Woke up this morning afraid I was gonna live.

“I always carry lots of stuff with me wherever I roam, always weighted down with books, with cassettes, with pens and paper, just in case I get the urge to sit down somewhere, and oh,...

I’m the girl who is lost in space, the girl who is disappearing always, forever fading away and receding farther and farther into the background. Just like the Cheshire cat, someday I will suddenly leave,...

I don’t think it matters how many parents you’ve got, as long as those who are around make their presence a good one.

I’ll see Naomi Wolf on television periodically, I have nothing against her and what she says, but I’ll feel that she’s a politician, like she’s got an agenda to get across and that she doesn’t...

Sometimes it feels like we’re all living in a Prozac nation. The United States of Depression.

I start to feel like I can ‘ t maintain the facade any longer, that I may just start to show through. And I wish I knew what was wrong. Maybe something about how stupid...

When things get unbearable, I wrap myself into a tight ball and shut my eyes. Every muscle in my body is tense. I open my eyes and I’m still where I was when I closed...

“I froze before the keyboard. I couldn’t think of a damn thing to say. No poems, no prose, no words. The pain cannot even be alchemized into art, into words, into something you can chalk...

I don’t want any more of this try, try again stuff. I just want out. I’ve had it. I am so tired. I am twenty and I am already exhausted.

I think, quite frankly, that the world simply does not care for the complicated girls, the ones who seem too dark, too deep, too vibrant, too opinionated, the ones who are so intriguing that new...

In life, single women are the most vulnerable adults. In movies, they are given imaginary power.

Everything’s plastic, we’re all going to die sooner or later, so what does it matter.

it’s the people you are close to, the ones who love you, theo nes who have seen your heart, who have touched your soul- to them, it is obvious that something is wrong or missing....

I need the thing that happens when your brain shuts off and your heart turns on.

They have no idea what a bottomless pit of misery I am.

The shortness of life, I keep saying, makes everything seem pointless when I think about the longness of death. When I look ahead, all I can see is my final demise. And they say not...

I feel like a defective model, like I came off the assembly line flat-out fucked and my parents should have taken me back for repairs before the warranty ran out.

Because, frankly, I have a tough time feeling that feminism has done a damn bit of good if I can’t be the way I am and have the world accommodate it on some level.

It was just very interesting to me that certain types of women inspire people’s imagination, and all of them were very difficult women.

In those pamphlets that they give at mental health centers where they list the ten or so symptoms that would indicate a clinical depression, ‘suicide threats’ or even simple ‘talk of suicide’ is considered cause...

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...

In a strange way, I had fallen in love with my depression. Dr. Sterling was right about that. I loved it because I thought it was all I had. I thought depression was the part...

If I were another person, I go on, I wouldn’t want to deal with me, I don’t want to deal with me, It’s so hopeless, I want out of this life. I really do. I...

All I do is go to the movies.

If you are chronically down, it is a lifelong fight to keep from sinking

Into every sunny life a little rain must fall.

It’s like Samson and Delilah: watch your back, because trouble could be the person you’re sleeping with.

In my case, I was not frightened in the least bit at the thought that I might live because I was certain, quite certain, that I was already dead.

I always carry lots of stuff with me wherever I roam, always weighted down with books, with cassettes, with pens and paper, just in case I get the urge to sit down somewhere, and oh,...

I can remember neing in high school, walking through Central Park on a chilly day, and the sound of stamping on the crispness of autumn leaves would make me think of the sensation of my...

But day after day of depression, the kind that doesn’t seem to merit carting me off to a hospital but allows me to sit here on this stoop in summer camp as if I were...

Am I worried people will say I’m repeating myself? Sure. One thought I had was to publish it as a novel but eventually I just decided to do what I wanted to do.

At heart, I have always been a coper, I’ve mostly been able to walk around with my wounds safely hidden, and I’ve always stored up my deep depressive episodes for the weeks off when there...

There are all these things my mother is good for that my father isn’t, and all these things my father is good for that my mother isn’t, and if only they could work out their...

Like, in high school, I was a good student and got straight As. It was very strict and you couldn’t do well there unless you studied very hard, but every time there was any trouble,...

I start to get the feeling that something is really wrong.

You don’t even have to hate to have a perfectly miserable time.

Embrace fanaticism. Harness joie de vivre by pursuing insane interests, consuming passions, and constant sources of gratification that do not depend on the approval of others

I know by now, only too well, that you can never get away from yourself because you never go away.

Feminism is a good venue for getting yourself across as much as for getting your point across.

Some catastrophic moments invite clarity, explode in split moments: You smash your hand through a windowpane and then there is blood and shattered glass stained with red all over the place; you fall out a...

I don’t care what you think about it. So you have a choice. I can sit here and do it in front of you, or I can keep running into the bathroom so you don’t...

My life’s actually been quite dull; it’s not all that glamorous.

One of the terrible fallacies of contemporary psychotherapy is that if people would just say how they felt, a lot of problems could be solved.

“The shortness of life, I keep saying, makes everything seem pointless when I think about the longess of death. When I look ahead, all I can see is my final demise. And they say not...

Many of the people who consented to talk about their private lives in front of millions of television viewers would say that they were sharing their stories as a way to give comfort [to] fellow...

How can you hide from what never goes away?

I admire Bruce Springsteen because he’s a heroic person who has lots of integrity and has this incredible body of work that is so vital.

Mental illness is so much more complicated than any pill that any mortal could invent