Latest Quotes

“The boys, as they talked to the girls from Marcia Blaine School, stood on the far side of their bicycles holding the handlebars, which established a protective fence of bicycle between the sexes, and the impression that at any moment the boys were likely to be away.”

— Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: A Novel

“I slept on one of the couches in Camilla’s living room, using my packed duffel bag as a pillow and my jacket as a blanket.”

— David Shapiro, Supremacist

“This book is not a suicide note.”

— Simon Critchley, Suicide (Kindle Single)

“And I felt like my heart had been so thoroughly and irreparably broken that there could be no real joy again, that at best there might eventually be a little contentment. Everyone wanted me to get help and rejoin life, pick up the pieces and move on, and I tried to, I wanted to, but I just had to li…”

— Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year

“Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.”

— Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or broken up with someone. But these experiences carry with them feelings. Depression, instead, is flat, hollow, and unendurable. It is also tiresome.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“A dictionary is both a book of words and a cosmos.”

— Lohren Green, Poetical Dictionary (Abridged)

“A screaming comes across the sky.”

— Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

“A screaming comes across the sky.”

— Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

“On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide— it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese— the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides: A Novel

“Sometimes the sordidness of his present existence, not to mention the stifling, clammy heat of the apartment his finances had forced him to take, on the third floor of an ugly old house on Binghamton’s West Side—‘ the nice part of town,’ everybody said (God have mercy on those who had to live in the…”

— John Gardner, Mickelsson's Ghosts

“That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say ‘My tooth is aching’ than to say ‘My heart is broken.’”

— C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

“The American flag is the most exquisite and artistic of all the banners of all the nations.”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel, Creatocracy: How the Constitution Invented Hollywood

“If you know someone who’s depressed, please resolve never to ask them why. Depression isn’t a straightforward response to a bad situation; depression just is, like the weather.”

— Stephen Fry, More Fool Me

“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”

— Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited

“Noble deeds and hot baths are the best cures for depression.”

— Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

“Seeing that I must shortly approach mankind with the heaviest demand that has ever been made on it, it seems to me indispensable to say who I am.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Why I Am So Wise (Penguin Great Ideas)

“There is no point treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, 'There now, hang on, you'll get over it.' Sadness is more or less like a head cold- with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.”

— Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees: A Novel

“Some friends don't understand this. They don't understand how desperate I am to have someone say, I love you and I support you just the way you are because you're wonderful just the way you are. They don't understand that I can't remember anyone ever saying that to me. I am so demanding and difficul…”

— Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation