― Laurell K. Hamilton, Mistral's Kiss
“That's the thing about depression: A human being can
survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight. But depression
is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it's impossible to ever see the
end.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
“I don't want to see anyone. I lie in the bedroom with the
curtains drawn and nothingness washing over me like a sluggish wave. Whatever
is happening to me is my own fault. I have done something wrong, something so
huge I can't even see it, something that's drowning me. I am inadequate and
stupid, without worth. I might as well be dead.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye
― Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye
Everyone wanted me to get help and rejoin life, pick up the pieces
and move on, and I tried to, I wanted to, but I just had to lie in the mud with
my arms wrapped around myself, eyes closed, grieving, until I didn’t have to
anymore.”
― Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions
― Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions
“I feel like a defective model, like I came off the assembly
line flat-out fucked and my parents should have taken me back for repairs
before the warranty ran out.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
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…..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
― David Foster Wallace
“I didn't want to wake up. I was having a much better time
asleep. And that's really sad. It was almost like a reverse nightmare, like
when you wake up from a nightmare you're so relieved. I woke up into a
nightmare.”
― Ned Vizzini, It's Kind of a Funny Story
― Ned Vizzini, It's Kind of a Funny Story
“If you are chronically down, it is a lifelong fight to keep
from sinking ”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
“Sometimes," says a fellow depressive, "I wish I
was in a full body cast, with every bone in my body broken. That's how I feel
anyway. Then, maybe, people would stop minimising my illness because they can
actually see what's wrong with me. They seem to need physical evidence.”
― Sally Brampton, Shoot The Damn Dog: A Memoir Of Depression
― Sally Brampton, Shoot The Damn Dog: A Memoir Of Depression
“In its severe forms, depression paralyses all of the
otherwise vital forces that make us human, leaving instead a bleak, despairing,
desperate, and deadened state. . .Life is bloodless, pulseless, and yet present
enough to allow a suffocating horror and pain. All bearings are lost; all
things are dark and drained of feeling. The slippage into futility is first
gradual, then utter. Thought, which is as pervasively affected by depression as
mood, is morbid, confused, and stuporous. It is also vacillating, ruminative,
indecisive, and self-castigating. The body is bone-weary; there is no will;
nothing is that is not an effort, and nothing at all seems worth it. Sleep is
fragmented, elusive, or all-consuming. Like an unstable, gas, an irritable
exhaustion seeps into every crevice of thought and action.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison
― Kay Redfield Jamison
“Depression - that limp word for the storm of black panic
and half-demented malfunction - had over the years worked itself out in Charlotte's
life in a curious pattern. Its onset was often imperceptible: like an assiduous
housekeeper locking up a rambling mansion, it noiselessly went about and turned
off, one by one, the mind's thousand small accesses to pleasure.”
― Sebastian Faulks
― Sebastian Faulks
“For six days I didn’t get up except to make a cup of tea,
or fry an egg, or lie in the skinny bath gazing at a cracked ceiling. The days
punished me with their slowness, piling up the hours on me, spreading their
joylessness about the room.
A doctor would have said I was suffering from depression. Everything I have read since suggests this was the case. But when you are in the grip of something like that it doesn’t usefully announce itself. No. what happens is you sit in a dark, dark cave, and you wait. If you are lucky there is a pinprick of light, and if you are especially lucky that pinprick will grow larger and larger, until one day the cave appears to slip behind, and just like that you find yourself in daylight and free. This is how it happened for me.”
― Lloyd Jones, Mister Pip
A doctor would have said I was suffering from depression. Everything I have read since suggests this was the case. But when you are in the grip of something like that it doesn’t usefully announce itself. No. what happens is you sit in a dark, dark cave, and you wait. If you are lucky there is a pinprick of light, and if you are especially lucky that pinprick will grow larger and larger, until one day the cave appears to slip behind, and just like that you find yourself in daylight and free. This is how it happened for me.”
― Lloyd Jones, Mister Pip
Large depression is the stuff of breakdowns - if one imagines a soul of iron that weathers and rusts with mild depression then major depression is the startling collapse of a whole structure
Depression is a sucking thing that had wrapped itself around me , ugly and more alive than I. It had a life of its own and bit by bit asphyxiated all the life out of me. It goes on glutting itself on me when there seems nothing left of me to feed on
Your mind is leeched until you seem dim-witted even to yourself. You smell sour to yourself"
Depression destroys the power of mind over mood.
Andrew Solomon, Noonday Demon
"This serotonin thing is part of modern neuromythology" David McDowell
