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Depression is anger without enthusiasm
-Anon.
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Depression moods lead, almost invariably, to accidents. But, when they occur, our mood changes again, since the accident shows we can draw the world in our wake, and that we still retain some degree of power even when our spirits are low. A series of accidents creates a positively light-hearted state, out of consideration for this strange power.
-Jean Baudrillard
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He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan.
-Alain de Botton
on Arthur Schopenhauer
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The term clinical depression finds its way into too many conversations these days. One has a sense that a catastrophe has occurred in the psychic landscape.
-Leonard Cohen
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Geez, if I could get through to you, kiddo, that depression is not sobbing and crying and giving vent, it is plain and simple reduction of feeling. Reduction, see? Of all feeling. People who keep stiff upper lips find that it's damn hard to smile.
-Judith Guest
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That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.
-Ernest Hemingway
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The world leans on us. When we sag, the whole world seems to droop.
-Eric Hoffer
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There exists, at the bottom of all abasement and misfortune, a last extreme which rebels and joins battle with the forces of law and respectability in a desperate struggle, waged partly by cunning and partly by violence, at once sick and ferocious, in which it attacks the prevailing social order with the pin-pricks of vice and the hammer-blows of crime.
-Victor Hugo
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I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.
-John Keats
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In addition to my other numerous acquaintances, I have one more intimate confidant. My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known -- no wonder, then, that I return the love.
-Soren Kierkegaard
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The only way to escape the abyss is to look at it, gauge it, sound it out and descend into it.
-Cesare Pavese
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Depression is rage spread thin.
-George Santayana
attributed
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Human existence must be a kind of error...it may be said of it, 'it is bad today and every day it will get worse, until the worst of all happens'.
-Arthur Schopenhauer
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This is my depressed stance. When you're depressed, it makes a lot of difference how you stand. The worst thing you can do is straighten up and hold your head high because then you'll start to feel better. If you're going to get any joy out of being depressed, you've got to stand like this.
-Charles Monroe Schulz
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Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance. It is tumbleweed distress that thrives on thin air, growing despite its detachment from the nourishing earth. It can be described only in metaphor and allegory
-Andrew Solomon
The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
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Depression is melancholy minus its charms -- the animation, the fits.
-Susan Sontag
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The madness of depression is the antithesis of violence. It is a storm indeed, but a storm of murk. Soon evident are the slowed-down responses, near paralysis, psychic energy throttled back close to zero. Ultimately, the body is affected and feels sapped, drained.
-William Styron
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In depression...faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no rememdy will come, not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.
-William Styron
from 'Darkness Visible; A Memoir of Madness', 1990
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Mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from natural experience, the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain.
-William Styron
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It's a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it's a depression when you lose your own.
-Harry S Truman
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I am beginning to see that all my troubles have their root in a habitual and absolute dependence upon my personal prestige, security, and romantic attachment. When these things go wrong, there is depression. Now this absolute dependence upon people and situations for emotional security is, I think, the immense and devastating fallacy that makes us miserable. This craving for such dependencies, this utter dependence upon people and situations, can only lead to conflict. Both on the surface and at depth. We are making demands on circumstances and people that are bound to fail us. The only safe and sure channel of absolute dependence is upon God himself.
-Bill Wilson
Letter, April, 1953
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Books about Depression
