Quotes

"Depression, when it's clinical, is not a metaphor.  It runs in families, and it's known to respond to medication and to counseling.  However truly you believe there's a sickness to existence that can never be cured, if you're depressed you will sooner or later surrender and say: I just don't want to feel bad anymore.  The shift from depressive realism to tragic realism, from being immobilized by darkness to being sustained by it, thus strangely seems to require believing in the possibility of a cure . . . "

--Jonathan Frazen from The Corrections.



"In depression this faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent.  The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come - not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute.  If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow.  It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.  So the decision making of daily life involves not, as in normal affairs, shifting from one annoying situation to another less annoying - or from discomfort to relative comfort, or from boredom to activity - but from moving from pain to pain.  One does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes. "

--William Styron from Darkness Visible



"In its severe forms, depression paralyzes all the otherwise vital forces that make us human, leaving instead a bleak, despairing, desperate, and deadened state.  It is a barren, fatiguing, and agitated conditon; one without hope or capacity; a world that is, as A. Alvarez put it, "airless and without exits."  Life is bloodless, pulseless, and yet present enought to allow a suffocating horror and pain.  All bearings are lost; all things are dark and drained of feeling.  The slippage into futility is first gradual, then utter.  Thought, which is a pervasively affected by depression as mood, is morbid, confused, and stuporous.  It is also vacillating, ruminative, indecisive, and self-castigating.  The body is bone-weary; there is no will; nothing that is not an effort, and nothing that at all seems worth it.  Sleep is fragmented, elusive, or all-consuming.  Like an unstable gas, an irritable exhaustion seeps into every crevice of thought and action."

--Kay Redfield Jamison, M.D. from Night Falls Fast:  Understanding Suicide



"Depression in the brain looks eerily like depression in the person.  It is fragility, brittleness, lack of resilence, a failure to heal.  Depression is chronic and progressive, with each episode -- perhaps each day! -- leaving damage in its wake.  Depression is not normal variation; it is pathology -- and risk of further harm."

--Peter D. Kramer, M.D. from Against Depression



"That's the thing about depression: A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight.  But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it's impossible to ever see the end.  The fog is like a cage without a key."

--Elizabeth Wurtzel from Prozac Nation



"Depression is the inability to construct a future."

--Rollo May



"The term clinical depression finds its way into too many conversations these days.  One has the sense that a catastrophe has occurred in the psychic landscape."

--Leonard Cohen



"The opposite of play is not work.  It's depression."

--Brian Sutton-Smith



"Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self - to the mediating intellect - as to verge close to being beyond description.  It remains nearly incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it in its extreme mode."

--William Styron from Darkness Visible



"Depression is nourished by a lifetime of ungrieved and unforgiven hurts."

--Penelope Sweet



"He who seeks an answer to the most pressing question, "What is living?" will find an answer in the Bible:  Man's destiny is to be a partner rather than a master.  There is a task, a law, and a way:  the task is redemption; the law, to do justice, to love mercy; and the way is the secret of being human and holy."

--Abraham Joshua Heschel



"Let us endeavor to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry."

--Mark Twain



"The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis but rather the feeling of not belonging."

--Mother Theresa



"Just when all those around me were assuring me they loved me, cared for me, appreciated me, ,yes, even admired me, I experienced myself as useless, unloved, and despicable person.  Just when people were putting their arms around me, I saw the endless depth of my human misery and felt that there was nothing worth living for.  Just when I had found a home, I felt absolutely homeless.  Just when I was being praised for my spirtual insights, I felt devoid of faith. Just when people were thanking me for bringing them closer to God, I felt that God had abandoned me.  It was as if the house I had finally found had no floors.  The anguish completely paralyzed me.  I could no longer sleep.  I cried uncontrollably for hours.  I could not be reached by consoling words or arguments.  I no longer had any interest in other people's problems.  I lost all appetite for food and could not appreciate the beauty of music, art, or even nature.  All had become darkness.  Within me there was one long scream coming from a place I didn't know existed, a place full of demons."

--Henri Nouwen



"If the angel deigns to come, it will because you have convinced him--
and not by your tears,
but by your resolve to make a
beginning"

-- Rainer Maria Rilke



"Without the correction, the reflection, the support of other presences, being is not merely unsafe; it is a horror."

-- George MacDonald



"He who learns must suffer.  Even in our sleep, pain falls drop by drop upon the heart.  In our own despair, against our own will, wisdom comes to us by the awful grace of God."

--Aeschylus



The Simple Path

The fruit of silence is

PRAYER

The fruit of prayer is

FAITH

The fruit of faith is

LOVE

The fruit of love is

SERVICE

The fruit of service is

PEACE.

--Mother Theresa



"There is no short cut, no patent tram-road, to wisdom.  After all the centuries of invention,
the soul's path lies through the thorny wilderness which must be still trodden in solitude, with
bleeding feet, with sobs for help, as it was trodden by them of old."

--George Eliot



"If we don't make progress on the spiritual path, we are strengthening the circle of suffering instead: doing
the same self-serving things year after year getting closer and closer to death.  When we live life in service to ourselves,
our life force naturally diminishes.  As such, meditate everyday.  Enlarge your motivation to include the welfar of
others."

--Sakyong Mipham



"I find that the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving.  To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against -- but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor."

--Oliver Wendell Holme



"We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope"

--Martin Luther King



"Trials give you strength, sorrows give understanding and wisdom."

--Chuck Falcon



"Just as despair can come to one only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one by other human beings."

--Elie Weisel



"Fall seven times, stand up 8."

--Japanese proverb



"If you are going through hell, keep going."

--Winston Churchill



"Its never too late to be what you might have been."

--George Eliot



"The future depends on what we do in the present."

--Mahatma Gandhi



"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 Stryon



"Most of the time, I'm half-way content."

--Bob Dylan



"No coward soul is mine
no trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere:
I see Heaven's glories shine,
And faith shines equal, bringing me from fear."

--Emily Bronte



"When does one ever know a human being?
Perhaps only after one has realized the
impossibility of knowledge and renounced
the desire for it and finally ceased to feel even
the need of it. But then what one achieves
is no longer knowledge, it is simply a
kind of co-existence; and this too
is one of the guises of love."

--Iris Murdoch



"Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here now, always--
A condition of complete simplicity
(costing not less than everything)...

--T.S. Elliot