Quotes on Depression

This is my depressed stance. When you're depressed, it makes a lot of difference how you stand. The worst thing you can do is straighten up and hold your head high because then you'll start to feel better. If you're going to get any joy out of being depressed, you've got to stand like this.
-Charlie Brown

Depression is the inability to construct a future.
-Rollo May

It seemed like this was one big Prozac nation, one big mess of malaise. Perhaps the next time half a million people gather for a protest march on the White House green it will not be for abortion rights or gay liberation, but because we're all so bummed out.
-Elizabeth Wurtzel

"It's snowing still," said Eeyore gloomily.
"So it is."
"And freezing."
"Is it?"
"Yes," said Eeyore. "However," he said, brightening up a little, "we haven't had an earthquake lately."
-A. A. Milne

"Good morning, Eeyore," said Pooh.
"Good morning, Pooh Bear," said Eeyore gloomily. "If it is a good morning, which I doubt," said he.
"Why, what's the matter?"
"Nothing, Pooh Bear, nothing. We can't all, and some of us don't. That's all there is to it."
"Can't all what?" said Pooh, rubbing his nose.
"Gaiety. Song-and-dance. Here we go round the mulberry bush."
-A. A. Milne

Every act of life, from the morning toothbrush to the friend at dinner, became an effort. I hated the night when I couldn't sleep and I hated the day because it went toward night.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald

Depression is melancholy minus its charms.
- Susan Sontag

I cling to depression, thinking it a form of truth.
-Mason Cooley

My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known - no wonder, then, that I return the love.
-Soren Kierkegaard

Many of us spend our whole lives running from feeling with the mistaken belief that you cannot bear the pain. But you have already borne the pain. What you have not done is feel all you are beyond that pain.
- Kahlil Gibran

One ceases to recognize the significance of mountain peaks if they are not viewed occasionally from the deepest valleys.
- Dr. Al Lorin

My world falls apart, crumbles, “The center cannot hold.” There is no integrating force, only the naked fear, the urge of self-preservation. I am afraid. I am not solid, but hollow. I feel behind my eyes a numb, paralyzed cavern, a pit of hell, a mimicking nothingness. I never thought. I never wrote, I never suffered. I want to kill myself, to escape from responsibility, to crawl back abjectly into the womb. I do not know who I am, where I am going—and I am the one who has to decide the answers to these hideous questions. I long for a noble escape from freedom—I am weak, tired, in revolt from the strong constructive humanitarian faith which presupposes a healthy, active intellect and will. There is nowhere to go…
–Sylvia Plath, journal, November 3, 1952

But depression is not a sudden disaster. It is more like a cancer: At first its tumorous mass is not even noticeable to the careful eye, and then one day—wham!—there is a huge, deadly seven-pound lump lodged in your brain or your stomach or your shoulder blade, and this thing that your own body has produced is actually trying to kill you. Depression is a lot like that: Slowly, over the years, the data will accumulate in your heart and mind, a computer program for total negativity will build into your system, making life feel more and more unbearable. But you won’t even notice it coming on, thinking that it is somehow normal, something about getting older, about turning eight or twelve or turning fifteen, and then one day you realize that your entire life is just awful, not worth living, a horror and a black blot on the white terrain of human existence. One morning you wake up afraid you are going to live.
–Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

A large proportion of my best friends are a little bit crazy. … I try to be cautious with my friends who are too sane. Depression is itself destructive, and it breeds destructive impulses: I am easily disappointed in people who don’t get it…
–Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon

Melancholy men, of all others, are the most witty.
–Aristotle

I wondered if I was just the sum of my brain scan, little dots clustered in my frontal lobe. Is that where the poems came from? The desire to destroy myself? This last depression had scared me. It had come on so quickly, not like the gradual woolgathering in my brain I had known before. –Betsy Lerner, Food and Loathing

Rituals, even unhappy ones, provide a measure of comfort. Like a superstitious ballplayer who will only use certain bats, my depression rituals have become a fixed, normal part of my life. … I need rituals to prevent unnecessarily rocking my already shaky emotional boat.
–David Karp, “An Unwelcome Career”

Everything great that we know has come to us from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and created our masterpieces. Never will the world be aware of how much it owes to them, nor above all what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.
–Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: Juermantes Way

I’d been depressed before, of course. But I’m talking about really depressed. Not just feeling a bit down or sad, a depression that has something to do with biorhythms. I’m talking about the kind of depressed that floats in upon you like a fog. You can feel it coming and you can see where it is going to take you but you are powerless, utterly powerless to stop it. I know now.
–Alan Cumming, Tommy’s Tale

Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair. When it comes, it degrades one’s self and ultimately eclipses the capacity to give or receive affection. It is the aloneness within us made manifest, and it destroys not only connection to others but also the ability to be peacefully alone with oneself.
–Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance. It is tumbleweed distress that thrives on thin air, growing despite its detachment from the nourishing earth. It can be described only in metaphor and allegory…Grief is a humble angel who leaves you with strong, clear thoughts and a sense of your own depth. Depression is a demon who leaves you appalled.
–Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

In the psychological literature, depression is often seen as a defense against sadness. But I’ll take sadness any day. There is no contest. Sadness carries identification. You know where it’s been and you know where it’s headed. Depression carries no papers. It enters your country unannounced and uninvited. Its origins are unknown, but its destination always dead-ends in you.
–Martha Manning, Undercurrents: A Life Beneath the Surface

I sometimes wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic-fear which is inherent in the human situation.
–Graham Greene

I tell you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star! –Friedrich Nietzsche

It is as if my life were magically run by 2 electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative—whichever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.
–Sylvia Plath, in her journal

I’m a happy-go-lucky manic-depressive. It does get very deep and dark for me, and it gets scary at times when I feel I can’t pull out of it. But I don’t consider myself negative-negative. I’m positive-negative.
–Tim Burton

I didn’t want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn’t know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anyone spoke to me, or looked at me too closely, the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I’d cry for a week.
–Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

I’m getting less good at faking it. People in my family are noticing and asking what’s wrong. My friends give me invitations to talk, to cry. I love them for their caring, but I want to run from it. I have lost their language, their facility with words that convey feelings. I am in new territory and feel like a foreigner in theirs.
–Martha Manning, Undercurrents: A Life Beneath the Surface