Latest Quotes

“The hardest thing about depression is that it is addictive. It begins to feel uncomfortable not to be depressed. You feel guilty for feeling happy.”

— Pete Wentz, Hyperbole and a Half

“Languid, Lovely, Lonely; the swans arched their beautiful necks and turned to gaze at him as he stood rooted to the shore, his feet encased in mud.”

— Melanie Benjamin, The Swans of Fifth Avenue: A Novel

“Some people think mental illness is a matter of mood, a matter of personality. They think depression is simply a form of being sad, that OCD is a form of being uptight. They think the soul is sick, not the body. It is, they believe, something that you have some choice over. I know how wrong this is.”

— David Levithan, Every Day

“I wonder if that's how darkness wins, by convincing us to trap it inside ourselves, instead of emptying it out. I don't want it to win.”

— Jasmine Warga, My Heart and Other Black Holes

“I wanted to tell people, 'My depression is acting up today' as an excuse for not seeing them, but I never managed to pull it off.”

— Ned Vizzini, It's Kind of a Funny Story

“We are at rest five miles behind the front.”

— Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“The depression belongs to all of us. I think of the family down the road whose mother was having a baby and they went around the neighborhood saying, "We're pregnant." I want to go around the neighborhood saying, "We're depressed." If my mum can't get out of bed in the morning, all of us feel the sa…”

— Melina Marchetta, Saving Francesca

“Anyone who has actually been that sad can tell you that there's nothing beautiful or literary or mysterious about depression.”

— Jasmine Warga, My Heart and Other Black Holes

“Does such a thing as ‘the fatal flaw,’ that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?”

— Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.”

— Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera (Oprah's Book Club)

“I felt myself being invaded through and through, I crumbled, disintegrated, and only emptiness remained.”

— Stanisław Lem, Solaris

“I flipped through the CT scan images, the diagnosis obvious: the lungs were matted with innumerable tumors, the spine deformed, a full lobe of the liver obliterated.”

— Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.”

— George Eliot, Middlemarch (Penguin Classics)

“In every way that counted, I was dead. Inside somewhere maybe I was screaming and weeping and howling like an animal, but that was another person deep inside, another person who had no access to the lips and face and mouth and head, so on the surface I just shrugged and smile and kept moving.”

— Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

“Who is John Galt?”

— Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”

— L.P Hartley, The Go-Between (New York Review Books Classics)

“I don't want to do anything. I don't even want to start this day because then I'll just be expected to finish it.”

— Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl: A Novel

“She’s buried beneath a silver birch tree, down towards the old train tracks, her grave marked with a cairn.”

— Paula Hawkins, The Girl on the Train: A Novel

“Depression is like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch it where it hurts. It's always there, though.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot: A Novel

“I saw the world in black and white instead of the vibrant colors and shades I knew existed.”

— Katie McGarry, Pushing the Limits