me, anyway, had always been the attraction of drugs, to stop the brutal round of hypercritical thinking, to escape the ravages of an unoccupied mind cannibalizing itself.
— Norah Vincent
Negative thoughts are the causes of all depression and all stress.Be positive
—  never infect your mind with negative thoughts.
That was the crux. You. Only you could work on you. Nobody could force you, and if you weren't ready, then you weren't ready, and no amount of open-armed encouragement was going to change that.
— Norah Vincent
I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.
— Sylvia Plath
Only the weak invite their demons to live with them. Isn't that right?
— Maria V. Snyder, Poison Study
If I was lonely, if I was afraid of being alone, then why abandon myself? Why run to someone else looking to give myself the thing that only I could give? I wanted to escape myself because I felt empty, and the emptiness frightened me. But obviously, I was empty because I was always running out, running away. The only way to fill the emptiness was to remain, to take up residence in myself.
— Norah Vincent
It’s disappointing to feel sad for no reason. Sadness can be almost pleasantly indulgent when you have a way to justify it.
— Allie Brosh
It’s weird for people who still have feelings to be around depressed people. They try to help you have feelings again so things can go back to normal, and it’s frustrating for them when that doesn’t happen.
— Allie Brosh
I was always asking myself why. Why am I feeling this? Thinking that if I knew the cause I could find the cure. But of course there was no reasonable why, at least not in the present. I was awash in an accumulation of past feelings and future dreads, all similar, at least as far as my brain was concerned, and so, lumped together as one. But nobody can handle a lifetime of experience in one moment. That's why depression crushes you.
— Norah Vincent
It’s a strange moment when you realize that you don’t want to be alive anymore.
— Allie Brosh
Despair was strength. Despair was the scab and the scar. The walled city in a time of plague. A closed fortification. A sure thing, because it was always safer, less painful to stop trying than it was to repeatedly try and fail. Failure-disappointment-was a poison in my blood. Despair was the antidote.
— Norah Vincent
The industrial and technological revolutions have made our lives simpler, in terms of what is physically required of us on a daily basis, but they have also made it possible for us to do a whole lot less than we ought to be doing, and we suffer for it.We have become flabby and overweight; our joints and muscles have become stiff from lack of use. We suffer from all sorts of problems related to our lack of physical exercise; it affects us on all levels, causing high blood pressure, increased cholesterol, anxiety, depression, insomnia and the list goes on and on.We know, too, how much better we feel for a bit of exercise. Those “feel-good” hormones lift our spirits, boost self-esteem and improve our overall sense of well-being. It’s a sort of built-in reward system. There’s a reason for that. It’s because we are meant to be active.
— Liberty Forrest, The Power and Simplicity of Self-Healing: With Scientific Proof That You Can Create Your Own Miracle
Happiness is not a reward. It's a consequence. You have to work at it every day.
— Norah Vincent
He who hasn't experienced a full depression alone and over a long period of time--he is a child.
— Jens Bjørneboe
An observant friend will recognize the signs of the rise of grief: eyes that easily well with tears, a smile that is difficult to sustain, a tendency to withdraw. And ultimately, perhaps we each need to create our own symbol of grieving — to wear our version of black, or maybe to color with black crayons for a while.
— Sandy Oshiro Rosen, Bare: The Misplaced Art of Grieving and Dancing
When I say that deciding to not kill myself was the worst part, I should clarify that I don’t mean it in a retrospective sense. From where I am now, it seems like a solid enough decision. But at the time, it felt like I had been dragging myself through the most miserable, endless wasteland, and—far in the distance—I had seen the promising glimmer of a slightly less miserable wasteland.
— Allie Brosh
i am constantly torn between killing myself and killing everyone around me.those seem to be the two choices. everything else is just killing time.
— John Green, Will Grayson, Will Grayson
None of it made any difference. The hollow feeling refused to go away. The next days were very hard. I found myself in the grip of a crippling ennui. I was back at square one, but I couldn’t bring myself to resume my job hunt; it was all I could do to drag myself from the bedroom floor to the sofa. With every passing day my financial affairs grew more ruinous, and it became harder and harder even to conceive of how I might dig myself out of the hole I was in—which only compounded my ennui, and my disinclination to do anything about it.
— Paul Murray
Behind the shadows there lies defeat
—  Fancy the light where her smile greets.
Even when the sun was shining she couldn’t see it. The whole house was closing in on her and she was suffocating.
— Crissi Langwell, The Road to Hope
i am constantly torn between killing myself and killing everyone around me. those seem to be the two choices. everything else is just killing time
— John Green, Will Grayson, Will Grayson
This is what Helen has learned: it is possible to be so tired you cannot reach for the sky, you cannot breathe. You can’t even talk. You can’t pick up the phone. You can’t do a dish or dance or cook or do up your own zipper.
— Lisa Moore
...dread invades the living room, finds her on the couch, presses on her, gets inside her where it swiftly grows bigger than she is until she is inside it, looking out from a rind of shadow.
— Ann-Marie MacDonald
i am constantly torn between killing myself and killing everyone around me. those seem to be the two choices. everything else is just killing time.
— John Green, Will Grayson, Will Grayson
I feel unspeakably lonely. And I feel - drained. It is a blank state of mind and soul I cannot describe to you as I think it would not make any difference. Also it is a very private feeling I have - that of melting into a perpetual nervous breakdown. I am often questioning myself what I further want to do, who I further wish to be; which parts of me, exactly, are still functioning properly. No answers, darling. At all.
— Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters
In someone's darkest hour your simple act of kindness may imitate the sunrise, and to sad eyes you become their only source of light.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Making Wishes
Even among familiar faces, people often feel invisible and desolate, like an island in cold waters or a shadow apart from the crowd. Be the reason another never feels alone.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Making Wishes
Even as a child the glimpse of what a normal life would have been was always beyond my vision and my grasp. No matter what I glimpsed - whether hope or warning, happiness or sadness - it all led to the same present, to me being numb.I have been formed by the events of my life and the people involved. The loss of my innocence; the watchful, paranoid eye of my mother; the rejection of the adults around me; my abusive ex-boyfriend; the ignorance of my peers; I’ve allowed all of them to shape me into this faceless, identity-less mass which in my mind, I’ve been all my life.I repress my feelings for personal autonomy by dropping them into the fathomless waters of my subconscious. Trapped behind a colossal wall made from the pain and repressed emotions of my life, I seem to search desperately for anything that will help me reconnect with the world I’ve just left behind, whether it be a way out or simply a person on the other side willing to listen. My cry for someone to feel and touch me are all the more paradoxical considering that those are the very things I am unable to do in my life. I’ve built this wall out of the fear of feeling something, and out of my paranoia of being emotionally touched and leaving myself vulnerable.I want to regress back to my childhood, back to where it all began, so that I might be able to start over and see where things went wrong. For me to progress, I must comprehend the people, the events, and most importantly the decisions that have lead to my current imprisonment behind this wall.The violent battle of selves continues inside me, and they’re forming my most deranged persona yet.
— Denice Envall
It is not depression or anxiety that truly hurts us. It is our active resistance against these states of mind and body. If you wake up with low energy, hopeless thoughts, and a lack of motivation - that is a signal from you to you. That is a sure sign that something in your mind or in your life is making you sick, and you must attend to that signal. But what do most people do? They hate their depressed feelings. They think "Why me?" They push them down. They take a pill. And so, the feelings return again and again, knocking at your door with a message while you turn up all the noise in your cave, refusing to hear the knocks. Madness. Open the door. Invite in depression. Invite anxiety. Invite self-hatred. Invite shame. Hear their message. Give them a hug. Accept their tirades as exaggerated mistruths typical of any upset person. Love your darkness and you shall know your light.
— Vironika Tugaleva
Sometimes I can feel my darkness, like a fragment of nerves inside of me somewhere, sparking my hate. I picture it moving throughout my body, the other cells letting it pass by, yielding to its master. It moves to my tongue when it wants me to spew beautiful, damaging words, it moves to my hands when it wants me to feel all it can take away, and it moves to my eyes to blind me from truly seeing the destruction I’ve done.
— Piper Payne, Breathing Black
What happens is my mind starts to go in circles, thinking and thinking, and then I can't sleep. And once a couple of days go by, if you haven't slept, you start to get sick. You can't eat. You start to cry. It just feeds on itself.
— Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Maybe anosognosia, the inability to see your own disability, is the human condition and I'm the only one who doesn't suffer from it.
— Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
Sometimes giving up feels like the easiest thing to do. But then the easiest thing has never produced more than a garden full of weeds.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Making Wishes
She could have risen from the ashes. Instead, she smoldered in the embers.
— Thinking Out Loud
There are times when life seems like a struggle where the only reward you get for hanging on is the chance to struggle some more.
— Michael Marshall Smith, One of Us
People Are like Icebergs, You only really see the tip of them.
— Lucas Sterk
Thus with continued concentration and the expenditure of enormous amounts of energy he tried to keep himself from slipping into the vast distances of his unhappiness. It was all around him. It was a darkness as impudently close as his brow. It choked him by its closeness. And what was most terrifying was its treachery. He would wake up in the morning and see the sun coming in the window, and sit up in his bed and think it was gone, and then find it there after all, behind his ears or in his heart.
— E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime
I am not manic-just happy. It has been such a long time since I was happy. Please join me on my magic carpet for now.
— Barbara Field Benziger
Running away can also be running to.
— Deb Caletti, The Last Forever
I want you to forget what i told you earlier, I... I couldnt love someone like you. I hate you. I thought it the second i saw you in the park. You were just poison! Drinking bear in the morning, quoting some stupid tanka to me!You listening to other people talking all day just so you never have to reveal a thing about yourself! You knew who I was, I was just a kid! What were you thinking whats wrong with you?! If i'd know who you were I wouldnt have told you a thing about me or my dreams. You dont think I can do it! You dont think ill ever amount to anything! What is that why you didnt say anything to me? You though maybe you'd humor the little kid? Endulge his fantasies for a little while! Just string him along? Just say it ill never measure up to my dreams! You knew from the beggining you coul have just admitted it! But you played along. So tell me god damnit! Tell me that little kids should run along to school! Tell me that you hate me! Say it! Come on listener say something for a change! You loser! Its because you act like that. You never say what's important! You act like it's non of your buisness! You've been living your whole life alone!
— Makoto Shinkai
Cos every breath is unbearably painful
— Nomzamo Nhlumayo
As far as he could discover, there were no signs of spring. The decay that covered the surface of the mottled ground was not the kind in which life generates. Last year, he remembered, May had failed to quicken these soiled fields. It had taken all the brutality of July to torture a few green spikes through the exhausted dirt.What the little park needed, even more than he did, was a drink. Neither alcohol nor rain would do. Tomorrow, in his column, he would ask Broken-hearted, Sick-of-it-all, Desperate, Disillusioned-with-tubercular-husband and the rest of his correspondents to come here and water the soil with their tears. Flowers would then spring up, flowers that smelled of feet."Ah, humanity..." But he was heavy with shadow and the joke went into a dying fall. He trist to break its fall by laughing at himself.
— Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts
Battered women who were physically abused as children develop an active coping style as adults, typically with obsessive-compulsive tendencies. It is as if she can "just get things right" then the battering will stop. Those who were sexually abused as children tend to be severely depressed and a more passive coping style.
— Debra Crown LPC-S Journal of Family Violence 2006
I'm not manic-just happy. It has been such a long time since I was happy. Please join me on my magic carpet for now.
— Barbara Field Benziger
But here I’d like to add to what the Tempter’s Manual suggests. Depression, at its finest, is not a Future that they cannot hopefully construct, nor a shamed Past that hounds them, but an agonizing Present that they cannot escape. We want to disable their Present so that they cannot use it to look Heavenward.
— Geoffrey Wood
Somehow they fail to see that for someone aggravated by depression, self-help will be useless, indeed, it is precisely the self that needs to be forgotten.
— Geoffrey Wood
Cross-legged on the floor, you drink, hoping each mouthful will hurt; occasional flurries of spastic movement as you try to work out what to do with your hands. When everyone else is gone, your world is just a tiny box with the walls pressing in. Messages on the phone you can't bear to play, much less listen to, and nothing in the apartment that you can recognize as meaningfully yours.
— Michael Marshall Smith, One of Us
I pop the lenses out of my sunglasses that way I see the bright side of things because if you always look at the dark side of things your not seeing the brightness that all things have and it's like you're stuck in a cloud of darkness
— Tiwanee Benjamin
They scold their own hearts but it actuates no real change, only deepens the wound. But they can’t look away from it. Thus, by paralyzing their Present, we beat The Adversary on His home turf. And loop after loop, the depressed haunt and harrow themselves, sometimes for years, when they have only, for a brief moment, to look away from themselves, to look up.
— Geoffrey Wood
You have the chief spark of your health's fire, for you have true knowledge of the hand that guides the universe.
— Boethius
Sorrow on another's face often looks like coldness, bitterness, resentment, unfriendliness, apathy, disdain, or disinterest when it is in truth purely sadness.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Making Wishes
Depression is a lying bastard.You'll have better days, I promise you.
— Sue Fitzmaurice