“It is very hard to explain to people who have never known serious depression or anxiety the sheer continuous intensity of it. There is no off switch.”— Matt Haig
“Depression will whisper in your ear. I can’t say 'don’t listen' because I know sometimes it’s a shout and you can’t help it. But there are other, better voices. I try to hear them instead.”— Olivia A. Cole, twitter.com
“I have been followed by an ever-present amorphous sadness for almost my entire life. I am 51 yrs old. It varies in strength from a casual unresolvable suspicion that I will never find the joy that others do in a sunset, to the feeling that being dead might a respite & a kindness. I’ve been on meds.…”— Andy Richter, twitter.com
“I couldn’t be with people and I didn’t want to be alone. Suddenly my perspective whooshed and I was far out in space, watching the world. I could see millions and millions of people, all slotted into their lives; then I could see me—I’d lost my place in the universe. It had closed up and there was n…”— Marian Keyes, amazon.com
“When you’re surrounded by all these people, it can be lonelier than when you’re by yourself. You can be in a huge crowd, but if you don’t feel like you can trust anyone or talk to anybody, you feel like you’re really alone.”— Fiona Apple, thoughtcatalog.com
“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, amazon.com
“I didn’t want to wake up. I was having a much better time asleep. And that’s really sad. It was almost like a reverse nightmare, like when you wake up from a nightmare you’re so relieved. I woke up into a nightmare.”— Ned Vizzini, amazon.com
“The tapestry of my life was a ruin of unraveling threads. The brightest parts were a nonsensical madman’s weaving. And now every day was a grey stitch, laid down with an outpatient’s patience, one following the next following the next, a story in lines, like a railway track to nowhere, telling absol…”— Alexis Hall, amazon.com
“I’ve been clinging to this world like a discarded shell of an insect stuck to a branch, about to be blown off forever by a gust of wind.”— Haruki Murakami, amazon.com
“The authority of depression is horrifying. I felt like my brain was busted and that I could never feel good again. I really thought that I was never gonna heal.”— Dick Cavett, psychologytoday.com
“I just wanna have fun and breathe, but I can’t do either one of them when I suffocate myself with depression.”— Lisa M. Cronkhite, amazon.com
“God knows I often retire to my bed wishing (at times even hoping) that I might never wake up; and in the morning I open my eyes, see the sun once again, and am miserable.”— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, amazon.com
“Anyone who has actually been that sad can tell you that there’s nothing beautiful or literary or mysterious about depression….Depression is like a heaviness that you can’t ever escape. It crushes down on you, making even the smallest things like tying your shoes or chewing on toast seem like a twent…”— Jasmine Warga, amazon.com
“Slowly, my feelings started to shrivel up. The few that managed to survive the constant beatings staggered around like wounded baby deer, just biding their time until they could die and join all the other carcasses strewn across the wasteland of my soul.”— Allie Brosh, amazon.com
“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, amazon.com
“I sat in the gradually chilling room, thinking of my whole past the way a drowning man is supposed to, and it seemed part of the present, part of the gray cold and the beggar woman without a face and the moulting birds frozen to their own filth in the Orangerie. I know now I was in the throes of som…”— M. F. K. Fisher, amazon.com
“The fatigue I’ve gathered year after year and stored inside now heaves a muted cry of helplessness. Nothing but fatigue, rounding my shoulders, heavier than ever on this late autumn day with a useless sun, a world of unforgiving disasters. So many struggles and tragedies, so much sorrow and egotism…”— Emil Dorian, amazon.com
“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.”— Anne Sexton, amazon.com
“It’s a strange moment when you realize that you don’t want to be alive anymore.”— Allie Brosh, amazon.com