Rebecca > Rebecca's Quotes

“The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.”
― Paul Farmer

“People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“Sure, I said. But some people would ask, 'How can you expect others to replicate what you're doing here?' What would be your answer to that?
He turned back and , smiling sweetly, said, Fuck you.
Then, in a stentorian voice, he corrected himself: No. I would say, 'The objective is to inculcate in the doctors and nurses the spirit to dedicate themselves to the patients, and especially to having an outcome-oriented view of TB.' He was grinning, his face alight. He looked very young just then. In other words, 'Fuck you'.”
― Paul Farmer & Tracy Kidder

“WL’s [White Liberals] think all the world’s problems can be fixed without any cost to themselves. We don’t believe that. There’s a lot to be said for sacrifice, remorse, even pity. It’s what separates us from roaches”
― Paul Farmer, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World

“I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“Until you value yourself, you won't value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it.”
― M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth

“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“Change happens very slow and very sudden.”
― Dorothy Bryant, The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You

“I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever only rejoices me, and the heart appoints”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches That Changed the World

“I don't want it to be attributed to a loss of control on my part. When I throw you out of the window, I want there to be no doubt the act was deliberate.”
― Ilona Andrews, Magic Burns

“We all carry within us places of exile, our crimes, our ravages. Our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to transform them in ourselves and others.”
― Albert Camus

“Sometimes our light goes out, but is blown again into instant flame by an encounter with another human being.”
― Albert Schweitzer

“Learn to value yourself, which means: fight for your happiness.”
― Ayn Rand

“Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or broken up with someone. But these experiences carry with them feelings. Depression, instead, is flat, hollow, and unendurable. It is also tiresome. People cannot abide being around you when you are depressed. They might think that they ought to, and they might even try, but you know and they know that you are tedious beyond belief: you are irritable and paranoid and humorless and lifeless and critical and demanding and no reassurance is ever enough. You're frightened, and you're frightening, and you're "not at all like yourself but will be soon," but you know you won't.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“I figured I had kept her from being too depressed after fucking--it's hard for a girl with any force in her and any brains to accept the whole thing of fucking, of being fucked without trying to turn it on its end, so that she does some fucking, or some fucking up; I mean, the mere power of arousing the man so he wants to fuck isn't enough; she wants him to be willing to die in order to fuck. There's a kind of strain or intensity women are bred for, as beasts, for childbearing when childbearing might kill them, and child rearing when the child might die at any moment: it's in women to live under that danger, with that risk, that close to tragedy, with that constant taut or casual courage. They need death and nobility near. To be fucked when there's no drama inherent in it, when you're not going to rise to a level of nobility and courage forever denied the male, is to be cut off from what is inherently female, bestially speaking.”
― Harold Brodkey

“I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.”
― John Keats

“It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.”
― Stephen Fry, Moab Is My Washpot

“No amount of love can cure madness or unblacken one's dark moods. Love can help, it can make the pain more tolerable, but, always, one is beholden to medication that may or may not always work and may or may not be bearable”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“I appear at times merry and in good heart, talk, too, before others quite reasonably, and it looks as if I felt, too, God knows how well within my skin. Yet the soul maintains its deathly sleep and the heart bleeds from a thousand wounds.”
― Hugo Wolf

“Manic-depression distorts moods and thoughts, incites dreadful behaviors, destroys the basis of rational thought, and too often erodes the desire and will to live. It is an illness that is biological in its origins, yet one that feels psychological in the experience of it, an illness that is unique in conferring advantage and pleasure, yet one that brings in its wake almost unendurable suffering and, not infrequently, suicide.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“Since I am writing a book about depression, I am often asked in social situations to describe my own experiences, and I usually end by saying that I am on medication.
“Still?” people ask. “But you seem fine!” To which I invariably reply that I seem fine because I am fine, and that I am fine in part because of medication.
“So how long do you expect to go on taking this stuff?” people ask. When I say that I will be on medication indefinitely, people who have dealt calmly and sympathetically with the news of suicide attempts, catatonia, missed years of work, significant loss of body weight, and so on stare at me with alarm.
“But it’s really bad to be on medicine that way,” they say. “Surely now you are strong enough to be able to phase out some of these drugs!” If you say to them that this is like phasing the carburetor out of your car or the buttresses out of Notre Dame, they laugh.
“So maybe you’ll stay on a really low maintenance dose?” They ask. You explain that the level of medication you take was chosen because it normalizes the systems that can go haywire, and that a low dose of medication would be like removing half of your carburetor. You add that you have experienced almost no side effects from the medication you are taking, and that there is no evidence of negative effects of long-term medication. You say that you really don’t want to get sick again. But wellness is still, in this area, associated not with achieving control of your problem, but with discontinuation of medication.
“Well, I sure hope you get off it sometime soon,” they say. ”
― Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

“I couldn’t be with people and I didn’t want to be alone. Suddenly my perspective whooshed and I was far out in space, watching the world. I could see millions and millions of people, all slotted into their lives; then I could see me—I’d lost my place in the universe. It had closed up and there was nowhere for me to be. I was more lost than I had known it was possible for any human being to be.”
― Marian Keyes, Anybody Out There?

“That was when Leonard realized 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

“sufferers of depression, who can elect to keep their feelings private, experience chronic, unremitting emotional alienation. Each moment spent “passing” as normal deepens the sense of disconnection generated by depression in the first instance. In this regard, depression stands as a nearly pure case of impression-management. For depressed individuals, the social requirement to “put on a happy face” requires subjugation of an especially intense inner experience. Yet, nearly unbelievably, many severely depressed people “pull off the act” for long periods of time. The price of the performance is to further exacerbate a life condition that already seems impossibly painful”
― David A. Karp

“I don’t belong here. I know that. But I don’t belong anywhere else, either. And that is at the heart of the black depression pressing down on me, flattening me. I have no place. No home. Sex, but no real affection. I am kept, but not cherished.”
― Ellen Hopkins, Tricks

“Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.”
― Margaret Atwood, Der blinde Mörder

“Just because you are blind, and unable to see my beauty doesn't mean it does not exist.”
― Margaret Cho

“The most terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one’s heart—hearts are made to be broken—but that it turns one’s heart to stone.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis