"The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"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

"That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful."
— Elizabeth Wurtzel

"“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

"And I felt like my heart had been so thoroughly and irreparably broken that there could be no real joy again, that at best there might eventually be a little contentment. 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: A Journal of My Son's First Year)

"No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won't hurt"
— Hunter S. Thompson

"... because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café 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)

"At heart, I have always been a coper, I've mostly been able to walk around with my wounds safely hidden, and I've always stored up my deep depressive episodes for the weeks off when there was time to have an abbreviated version of a complete breakdown. But in the end, I'd be able to get up and on with it, could always do what little must be done to scratch by."
— Elizabeth Wurtzel

"In addition to my other numerous acquaintances, I have one more intimate confidant. . . . My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known- no wonder, then, that I return the love."
— Søren Kierkegaard

"If I can't feel, if I can't move, if I can't think, and I can't care, then what conceivable point is there in living?"
— Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"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)

"Noble deeds and hot baths are the best cures for depression."
— Dodie Smith (I Capture the Castle)

"You're fucked. You thought you were going to be someone, but now it's obvious you're nobody. You haven't got as much talent as you thought you had, and there was no Plan B, and you got no skills and no education, and now you're looking at forty or fifty years of nothing. Less than nothing, probably. That's pretty heavy. That's worse than having the brain thing, because what you got now will take a lot longer to kill you. You've got the choice of a slow, painful death, or a quick, merciful one."
— Nick Hornby (A Long Way Down)

"Choking with dry tears and raging, raging, raging at the absolute indifference of nature and the world to the death of love, the death of hope and the death of beauty, I remember sitting on the end of my bed, collecting these pills and capsules together and wondering why, why when I felt I had so much to offer, so much love, such outpourings of love and energy to spend on the world, I was incapable of being offered love, giving it or summoning the energy with which I knew I could transform myself and everything around me."
— Stephen Fry (Moab Is My Washpot)

"Everything's plastic, we're all going to die sooner or later, so what does it matter."
— Elizabeth Wurtzel

"Crying is one of the highest devotional songs. One who knows crying, knows spiritual practice. If you can cry with a pure heart, nothing else compares to such a prayer. Crying includes all the principles of Yoga."
— Swami Kripalu

"Even when I try to stir myself up, I just get irritated because I can't make anything come out. And in the middle of the night I lie here thinking about all this. If I don't get back on track somehow, I'm dead, that's the sense I get. There isn't a single strong emotion inside me."
— Banana Yoshimoto

"A melancholy-looking man, he had the appearance of someone who had searched for the leak in life's gas pipe with a lighted candle."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I shouldn't, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"Depression is boring, I think
and I would do better to make
some soup and light up the cave."
— Anne Sexton

"Sometimes it feels like we're all living in a Prozac nation. The United States of Depression. "
— Elizabeth Wurtzel (Prozac Nation)

"Life is ten percent what you experience and ninety percent how you respond to it."
— Dorothy M. Neddermeyer, PhD

"As for Gussie Finknottle, many an experienced undertaker would have been deceived by his appearance and started embalming on sight."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction It is already happening to some extent in our own society. Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual's internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable."
— Theodore Kaczynski

"If you can't, or won't, think of Seymour, then you go right ahead and call in some ignorant psychoanalyst. You just do that. You just call in some analyst who's experienced in adjusting people to the joys of television, and Life magazine every Wednesday, and European travel, and the H-bomb, and Presidential elections, and the front page of the Times, and God knows what else that's gloriously normal."
— J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey)

"The modern philosopher had told me again and again that I was in the right place, and I still felt depressed even in acquiescence. But I had heard that I was in the wrong place, and my soul sang for joy like a bird in spring."
— G.K. Chesterton

"For weeks Tyrone thought he was going to die any minute, and there were also times when he was afraid he wasnt going to die."
— Hubert Selby Jr. (Requiem for a Dream)

"the intensity, glory, and absolute assuredness if my mind's flight made it very difficult for me to believe once i was better, that the illness was one i should willingly give up....moods are such an essential part of the substance of life, of one's notion of oneself, that even psychotic extremes in mood and behavior somehow can be seen as temporary, even understandable reactions to what life has dealt....even though the depressions that inevitably followed nearly cost me my life."
— Kay Redfield Jamison

"I told Doreen I would not go to the show or the luncheon or the film premiere, but that I would not go to Coney Island either, I would stay in bed. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I shouldn't, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"There had been times when he knew, somewhere in him, that he would get used to it, whatever it was, because he had learnt that some hard things became softer after a very little while."
— Nick Hornby (About a Boy)

"Don’t ask me those questions! Don’t ask me what life means or how we know reality or why we have to suffer so much. Don’t talk about how nothing feels real, how everything is coated with gelatin and shining like oil in the sun. I don’t want to hear about the tiger in the corner or the Angel of Death or the phone calls from John the Baptist."
— Susanna Kaysen

"They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls."
— Sylvia Plath

"The intermittent depression that had shadowed him throughout his adult life was about to envelop him once again. "
— Erik Larson (The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America)

"Whenever I get that sad, depressed feeling, I go out and kill a policeman."
— P. G. Wodehouse

"An unchangeable colour rules over the melancholic: his dwelling is a space the colour of mourning. Nothing happens in it. No one intrudes. It is a bare stage where the inert I is assisted by the I suffering from that inertia. The latter wishes to free the former, but all efforts fail, as Theseus would have failed had he been not only himself but also the Minotaur; to kill him then, he would have had to kill himself"
— Alejandra Pizarnik

"We have talked about Suzy and about her last days, but it's as if our lives stopped then and there. If I say anything to him about feeling lonesome, he goes outside and does some little chore. I can't tell if he is secretly blaming me, or himself, or just too full of pain to talk. That was the one thing we could always do together. I wish for the old days. I wish for the struggling days and the days of Geronimo, and the days of birthing Charlie with no one but Jack to help me. How happy and in love we were then. I want to be in love again, but all I feel is darkness and shadows. Everything is changed and different (p. 364)."
— Nancy E. Turner (These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901 : A Novel)

"Eventually sinking into despair, [Heinrich von Kleist] shot himself in 1811 as part of a suicide pact made with a woman suffering from incurable cancer."
— Nicholas Tucker (Philip Pullman: Darkness Visible: Inside the World of Philip Pullman)