Antonin Artaud wrote on one of his drawings, “Never real and always true,” and that is how depression feels. You know that it is not real, that you are someone else, and yet you know that it is absolutely true.
Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance.
The people who succeed despite depression do three things. First, they seek an understanding of what’s happening. They they accept that this is a permanent situation. And then they have to transcend their experience and grow from it and put themselves out into the world of real people.
I regret everything because it has just finished, and already when I was twelve, I lamented the time that had gone by. Even in the best of spirits, it’s always been as though I wrestle with the present in a vain effort to stop its becoming the past.
While people argue with one another about the specifics of Freud’s work and blame him for the prejudices of his time, they overlook the fundamental truth of his writing, his grand humility: that we frequently do not know our own motivations in life and are prisoners to what we cannot understand.
You don’t think in depression that you’ve put on a gray veil and are seeing the world through the haze of a bad mood. You think that the veil has been taken away, the veil of happiness, and that now you’re seeing truly.
Fold the worst events of your life into a narrative of triumph.
We cannot bear a pointless torment, but we can endure great pain if we believe that it’s purposeful.
The absence of marriages will result in all kinds of financial burdens that gay people wouldn’t face if they could get married.
The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and it was vitality that seemed to seep away from me in that moment.
A sense of humor is the best indicator that you will recover; it is often the best indicator that people will love you. Sustain that and you have hope.
I believe that words are strong, that they can overwhelm what we fear when fear seems more awful than life is good.