Depression Quotes

One thing is undeniably clear. We have all had bad experiences, we have all had tragedies in our lives which help to shape who we are.

~ J. Loren Norris

Was James bipolar?”The tears returned, and I watched her battle them. “We don’t use that word in our family.”I stared at her for a moment. “Why not?”“Mum and Dad don’t believe in it.” She kept walking. “James was always … troubled. But there was nothing wrong with him, nothing more than anyone else anyway, everyone feels a bit down sometimes.”“Olivia! It was more than feeling down.”She laughed, bitterly. “I know, Dee, fuck, do I know that. I’m just telling you how it goes. The party line—what we told people when they asked.

~ Hazel Butler

I almost said, you’re not broken, you’re just going through something. But I couldn’t. She knew. There was something terribly wrong with her, all the way inside. She was like a big diamond with a dead spot in the middle. I was supposed to breathe life into that dead spot, but it hadn’t worked.

~ Janet Fitch

And she would like to cry, but she is unable to; and she would like to disappear but she won't; and she would like to stop feeling this despair and so she thinks that she will go to the movies see friends shop eat barter fuck the neighbor's husband: she is like a sow in her mud (of loneliness) and covers herself in it and what of it--it is the disease of her country, and the late night television shows the magazines and movies in cheap collusion with it.

~ Micheline Aharonian Marcom

I swore as the knife I’d been using to dice our dinner bit into my finger. I dropped it on the floor, blood spattering the counter and cupboard doors a furious red. I watched, mesmerised, as the blood welled up and began to seep down my hand; I tried to catalogue the amount of pain I was in. Surprisingly little, I concluded, pushing at the edges of the wound to see how deep it went. Deep enough. I was starting to feel it now, but it didn’t hurt so much. I’d endured far worse.If it came to it, I could do it. There was comfort in that knowledge.

~ Hazel Butler

James had taken his own life, but the need to do so was not something easily explained. He had the life he wanted: money, a home, a job, a wife, a good friend. I’d known people who died at their own hand because life became unbearable, or because something happened, something terrible. That wasn’t so for James—there was something inside him, something a part of him, something over which he had no control, but which had absolute control over him.

~ Hazel Butler

However vivid they might be, past images and future delights did not protect Sylvia from the present, which rules despotic over pale shadows of past and future. That was Sylvia's genius and her Panic Bird- her total lack of nostalgia. She had no armor. This left her especially vulnerable in New York, where she was removed from the context of her life, severed from that reassuring arc.

~ Elizabeth Winder

Death begins before birth. I have always found this an odd notion, but were it not for the death of certain cells during our initial development, humans would be born with webbed toes. Death moulds our physical being from the very start of our existence. It sculpts us, determines how we begin, and where we end. The events in life that define us, that break us and remake us, all stem from death—the death of a place, a time, a relationship, of those we hold most dear, and finally ourselves. Death is the one inescapable aspect of life, the only immutable force, the single thing in this world that cannot and should not be changed.But death is never the end.It is the beginning.

~ Hazel Butler

It was a fact that had become the focus of my entire life, a whisper in my heartbeat, a permanent, insidious presence that punctuated my every breath. I couldn’t escape it, that persistent voice, lingering in the blood pulsing through my veins. It said only one thing, over and over, a repetition of inescapable anguish, the knowledge of a thing that could never be undone.James is dead. James is dead. James is dead. James is dead.

~ Hazel Butler

Dishonoring what we feel is an epidemic that has us self-medicating as a culture and trying to numb ourselves.

~ Abiola Abrams

Sylvia had begun her month in New York with princessy pomp and fanfare….Her departure on June 27 was entirely different. She left New York shaken, depleted, and utterly alone.

~ Elizabeth Winder

The one who sees thought as a thought is the witness to mind and no longer subject to suffering.

~ Vivian Amis

Sharing a burdened heart with another who has the wisdom, strength, and knowledge to carry it, frees us from its weight long enough to focus on solutions

~ Gayathri Ramprasad

Where there is light, darkness must cease.

~ Vivian Amis

I lied, but by his reaction I think he liked what I had said. I had told Shreya about Sudeshna and she was okay with our relationship, but there were a few things that I hadn’t told even her…..secrets.I wasn’t proud to keep it away from her but it could have been a deal breaker for us. Some things are best left unsaid, I had heard someone say. Now I knew how true it is, because even with the best of intentions, some things are bound to be misunderstood. Shreya wouldn’t understand why I did those things, and nor would Priya. They wouldn’t understand that it needed to be done. It was best to keep it sealed and leave everyone at their happy states – in dark….but happy.

~ Bhaskaryya Deka

You haunt my days and dreams.

~ Jennifer Elisabeth

I wanted to say all these things about how you just have to hold on to the things you love and let go of all the rest.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

My unhappiness precluded all else; unhappiness is a kind of narcissism, in which nothing that does not resonate with your unhappiness can interest you.

~ Caroline Kettlewell

Why can't I remember our family Christmas, or a warm spring day, or anything that might have been pleasant? It is as though the filter of recall is itself altered, so that it blocks out everything but the darkest colors of the spectrum.

~ Caroline Kettlewell

The more you engage in any type of emotion or behavior, the greater your desire for it will become.

~ Chris Prentiss

Again, all of life presents us with two basic ways to treat events. We can either label them god for us or bad for us. The event is only an event. It's how we treat the event that determines what it becomes in our lives. The event doesn't make that determination- we do.

~ Chris Prentiss

From this vantage point he came to a realization that everything that had happened to him before this had been a journey upward through time, everything that occurred after it a descent. If he could not control his fate, why be born?

~ Irving Stone

There is no cell culture for depression. You can't see it on a bone scan or an x-ray. Not everyone with depression will show the same behavioral symptoms.

~ Chris Prentiss

The world always seems like it's going to hell when you're depressed. And, of course, it always is going to hell in some way. That's what makes it so hard to tell the difference between Armageddon and the blues.

~ Andrew Klavan

Every day you feel like you can't control the forces affecting your fate-your job,the government,your addiction,your depression,your money. So you stage micro-revolts. You customise your ringtone,you paint your room,you collect stamps. You choose.Choices,even small ones,can hold back the crushing weight of helplessness,but you can't stop there. You must fight back your behavoir and learn to fail with pride. Failing often is the only way to ever get the things you want out of life. Besides death your destiny is not inescapable.You are not so smart,but you are smarter than dogs and rats. Don't give in yet.

~ David Mcraney

If you feel depressed for an hour, you've produced approximately eighteen billion new cells that have more receptors calling out for depressed-type peptides and fewer calling out for feel-good peptides.

~ Chris Prentiss

The greatest and the best Christians when they are physically weak are more prone to an attack of spiritual depression than at any other time and there are great illustrations of this in the Scriptures.

~ Martyn Llyod-Jones

I'd wasted so much of my life. So many of my days, and all of my promise, all of my dreams, lost to hospitals, to depression, to wanting to die. This wasn't how it was supposed to be. This is not who I am.Except, of course, it was. It was all there was left to be.

~ Alexis Hall

When I was lost in the fog, it was as though nothing else existed. And, afterwards, it seemed incomprehensible that I had ever really thought like that. Self-recrimination inevitably followed.

~ Alexis Hall

Sometimes I though about killing myself. The idea of it circled my head, shining and lovely like a tinsel halo. How beautiful it would be if everything could just stop. If I could stop. If I didn't have to feel like this. Yes, I thought about it and thought about it, but I was too exhausted to do anything about it. That should have been funny, right?

~ Alexis Hall

The tapestry of my life was a ruin of unravelling threads. The brightest parts were a nonsensical madman's weaving. And now every day was a grey stitch, laid down with an outpatient's patience, one following the next following the next, a story in lines, like a railway track to nowhere, telling absolutely nothing.

~ Alexis Hall

Days passed in a grey fog. I was becalmed. Without energy, without hope, with no sight of land, I could remember feeling better but I somehow couldn't believe in it. There was nothing but this.

~ Alexis Hall

There had been a subtle realignment of the spheres. The world was somehow a place I could endure again. If life was a grey corridor lined with doors, it was now within my power to open some of them.

~ Alexis Hall

I would if somebody would want to but of course nobody would want to so I wouldn't want to force anybody to want to.

~ Susanna Kaysen

If I was feeling depressed or frustrated about my lot in life, all I had to do was tap the Player One button, and my worries would instantly slip away as my mind focused itself on the relentless pixelated onslaught on the screen in front of me.

~ Ernest Cline

You make me want things that I can't have.

~ Kendare Blake

Whenever I feel like this, I am gentle with myself, pretend like I'm someone else, someone good. I walk on eggshells around myself, like I'm some fragile piece of porcelain you have to place quietly, deliberately back on the shelf.

~ Andrea Portes

Well, enough of this introspection. It’s depressing, quite frankly.

~ Sol Luckman

Prideful fool. It hurt his feelings that he couldn’t make my crazy go away. You know how men are. Always trying to fix things can’t be fixed.

~ Ken Wheaton

That’s why; he’s worried about how his life is turning out, and he’s lonely, and lonely people are the bitterest of them all.

~ Nick Hornby