This Close to Happy Quotes

“I feel less and less up to the requirements of my life,”
― Daphne Merkin, This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression

“Spring and Fall” …cannot be said to be about depression - but of course, to someone who is depressed, everything is about depression. …For some of us, the sadness running under the skin of things begins as a trickle and ends up a hemorrhage, staining everything.”
― Daphne Merkin, This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression

“I also recognize, however, that you can talk yourself blue in the face in a therapist’s office about crucial failures of love or nurturance with little effect on the inner blackness you carry around with you.”
― Daphne Merkin, This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression

“to someone who is depressed, everything is about depression.”
― Daphne Merkin, This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression

“What would it be like as an adult to open my eyes with a feeling of even mild anticipation?”
― Daphne Merkin, This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression

“You see, down here, where life hangs heavy like a suffocating cloak, I can’t remember that I’ve ever felt any other way. I need to be reminded that there are reasons in the world to hold on, even if I have forgotten them; I tell myself if I can just hold on I will remember them, these reasons, they will come back to me.”
― Daphne Merkin, This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression

“I imagine a belief in God must come with a dazzling sense of purpose.”
― Daphne Merkin, This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression

“even on medication, there is nothing tempting enough to make me want to rise,”
― Daphne Merkin, This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression

“to be awake is to be hauled back into a pained consciousness?”
― Daphne Merkin, This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression

“Despair is always described as dull, when the truth is that despair has a light all its own, a lunar glow, the color of mottled silver.”
― Daphne Merkin, This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression

“It was one thing to be depressed in your twenties or thirties, when the aspect of youth gave it an undeniable poignancy, a certain tattered charm; it was another thing entirely to be depressed in middle age, when you were supposed to have come to terms with life’s failings, as well as your own.”
― Daphne Merkin, This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression