He who hears the rippling of rivers in these degenerate days will not utterly despair.

However, robust evidence shows that people systematically overestimate the probability of positive future contingencies, and underestimate the probability of negative ones — only those who are depressed or dysphoric come to accurate assessments.

Something inside me clicks. It’s like I’ve spent my whole life fiddling with a complicated combination only to discover I was toying with the wrong lock.

It is madness. And if you don’t know who you are, or if your real self has drifted away from you with the undertow, madness at least gives you an identity. It’s the same with...

Broke is a relative term, like sister, cousin, or Uncle Sam.

I figured I could get a job at a filling station somewhere, putting gas and oil in people’s cars. I didn’t care what kind of job it was, though. Just so people didn’t know me...

I go dreaming into the future, where I see nothing, nothing. I have no plans, no idea, no project, and, what is worse, no ambition. Something – the eternal ‘what’s the use?’ – sets its...

Talking to a therapist, I thought, was like taking your clothes off and then taking your skin off, and then having the other person say, “Would you mind opening up your rib cage so that...

In the darkest time, I have always believed, the light will shine.

Love is a hollow word which seems at home in song lyrics and greeting cards, until you fall in love and discover it’s disconcerting power. Depression means nothing more than the blues, commercially packaged angst,...

You can have all the money in the world, one of the biggest mansions ever built, be one of the most famous people in the world, and still be as unhappy as Mariah Carey was....

When I’m naked, I can see my heart beating.

It’s crazy what a heart blinded by love can lead you to believe.

I think I’ll feel out of place wherever I go on earth, forever. But that’s fine. I have to make my peace with that.

When we’re unemployed, we’re called lazy; when the whites are unemployed it’s called a depression.

For a moment you forget how much the loss hurts. Then you remember and it buries you.

You know those afternoons,” he asks, drawing a shaking breath, “where you’re just going along, doing fine, and then afternoon comes and it feels like you’ve just got the wind knocked out of you and...

Squiffy, have you ever felt a sort of strange emptiness in the heart? A sort of aching void of the soul?”Oh, rather!”What do you do about it?”I generally take a couple of cocktails.

I wish on one of the stars for divine orchestration and save the rest of them for all of the other girls in the world who will feel like I do tonight.

Bad thoughts can be dangerous if left to simmer and weaken the heart slowly and invisibly. Like termites that destroy the beams of a house, secretly, in the dark until it’s too late and everything...

When the depression hit, he bought land for 50 cents an acre and cows for $1 each from his neighbors who couldn’t make it.

I’m so unhappy that I’m going to overdose on aspirin,” but they’d be awfully surprised if they succeeded. They have no intention of dying. At the first sight of blood, they panic.

I finally understood what could drive kids to show up with guns and shoot up their schools.

I spend a lot of time trying to convince myself that nothing really matters except being alive.

good monster” the notmuch (a childlike mania). Now the two of them play, they’re cheeky and brave together, Leo now answers his mother: Notmuch. The notmuch is half memory of Fips, the other half is...

Seriously, why aren’t you on drugs?” Cath walked past her out of the room.”Are you a licensed psychiatrist? Or do you just play one on TV?””I’m on drugs,” Reagan said. “They’re a beautiful thing.

Find your “self-culture” is hero’s work. I liken it to the journey of a warrior who is preparing for battle. There is no violence in the battle, but there is a plan of attack and...

There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room.

People try to say suicide is the most cowardly act a man could ever commit. I don’t think that’s true at all. What’s cowardly is treating a man so badly that he wants to commit...

My life is just a shadow in mortals live, a worthless piece of nothing. But still, wandering in this world, without a reason. My biggest questions are, why I haven’t already died for the things...

Community is about sharing my life; about allowing the chaos of another’s circumstances to infringe on mine; about permitting myself to be known without constraint; about resigning myself to needing others.

Indigo has a purifying, stabilizing, cleansing effect when fear, repression, and obsessions have disturbed your mental body. Indigo food vibrations are: blackberries, blue plums, blueberries, purple brocoli, beetroot, and purple grapes.

Just as verbally and physically abused children internalize blame, so do incest victims. However, in incest, the blame is compounded by the shame. The belief that ‘it’s all my fault’ is never more intense than...

Where there is light, darkness must cease.

I would not wish depression on anybody. And yet, it taught me a lot. I have not become suddenly mawkishly grateful for my life but I am more interested in it, more engaged you might...

my brain had begun to endure its familiar siege: panic and dislocation, and a sense that my thought processes were being engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the...

I lied, but by his reaction I think he liked what I had said. I had told Shreya about Sudeshna and she was okay with our relationship, but there were a few things that I...

HYPOCHONDRIASIS, n. Depression of one’s own spirits.Some heaps of trash upon a vacant lot Where long the village rubbish had been shot Displayed a sign among the stuff and stumps –“”Hypochondriasis.”” It meant The Dumps....

I am not enough in myself; I can barely make it through buying milk and school supplies. Thank goodness there is a Guardian to come before me and throw off the dark.

Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don’t believe it. Seek out the memories depression takes away and project them into the future. Be brave;...

Enlightenment is the Goal – Love is the Game – Taking steps are the rules! – Allan Rufus

It is as great a thing to love as it is to be loved. Love is not something that can be wasted.

What to do with life? Get out of bed, Derek. That’s what you do. You get out of bed, and you get yourself a cup of fucking coffee. That’s all you can do.

At the best of times, spring hurts depressives.

After a while, it all started to fade. No more pain, no more unwanted thoughts and no sound. Just darkness. I welcomed it. I was done.

At that moment, sitting on that park bench, The Writer was overcome by an indefinable sadness not completely ascribable to the state in which The Mother was now, nor the desperation of his decades-long creative...

The diabolical thing about melancholy is not that it makes you ill but that it makes you conceited and shortsighted; yes almost arrogant. You lapse into bad taste, thinking of yourself as Heine’s Atlas, whose...

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.

Bill Hewlett and I were brought up in the Depression. We weren’t interested in the idea of making any money. Our idea was if you couldn’t find a job, you’d make one for yourself.

We are doing a poor job in addressing depression. We are failing these people.