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Depression Quotes

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Depression Quotes

“Did all his trouble, then, simply boil down to that? Just complicated, unmanly whinings; poor-little-rich-girl stuff? Was he no more than a loafer using his idleness to invent imaginary woes? A spiritual Mrs Wititterly? A Hamlet without poetry? Perhaps. And if so, did that make it any more bearable? It is not the less bitter because it is perhaps one’s own fault, to see oneself drifting, rotting, in dishonour and horrible futility, and all the while knowing that somewhere within one there is the possibility of a decent human being.”

“I feel unspeakably lonely. And I feel - drained. It is a blank state of mind and soul I cannot describe to you as I think it would not make any difference. Also it is a very private feeling I have - that of melting into a perpetual nervous breakdown. I am often questioning myself what I further want to do, who I further wish to be; which parts of me, exactly, are still functioning properly. No answers, darling. At all.”

“I can't deceive myself that out of the bare stark realization that no matter how enthusiastic you are, no matter how sure that character is fate, nothing is real, past or future, when you are alone in your room with the clock ticking loudly into the false cheerful brilliance of the electric light. And if you have no past or future which, after all, is all that the present is made of, why then you may as well dispose of the empty shell of present and commit suicide.”

“She isn't traumatized, she isn't weighed down by any obvious grief. She's just sad, all the time. An evil little creature that wouldn't have shown up on any X-rays was living in her chest, rushing through her blood and filling her head with whispers, saying she wasn't good enough, that she was weak and ugly and would never be anything but broken. You can get it into your head to do some unbelievably stupid things when you run out of tears, when you can't silence the voices no one else can hear, when you've never been in a room where you felt normal. In the end you get exhausted from always tensing the skin around your ribs, never letting your shoulders sink, brushing along walls all your life with white knuckles, always afraid that someone will notice you, because no one's supposed to do that. All Nadia knew was that she had never felt like someone who had anything in common with anyone else. She had always been entirely alone in every emotion. She sat in a classroom full of her contemporaries, looking like everything was the same as usual, but inside she was standing in a forest screaming until her heart burst. The trees grew until one day the sunlight could no longer break through the foliage, and the darkness in here became impenetrable.”

“But about the drip drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don't know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the laundrette. Or to sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night, because you can't bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jeering trick-or-treaters. Or to have the librarian smile pityingly and say, ‘Goodness, you're a quick reader!’ when you bring back seven books, read from cover to cover, a week after taking them out. They don't know what it is to be so chronically untouched that the accidental brush of a bus conductor's hand on your shoulder sends a jolt of longing straight to your groin.”

“exI feel unspeakably lonely. And I feel - drained. It is a blank state of mind and soul I cannot describe to you as I think it would not make any difference. Also it is a very private feeling I have - that of melting into a perpetual nervous breakdown. I am often questioning myself what I further want to do, who I further wish to be; which parts of me, exactly, are still functioning properly. No answers, darling. At all.”

“It was not until I listened to the desperately lonely people who contact The Samaritans that I began to understand what friendship is, by seeing how terrible and damaging it is to try live without it. The knowledge of knowing of even one, not very close, friend provides some sense of belonging. If you do not belong anywhere it is hard to survive. One of the common elements in suicide is the pain of loss, and the final loss is the conviction that there is no place at all where you safely belong. You are worth nothing, not even to yourself. Especially to yourself. There becomes no point in not killing yourself. People are able to survive for years in a deadly marriage or a dull job, because they do at least belong there. The crippling routine of housework, a production line, a viewless office with anaemic plants - even Mildred's desk and typewriter cover may be what has kept her going all these years. Simone Weil once said that what keeps people committed to a cause is not so much the cause itself, as being part of the way of life among those who serve the cause.”

“How many of us dads feel alone, depressed, anxious, overwhelmed, overstimulated, or burned out, like we’re dragging our feet, speechless, doubting our abilities, or just flat-out tired? I know it has to be a lot of us, because every dad I talk to mentions feeling like this multiple times, week in and week out. Turn over to social media, and you will find forums, groups, and influencers supporting dads feeling this way. It is a reality that being a dad is hard work and it wears on you. Support is what we need, but it seems impossible to find.”

“America" Loans Interest rates Endless advertisements Usury and deception Countless heavy bodies filled with fear Migrant, refugee, and illegal bodies that came escaping America’s oppression in their own countries… America Depression, anxiety, and pain relief pills A political, media, and institutional matrix of power ran by one lobby… Credit cards Bankruptcy Debts Drugs The homeless Racism Weapons Strict security measures Suffocating any attempt for any meaningful change under the pretext of the homeland security… America Sanctions imposed on this country and that, Internal psychological sanctions imposed on a majority of the naïve who believe themselves to be free… America Tasteless fruit, vegetables, meats, eggs, and cheeses, injected with hormones, sprayed with pesticides and many other carcinogenic substances… America Houses that look beautiful from the outside, inhabited by people who are mostly lonely, going through psychological or nervous breakdowns, or perhaps wrestling with depression or hysteria, the luckiest of them are on daily pills to help them adapt to the psychological and spiritual death surrounding them from all sides… America Fruitless trees and scentless flowers, as if as a punishment or a curse from heaven upon those who stole the land from its native people, after erasing most of them… America Bills Sad letters in the mail, mostly from companies and advertisers wishing you a delightful day and great consumption, encouraging you to solve your problems with more consumption, and reminding you that you may die abruptly of loneliness or the toxins that you consume, and therefore, you must seriously consider purchasing your casket and the plot under which you will be buried… [Original poem published in Arabic on August 27, 2024 at ahewar.org]”

“What's shadow-sick?' she asked. 'You might call it 'heartsick' or 'soul-sick',' answered Anita. 'It happens when humans turn from face-to-face trust and let the darkness of death enter them. Thanks to Adam, we all have inherited shadow-sickness in our mortality. Resisting it is the war in which we are all engaged.' 'Is your colleague being guarded, then?' John asked. 'No, she is being companioned inside a community to the north,' Anita said. 'It is a guarding of sorts--but *for*, not *against*. The purpose is to help her turn once again toward life.' She addressed Lilly. 'We learned long ago that shadow-sickness feeds on isolation. So we take our stand against it by protecting relationships of intentional love and kindness.”

“The Dark Cloud Is the loneliness you go through because isolation is common and friends are not Is the story of 50,000 raped Bosniak women which history forgot Is the intense pressure of being crushed under a pile of mental weight Is the backstabbing ex-boyfriend who took you for granted and compelled you to question the integrity of your relationship, including the first date”

“How heavy do I journey on the way, When what I seek, my weary travel’s end, Doth teach that ease and that repose to say, “Thus far the miles are measur’d from thy friend!” The beast that bears me, tired with my woe, Plods dully on, to bear that weight in me, As if by some instinct the wretch did know His rider lov’d not speed, being made from thee: The bloody spur cannot provoke him on That sometimes anger thrusts into his hide; Which heavily he answers with a groan, More sharp to me than spurring to his side; For that same groan doth put this in my mind; My grief lies onward, and my joy behind —William Shakespeare[”

“It’s because people have aspirations and ambitions that solitude wears on them. If you don’t have a damn about what the rest of the world is up to, you can be alone for a hundred years- a thousand years- with no difficulty whatsoever. At least, you can if you don’t let criticism bother you.”

“I needed to escape my loneliness. I needed comfort and companionship. I needed certainty and faith and stability. But the truth is that I can’t fix that all now. Instead, I made a commitment to noticing. I made it my job to seek the beauty around me; to witness the little magic shows of nature unveiling in hedgerows and verges and the changing of the seasons. By turning my attention outward and finding places and creatures to love, I found beauty to focus on. I had reasons to stay.”

“In the bedroom I put on a sweatsuit I've had since high school, take the sheets off my bed, pick clothes up from the floor - dirty or clean it doesn't matter - put them all in the hamper, put clean sheets on the bed, pause to retch and weep, gather all the pillows and blankets from the rest of my apartment, get my computer, cocoon myself, watch TV. I order a pizza. I drift in and out of consciousness, letting their reality be my reality, eat the pizza, fall asleep with the TV on, wake up with the TV on, in and out, in and out, alone and lonely like I like it.”

“There is a remarkable picture by the painter Kramskoy, called “Contemplation.” There is a forest in winter, and on a roadway through the forest, in absolute solitude, stands a peasant in a torn kaftan and bark shoes. He stands, as it were, lost in thought. Yet he is not thinking; he is “contemplating.” If any one touched him he would start and look at one as though awakening and bewildered. It's true he would come to himself immediately; but if he were asked what he had been thinking about, he would remember nothing. Yet probably he has, hidden within himself, the impression which had dominated him during the period of contemplation. Those impressions are dear to him and no doubt he hoards them imperceptibly, and even unconsciously. How and why, of course, he does not know either. He may suddenly, after hoarding impressions for many years, abandon everything and go off to Jerusalem on a pilgrimage for his soul's salvation, or perhaps he will suddenly set fire to his native village, and perhaps do both. There are a good many “contemplatives” among the peasantry. Well, Smerdyakov was probably one of them, and he probably was greedily hoarding up his impressions, hardly knowing why.”

“I wasn’t empty because others abandoned me, but because I had abandoned myself. Who I am was repressed—collateral damage in a long-term coping mechanism gone unchecked. My subconscious had put up partitions to contain the flood of emotion in the wake of trauma, but in doing so, my identity was trapped and locked away as well. As a result, everything repressed would one day come forward—without warning, without control, and without a shutoff valve.”

“Come erano tranquilli e beati gli altri, tutti gli altri! – tornava a ripetersi, riabbassata la testa sul piatto –. Come erano bravi a godersi la vita! La sua pasta si vede era diversa, inguaribilmente diversa, da quella della gente normale che una volta mangiato e bevuto non bada che a digerire. Accanirsi a mangiare e a bere a lui non sarebbe servito, no. (...) sarebbe ricascato in pieno a ruminare sulle sue solite cose, le vecchie e le nuove. Le sentiva in agguato, già pronte a saltargli addosso come prima, come sempre: e tutte quante insieme.”