Quotes about Depression

One's laughter maybe another's tears.

One's laughter maybe another's tears.

See, this is what I hate about Prozac, I said.  My life is terrible, so I should take Prozac and feel better about it even though it's still terrible?

What do you do with pain so bad it has no redeeming value? It cannot even be alchemized into art, into words, into something you can chalk up to an interesting experience because the pain itself, its intensity, is so great that there is no way to objectify it or push it outside or find its beauty within. That is the pain I'm feeling now. It's so bad, it's useless. The only lesson I will ever derive from this pain is how bad pain can be.

Sometimes, I get so consumed by depression that it is hard to believe that the whole world doesn't stop and suffer with me.

I wonder if any of them can tell from just looking at me that all I am is the sum total of my pain, a raw woundedness so extreme that it might be terminal. It might be terminal velocity, the speed of the sound of a girl falling down to a place from where she can't be retrieved. What if I am stuck down here for good?

I know I can do so much more than this, I know that I could be a life force, could love with a heart full of soul, could feel with the power that flies men to the moon. I know that if I could just get out from under this depression, there is so much I could do besides cry in front of the TV on a Saturday night.

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. The fog is like a cage without a key.

No one who had never been depressed like me could imagine that the pain could get so bad that death became a star to hitch up to, a fantasy of peace someday which seemed better than any life with all this noise in my head.

That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful.

That's the one thing I want to make clear about depression: It's got nothing at all to do with life. In the course of life, there is sadness and pain and sorrow, all of which, in their right time and season, are normal—unpleasant, but normal. Depression is in an altogether different zone because it involved a complete absence: absence of affect, absence of feeling, absence of response, absence of interest. The pain you feel in the course of a major clinical depression is an attempt on nature's part (nature, after all, abhors a vacuum) to fill up the empty space. But for all intents and purposes, the deeply depressed are just the walking, waking dead.

I start to think there really is no cure for depression, that happiness is an ongoing battle, and I wonder if it isn't one I'll have to fight for as long as I live. I wonder if it's worth it.

There is a classic moment in The Sun Also Rises when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt, and all he can say in response is, 'Gradually and then suddenly.' When someone asks how I lost my mind, that is all I can say too.

The banks are continually making new loans and retiring old ones as they are repaid. In the aggregate, the debts owed to banks are increasing with the mere passage of time, because interest accrues over time. The money available to repay those debts, however, can be created only by the banks as they make additional loans.

The net requirement, then, is that banks must make new loans faster than they retire old loans, that is, there must be a continual expansion of bank credit money. If there is not, the result is depression—increasing numbers of defaulted loans, greater numbers of bankruptcies, expanding unemployment—and all the human misery that comes with it.

If your gonna go down, go down swinging!

One of the leading theories of why electroconvulsive therapy is effective for most severe depressions is that it causes a loss of short-term memory – patients feel better because they can’t remember why they were sad.

If I feel depressed I will sing.
If I feel sad I will laugh.
If I feel ill I will double my labor.
If I feel fear I will plunge ahead.
If I feel inferior I will wear new garments.
If I feel uncertain I will raise my voice.
If I feel poverty I will think of wealth to come.
If I feel incompetent I will think of past success.
If I feel insignificant I will remember my goals.
Today I will be the master of my emotions.

Depression is a house you built long ago, so you could live with your rage.

My loss of interest in contemporary culture was only a symptom of a deeper malady – a disavowal of almost everything that had once fascinated or at least entertained me.  Some crisis was announcing itself, a “dark night of the soul” carefully prepared by me history, it seems to me now, though I did not see it that way at the time.  Stalking the all-too-familiar pavement of New York City, I felt I was skating across the thinnest coating of ice, and beneath that slick crust the void was waiting to claim me, to crush me in the impersonal oblivion that had terrified me as a child.  A simple question confronted me – “Is this it?” – and kept intensifying its mocking force, whispering that my life was a lie.

God is like the stars, he's always there. On the brightest day He's there, although because of the Sun we may forget about Him, but then on the blackest Night we will see that He's still there

"An essential part of seeing clearly is finding the willingness to look closely and to go beyond our own ideas."

Even the darkest of Shadows could not be borne without Light-

The values of solitude - one of its values - is, of course, that there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within, just as there is nothing to help balance at times of particular stress or depression.  A few moments of desultory conversation...may calm an inner storm.  But the storm, painful as it is, might have had some truth in it.  So sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands.  The reasons for depression are not so interesting as the way one handles it, simply to stay alive.

Tears are our birthright.  The purpose of yoga is to know thyself.  If thyself is having a moment of shimmering depression, let's look at it, then let it go.

The big advantage of depression. It makes a perfect excuse to put up decorations and balloons, because there is only one way to go...    ...and that is UP, UP AND OUT OF THERE !

"These are the days that try man's heart."-paraphrazed

All life is the play of universal forces. The individual gives a personal form to these universal forces. But he can choose whether he shall respond or not to the action of a particular force. Only most people do not really choose - they indulge the play of the forces. Your illness, depressions etc. are the repeated play of such forces. It is only when you can make oneself free of them that one can be the true person and have a true life - but one can be free only by living in the Divine.                                                                 (XXII p. 318)
 

The mood state Americans are in, on average, when watching television is mildly depressed.

There are no perfect human beings! Persons can be found who are good, very good indeed, in fact, great. There do in fact exist creators, seers, sages, saints, shakers, and movers...even if they are uncommon and do not come by the dozen. And yet these very same people can at times be boring, irritating, petulant, selfish, angry, or depressed. To avoid disillusionment with human nature, we must first give up our illusions about it.

Soul Gathers Force It is possible, when the future is dim, when our depressed faculties can form no bright ideas of the perfection and happiness of a better world,-it is possible still to cling to the conviction of God's merciful purpose towards His creatures, of His parental goodness even in suffering, still to feel that the path of duty, though trodden with a heavy heart, leads to peace; still to be true to conscience; still to do our work, to resist temptation, to be useful, though with diminished energy, to give up our wills when we cannot rejoice under God's mysterious providence. In this patient, though uncheered obedience, we become prepared for light. The soul gathers force.