quotations about depression
The way sadness works is one of the strange riddles of the world. If you are stricken with a great sadness, you may feel as if you have been set aflame, not only because of the enormous pain, but also because your sadness may spread over your life, like smoke from an enormous fire. You might find it difficult to see anything but your own sadness, the way smoke can cover a landscape so that all anyone can see is black. You may find that if someone pours water all over you, you are damp and distracted, but not cured of your sadness, the way a fire department can douse a fire but never recover what has been burnt down.
DANIEL HANDLER (as Lemony Snicket)
The Bad Beginning
Depression is like a flag being hoisted by the unconscious, making a statement: Look, there is something inside that needs to be felt and experienced and you are not dealing with it so here is a flag, a depression. Pay attention to it instead of running away from it. Go into it, find out what is inside it. Sit with your fantasies and try to paint them or write about them. What pictures does the depression make, what colour is it? If one allows fantasy activity into a depression, it comes alive. Otherwise the container is sealed and nothing can move it. It just remains the same.
LIZ GREENE & HOWARD SASPORTAS
Dynamics of the Unconscious
Laugh at depression and depression will join in.
JOSEPH JULIUS BONKOWSKI
Quote Me
I was depressed ... I was suicidal. As a matter of fact, I would have killed myself but I was in analysis with a strict Freudian and if you kill yourself they make you pay for the sessions you miss.
WOODY ALLEN
Annie Hall
Like those rare conditions which causes a person's own immune system to assault itself, depression is a disorder wherein the self attacks the self.
TERRENCE REAL
I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression
My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known -- no wonder, then, that I return the love.
SOREN KIERKEGAARD
Either/Or
I'll never forget how the depression and loneliness felt good and bad at the same time. Still does.
HENRY ROLLINS
The Portable Henry Rollins
A phenomenon that a number of people have noted while in deep depression is the sense of being accompanied by a second self -- a wraithlike observer who, not sharing the dementia of his double, is able to watch with dispassionate curiosity as his companion struggles against the oncoming disaster, or decides to embrace it. There is a theatrical quality about all this, and during the next several days, as I went about stolidly preparing for extinction, I couldn't shake off a sense of melodrama -- a melodrama in which I, the victim-to-be of self-murder, was both the solitary actor and lone member of the audience.
WILLIAM STYRON
Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness
She married her sadness and slept with happiness on the weekends.
CHRISTOPHER POINDEXTER
Remington Typewriter Poetry
Depression is a choice.
A.B. CURTISS
Depression Is a Choice
Depression is nature's way of telling you that you've got complex social problems that the mind is intent on solving. Therapies should try to encourage depressive rumination rather than try to stop it, and they should focus on trying to help people solve the problems that trigger their bouts of depression.
PAUL W. ANDREWS
"Depression's Evolutionary Roots", Scientific American, August 25, 2009
The sun stopped shining for me is all. The whole story is: I am sad. I am sad all the time and the sadness is so heavy that I can't get away from it. Not ever.
NINA LACOUR
Hold Still
It's brilliant, being depressed; you can behave as badly as you like.
NICK HORNBY
High Fidelity
The difference between common sadness and clinical depression is like the difference between breathing hard after a fast sprint and being chronically short-of-breath. The former is expected and normal, given the stress of the sprint; the latter is an abnormal condition.
WALTER F. MCDERMOTT
Understanding Combat Related Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
Whenever I get depressed, I raise my hemlines. If things don't change, I am bound to be arrested.
CALISTA FLOCKHART
Ally McBeal
Something crucial about depression ... the smarter you were, the worse it was. The sharper your brain, the more it cut you up.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
The Marriage Plot
Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
Letters to a Young Poet
People who drink to drown their sorrow should be told that sorrow knows how to swim.
ANN LANDERS
attributed, The Mammoth Book of Zingers
I have never been remotely ashamed of having been depressed. Never. What's to be ashamed of? I went through a really rough time and I am quite proud that I got out of that.
J. K. ROWLING
USA Today, Mar. 23, 2008
The term clinical depression finds its way into too many conversations these days. One has a sense that a catastrophe has occurred in the psychic landscape.
LEONARD COHEN
International Herald Tribune, Nov. 4, 1988