quotations about depression
Depression is a prison where you are both the suffering prisoner and the cruel jailer.
DOROTHY ROWE
Depression: The Way Out of Your Prison
Real depression is like a heart that doesn't pump blood to the fingers and toes.
ANDREW SOLOMON
The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
Mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from normal experience, the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain ... it is entirely natural that the victim begins to think ceaselessly of oblivion.
WILLIAM STYRON
Darkness Visible
What uniform can I wear to hide my heavy heart? It is too heavy. It will always show.
JEAN COCTEAU
The Miscreant
In a strange way, I had fallen in love with my depression. I loved it because it was all I had. I thought depression was the part of my character that made me worthwhile. I thought so little of myself, felt that I had such scant offerings to give to the world, that the one thing that justified my existence at all was my pain.
ELIZABETH WURTZEL
Prozac Nation
If you know someone who's depressed, please resolve never to ask them why. Depression isn't a straightforward response to a bad situation; depression just is, like the weather.
STEPHEN FRY
attributed, The Final Curtain: Fame, Fortune & Futile Lives
That's the thing about depression. When I feel it deeply, I don't want to let it go. It becomes a comfort. I want to cloak myself under its heavy weight and breathe it into my lungs. I want to nurture it, grow it, cultivate it. It's mine. I want to check out with it, drift asleep wrapped in its arms and not wake up for a long, long time.
STEPHANIE PERKINS
Lola and the Boy Next Door
Depression is a side effect of dying.
JOHN GREEN
The Fault in Our Stars
Depression is seductive: it offends and teases, frightens you and draws you in, tempting you with its promise of sweet oblivion, then overwhelming you with a nearly sexual power, squirming past your defenses, dissolving your will, invading the tired spirit so utterly that it becomes difficult to recall that you ever lived without it...or to imagine that you might live that way again. With all the guile of Satan himself, depression persuades you that its invasion was all your own idea, that you wanted it all along. It fogs the part of the brain that reasons, that knows right and wrong. It captures you with its warm, guilty, hateful pleasures, and, worst of all, it becomes familiar. All at once, you find yourself in thrall to the very thing that most terrifies you. Your work slides, your friendships slide, your marriage slides, but you scarcely notice: to be depressed is to be half in love with disaster.
STEPHEN L. CARTER
The Emperor of Ocean Park
Depression is the inability to construct a future.
ROLLO MAY
Love and Will
I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.
SYLVIA PLATH
Ariel
During depression the world disappears ... because the inner voice is so urgent in its own discourse: How shall I live? How shall I manage the future? Why should I go on?
KATE MILLETT
The Loony-Bin Trip
A new study found that people who are depressed have a greater risk of stroke. Well that should cheer them up.
JAY LENO
The Tonight Show, Sep. 26, 2011
In depression this faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come- not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.
WILLIAM STYRON
Darkness Visible
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Hamlet
He's turned his life around. He used to be depressed and miserable. Now he's miserable and depressed.
HARRY KALAS
The Philadelphia Inquirer, February 26, 1981
This is the great lesson the depressive learns: Nothing in the world is inherently compelling. Whatever may be really "out there" cannot project itself as an affective experience. It is all a vacuous affair with only a chemical prestige. Nothing is either good or bad, desirable or undesirable, or anything else except that it is made so by laboratories inside us producing the emotions on which we live. And to live on our emotions is to live arbitrarily, inaccurately--imparting meaning to what has none of its own. Yet what other way is there to live? Without the ever-clanking machinery of emotion, everything would come to a standstill.
THOMAS LIGOTTI
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
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
I feel it through my shoes
They used to call that the blues
Now they call it depression
BAHAMAS
"No Depression", Earthtones
I have a suspicion that society, in its heart of hearts, despises depressives because it knows they have a point: the recognition that life is finite and sad and frightening.
TIM LOTT
"What does depression feel like? Trust me -- you really don't want to know", The Guardian, April 19, 2016