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Mental Illness Quotes

Browse 1580 quotes about Mental Illness.

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Mental Illness Quotes

“The fact is, I was sick, but not in an easily explained flu kind of way. It's my experience that people are a lot more sympathetic if they can see you hurting, and for the millionth time in my life I wish for measles or smallpox or some other recognizable disease just to make it simple for me and also for them. Anything would be better than the truth: I shut down again. I went blank. One minute I was spinning, and the next minute my mind was dragging itself around in a circle, like an old, arthritic dog trying to lie down. And then I just turned off and went to sleep, but not sleep in the way you do every night. Think a long, dark sleep where you don't dream at all.”

SadMental Illness
Book:All the Bright Places
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“Cancer Kid has the Make-A-Wish Foundation because Cancer Kid will eventually die, and that's sad. Schizophrenia Kid will also eventually die, but before he does, he will be overmedicated with a plethora of drugs, he will alienate everyone he's ever really cared about, and he will most likely wind up on the street, living with a cat that will eat him when he dies. That is also sad, but nobody gives him a wish, because he isn't actively dying. It is abundantly clear that we only care about sick people who are dying tragic, time-sensitive deaths.”

SadMental IllnessUnfair
Book:Words on Bathroom Walls
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“With thousands of years of history frozen in time, it's no wonder that many southerners like me romanticize the north as a place where we can freeze our former selves, thaw, and then bloom anew. Here it’s just you, the land, and your thoughts, and you can't leave until you've wrestled with yourself and emerged a survivor. But then again, the light is much more intense up here and everything looks different because of it. The sun hasn’t set in a couple of months, and you can see things much more clearly when it is light all of the time.”

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Book:See What Flowers
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“You can’t be beaten by something you laugh at.”

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Book:Freak
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“The local police was her brother Martin, the sheriff. Her father was the Assistant Chief of Police. The last thing she was going to do was tell them Ray was AWOL from the mental institution.”

Mental IllnessSelf DeterminationSexual AbuseWomen S EmpowermentNarcissistic ViolenceTree Of LivesElizabeth GardenElizabeth Garden SayingsSchizophrenic Family MemberFamily Narcissism
Book:TREE OF LIVES: My rocky path out of the Wildwoods
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“Between 10 and 20 percent of people with anorexia die from heart attacks, other complications and suicide; the disease has the highest mortality rate of any mental illness. Or Kitty could have lost her life in a different way, lost it to the roller coaster of relapse and recovery, inpatient and outpatient, that eats up, on average, five to seven years. Or a lifetime: only half of all anorexics recovery in the end. The other half endure lives of dysfunction and despair. Friends and families give up on them. Doctors dread treating them. They’re left to stand in the bakery with the voice ringing in their ears, alone in every way that matters.”

FamilyMental IllnessEating DisordersAnorexia
Author:Harriet Brown
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“I’ve never had anorexia, but I know it well. I see it on the street, in the gaunt and sunken face, the boney chest, the spindly arms of an emaciated woman. I’ve come to recognize the flat look of despair, the hopelessness that follows, inevitably, from years of starvation. I think: That could have been [me]. It wasn’t. It’s not.”

FamilyMental IllnessEating DisordersAnorexia
Book:Brave Girl Eating: A Family's Struggle with Anorexia
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“For three days and three nights, Phædrus stares at the wall of the bedroom, his thoughts moving neither forward nor backward, staying only at the instant. His wife asks if he is sick, and he does not answer. His wife becomes angry, but Phædrus listens without responding. He is aware of what she says but is no longer able to feel any urgency about it. Not only are his thoughts slowing down, but his desires too. And they slow and slow, as if gaining an imponderable mass. So heavy, so tired, but no sleep comes. He feels like a giant, a million miles tall. He feels himself extending into the universe with no limit. He begins to discard things, encumbrances that he has carried with him all his life. He tells his wife to leave with the children, to consider themselves separated. Fear of loathsomeness and shame disappear when his urine flows not deliberately but naturally on the floor of the room. Fear of pain, the pain of the martyrs is overcome when cigarettes burn not deliberately but naturally down into his fingers until they are extinguished by blisters formed by their own heat. His wife sees his injured hands and the urine on the floor and calls for help. But before help comes, slowly, imperceptibly at first, the entire consciousness of Phædrus begins to come apart — to dissolve and fade away. Then gradually he no longer wonders what will happen next. He knows what will happen next, and tears flow for his family and for himself and for this world.”

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Author:Robert Pirsig
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“I am sitting next to a middle-aged Midwestern blonde from Shakopee, Minnesota. She is unremarkable; from the outside she looks less unkempt than some, a veneer of solidity that makes me wonder what she's doing here. Then she tells her story. Her thirty-year-old daughter, her best friend as she described her, had planned a big fiftieth birthday party for her. She had set up catering, had had a cake delivered to her mom's house. A few hours before the party, she had been with her mom setting up tables and making a playlist, and then left to go to her apartment to change clothes. She said to her mother what she said every time they parted, "I love loving you," and walked out the door. She never showed up for the party. She had gone home and hanged herself. This mother, that veneer I had misrecognized, was a husk, all that was left of a body destroyed by the unknown becoming known. "What had I missed?" she asked. What was lurking inside the body of her daughter that day? What was underneath the party planning and the love of loving her mother? What could that young woman not bear to know, not bear to feel?”

LoveLossGriefFamilySuicideInvisibleMental IllnessInvisible IllnessInvisible Self
Book:Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition
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“I hadn’t thought about prom, Bailey, or that car crash in years. I’d been under the assumption that therapy had wiped it from my mind completely. The search for Lizzie was doing something to me. Causing me to regress, in a way. Bailey Shepherd was no one to me, but at the same time, she was everything. My cause and value of life forever changed by a girl buried in a labyrinth of gnarled alloy and gasoline.”

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Book:The Organist
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“Just as I’m about to continue walking along the shoreline, the left third of the iceberg breaks off suddenly and crashes violently, like a high-rise apartment building imploding in the heart of the city. Tears roll down my face uncontrollably as I watch the two distinct halves of the iceberg drift further and further apart from each other. It’s devastating to watch something that seems so strong and unbreakable crumble in an instant. Even more devastating is the feeling that there’s nothing I can do about it.”

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Book:See What Flowers
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“It didn't last long—I wasn't famous enough. But it felt like forever to me. So now, I guess, I'm a bit... private." That wasn't the full story, just a fraction of it. Because the press had left Zaf alone eventually, but grief hadn't. Not for a long, long time. He wasn't going to tell her about the heights his anxiety had reached, or how it turned out depression could fuel rage like nothing else, or how bleak it felt when the fire ran out and the demons were all you had left. Not right now, anyway.”

LossGriefMental Illness
Book:Take a Hint, Dani Brown
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“Most of the time I lack closure; a reason. Without closure, you are perpetually haunted by the separation. Even if the reason is obvious, there is no easy way to move on, despite what people say. I have lost enough to know that when people say "You are better off" or "Just move on", they do not understand. Most of the pain comes not from the separation itself, but from the chaos created internally.”

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Book:The BPD Journals: A Year in the Life
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“Because what she dreaded now, ever since that walk down Lexington Avenue, was that the illness that had possessed, transformed, and consumed her father might also be at work in her brain. She could feel herself think differently and knew that, in the end, it did not matter whether this feeling was based on reality or fantasies. What mattered was that she was unable to stop thinking about her thoughts. Her speculations reflected one another, like parallel mirrors- and, endlessly, each image inside the vertiginous tunnel looked at the next wondering whether it was the original or a reproduction. This, she told herself, was the beginning of madness. The mind becoming the flesh for its own teeth.”

MetaphorMental IllnessInsanity
Book:Trust
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“But at that moment all I could see was the wolf in the white van, so alive, so strong. Hidden from view, unnoticed, concealed. And I thought, maybe he's real, this wolf, and he's really out there in a white van somewhere, riding around. Maybe he's in the far back, pacing back and forth, circling, the pads of his huge paws raw and cracking, his thick, sharp claws dully clicking against the raised rusty steel track ridges on the floor. Maybe he's sound asleep, or maybe he's just pretending. And then the van stops somewhere, maybe, and somebody gets out and walks around the side to the back and grabs hold of the handle and flings the doors open wide. Maybe whoever's kept him wears a mechanic's jumpsuit and some sunglasses, and he hasn't fed the great wolf for weeks, cruising the streets of the city at night, and the wolf's crazy with hunger now; he can't even think. Maybe he's not locked up in the back at all: he could be riding in the passenger seat, like a dog, just sitting and staring out the open window, looking around, checking everybody out. Maybe he's over in the other seat behind the steering wheel. Maybe he's driving.”

MetaphorMental IllnessDelusionJohn DarnielleWolf In White Van
Book:Wolf in White Van
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“He wouldn't tell me that I always have two options—You can choose how you feel or you you can let your feelings choose you because maybe it is true that those were the options that my husband had, but I knew I didn't have those options and I hated for someone to tell me that I had options I didn't have because I knew that my mind was a small object for sale and my feelings could pick me up and own me and maybe my husband was too expensive for feelings to choose him, to pick him up and have him rung up and scanned and bagged and taken along with those feelings, feelings of I can't really get out of bed today and Husband, would you please not talk to me for the rest of the year. I, too often, had my face smashed against concrete curbs of Ruby, memories of Ruby, the way her face had looked that afternoon as she curled in that chair by the window and the light streaming in and the dark streaming out and what happened so soon after—I went around hostage to those memories, an invisible person following me with a gun barrel to my back.”

MemoriesDepressionThoughtsMetaphorMental IllnessLack Of UnderstandingStream Of ConsciousnessPatronizingCatherine LaceyBad AdviceNobody Is Ever Missing
Book:Nobody Is Ever Missing
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“Every few minutes or so I would remember the look from the man who had wanted fifty cents, and I'd look at that framed memory hanging in myself and it meant I was here, back in this sick city, but in other ways I was not here at all and anyone who looked closely could see that I had nothing to give, that I was a junk drawer, a collection of things that may or may not have had a use.”

MetaphorMental IllnessDisconnectedCatherine LaceyRemovedNobody Is Ever MissingNothing To Give
Book:Nobody Is Ever Missing
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“In the deep, wet tangled, wild jungle where even natives won't go is a mystical, dangerous river. The river's got no name because naming it would make it real, and no one wanted to believe that river be real. They say you get there only inside a dream-but don't you think of it at bedtime, now, 'cause not everyone who goes there be able to leave! That jungle canopy, it so leafy true daylight can never break in the riverbank, it be wet muck thick with creatures that eat you alive if you stay still too long. To miss that fate, you gots to go into the black water. But the water be heavy as hot tar; once you in, it bind you and pull you along, bit by bit, 'til you come to the end of the land, and then over the water goes in a dark, slow cascade, the highest falls in the history of the world ever. There be demons in that cascading water, and snakes, and wraiths that whisper in your ears. They love you, they say. You should give yourself to them, stay with them, become one of them, they say. 'Isn't it good here?' they say. 'No pain, no trouble.' But also no light and no love and no joy and no ground. You tumble and tumble as you fall, and you try and choose, but your mind be topsy-turvy and maybe you can't think so well, and maybe you can't choose right, and maybe you never wake up. "It felt like that," I tell Tootsie, "even after you got me out and Scott moved me to Highland. I couldn't choose. I couldn't shut out the wraiths...But you would say, 'Hang on, sweetie,' and Scottie would say, 'I miss you, Mama,' and Scott would hold me, just hold me and say nothing at all." Tootsie snorts. "Scott was useless the whole while." "Scott was in the river, too.”

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Book:Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald
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