Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness

by William Styron

There is a region in the experience of pain where the certainty of alleviation often permits superhuman endurance.

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.

So the decision-making of daily life involves not, as in normal affairs, shifting from one annoying situation to another less annoying—or from discomfort to relative comfort, or from boredom to activity—but moving from pain to pain.

He must try to utter small talk, and be responsive to questions, and knowingly nod and frown and, God help him, even smile.

All this I realized was more than I could ever abandon, even as what I had set out so deliberately to do was more than I could inflict on those memories, and upon those, so close to me, with whom the memories were bound.

I found the repose, the assuagement of the tempest in my brain, that I was unable to find in my quiet farmhouse.

depression, one must constantly insist, presents so many variations and has so many subtle facets—depends, in short, so much on the individual’s totality of causation and response—that one person’s panacea might be another’s trap.

I had my first dream in many months, confused but to this day imperishable, with a flute in it somewhere, and a wild goose, and a dancing girl.

There is a Sisyphean torment in the fact that a great number—as many as half—of those who are devastated once will be struck again; depression has the habit of recurrence.

It is of great importance that those who are suffering a siege, perhaps for the first time, be told—be convinced, rather—that the illness will run its course and that they will pull through.

it occurred to me to wonder—for the first time with any really serious concern—why I had been visited by such a calamity.

Thus depression, when it finally came to me, was in fact no stranger, not even a visitor totally unannounced; it had been tapping at my door for decades.

Self-Destruction in the Promised Land, Howard I. Kushner,

a simulacrum of all the evil of our world: of our everyday discord and chaos, our irrationality, warfare and crime, torture and violence, our impulse toward death and our flight from it held in the intolerable equipoise of history.

if depression had no termination, then suicide would, indeed, be the only remedy.

it is conquerable.

And so we came forth, and once again beheld the stars.