117 Inspirational Depression Quotes

Sometimes, life can feel overwhelming, and the shadows of depression may obscure our path. In those moments, words of wisdom can offer a glimmer of hope and a gentle reminder that brighter days lie ahead. Our carefully curated collection of the top 117 inspirational depression quotes is designed to uplift your spirit, providing comfort and encouragement when you need it most. Through these profound words, drawn from thinkers, writers, and survivors, may you find the strength and inspiration to navigate through the challenges and embrace a journey toward healing and hope.

1. “At heart, I have always been a coper, I've mostly been able to walk around with my wounds safely hidden, and I've always stored up my deep depressive episodes for the weeks off when there was time to have an abbreviated version of a complete breakdown. But in the end, I'd be able to get up and on with it, could always do what little must be done to scratch by.” - Elizabeth Wurtzel

2. “Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.” - Philip K. Dick

3. “It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it’s a depression when you lose your own.” - Harry S. Truman

4. “If I can't feel, if I can't move, if I can't think, and I can't care, then what conceivable point is there in living?” - Kay Redfield Jamison

5. “The modern philosopher had told me again and again that I was in the right place, and I still felt depressed even in acquiescence. But I had heard that I was in the wrong place, and my soul sang for joy like a bird in spring.” - G.K. Chesterton

6. “Even for me life had its gleams of sunshine.” - Charlotte Brontë

7. “A melancholy-looking man, he had the appearance of one who has searched for the leak in life's gas-pipe with a lighted candle.” - P.G. Wodehouse

8. “No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won't hurt” - Hunter S. Thompson

9. “I told Doreen I would not go to the show or the luncheon or the film premiere, but that I would not go to Coney Island either, I would stay in bed. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I shouldn't, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired.” - Sylvia Plath

10. “Even when I try to stir myself up, I just get irritated because I can't make anything come out. And in the middle of the night I lie here thinking about all this. If I don't get back on track somehow, I'm dead, that's the sense I get. There isn't a single strong emotion inside me.” - Banana Yoshimoto

11. “I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

12. “I never felt like that before. Maybe it could be depression, like you get. I can understand how you suffer now when you're depressed; I always thought you liked it and I thought you could have snapped yourself out any time, if not alone then by means of the mood organ. But when you get that depressed you don't care. Apathy, because you've lost a sense of worth. It doesn't matter whether you feel better because you have no worth.” - Philip K. Dick

13. “Depression is boring, I thinkand I would do better to makesome soup and light up the cave.” - Anne Sexton

14. “An unchangeable colour rules over the melancholic: his dwelling is a space the colour of mourning. Nothing happens in it. No one intrudes. It is a bare stage where the inert I is assisted by the I suffering from that inertia. The latter wishes to free the former, but all efforts fail, as Theseus would have failed had he been not only himself but also the Minotaur; to kill him then, he would have had to kill himself” - Alejandra Pizarnik

15. “People think that food cheers you up, that a doughnut cures all ills, but this only works for trivial complaints. When real disaster strikes, food chokes you.” - Helena Dela

16. “I wonder Pa went so easy. I wonder Grampa didn' kill nobody. Nobody never tol' Grampa where to put his feet. An' Ma ain't nobody you can push aroun' neither. I seen her beat the hell out of a tin peddler with a live chicken one time 'cause he give her a argument. She had the chicken in one han', an' the ax in the other, about to cut its head off. She aimed to go for that peddler with the ax, but she forgot which hand was which, an' she takes after him with the chicken. Couldn' even eat that chicken when she got done. They wasn't nothing but a pair of legs in her han'. Grampa throwed his hip outa joint laughin'.” - John Steinbeck

17. “It weren’t too loo long before I seen something in me, had changed. A bitter seed was planted inside of me. And I just didn’t feel so, accepting, anymore.” - Kathryn Stockett

18. “People with family histories of alcoholism tend to have lower levels of endorphins- the endogenous morphine that is responsible for many of our pleasure responses- than do people genetically disinclined to alcoholism. Alcohol will slightly raise the endorphin level of people without the genetic basis for alcoholism; it will dramatically raise the endorphin level of people with that genetic basis. Specialists spend a lot of time formulating exotic hypotheses to account for substance abuse. Most experts point out, strong motivations for avoiding drugs; but there are also strong motivations for taking them. People who claim not to understand why anyone would get addicted to drugs are usually people who haven't tried them or who are genetically fairly invulnerable to them.” - Andrew Solomon

19. “She wondered that hope was so much harder then despair.” - Patricia Briggs

20. “The same sensitivity that opens artists to Being also makes them vulnerable to the dark powers of non-Being. It is no accident that many creative people--including Dante, Pascal, Goethe, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Beethoven, Rilke, Blake, and Van Gogh--struggled with depression, anxiety, and despair. They paid a heavy price to wrest their gifts from the clutches of non-Being. But this is what true artists do: they make their own frayed lives the cable for the surges of power generated in the creative force fields of Being and non-Being. (Beyond Religion, p. 124)” - David N. Elkins

21. “Depression is melancholy minus its charms.” - Susan Sontag

22. “Depression, as far as I'm concerned, is just a waste of time.” - Helen Reddy

23. “Perfume was first created to mask the stench of foul and offensive odors...Spices and bold flavorings were created to mask the taste of putrid and rotting meat...What then was music created for?Was it to drown out the voices of others, or the voices within ourselves?I think I know.” - Emilie Autumn

24. “Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song.” - Pope John Paul II (Karol Wojtyła)

25. “I feel like I'm dropping such a long way down again." "I seem to be dropping into a cold dark wet place, where no one's been before and noone can every follow. There's no future there; just a past that sometimes fools you into thinking it's the future. It's the most alone place you can ever be and, when you go there, you not only cease to exist in real life, you also cease to exist in their consciousness and in their memories.” - John Marsden

26. “Es ist nicht leicht in Berlin, und das Leben fordert den ganzen Menschen. Das Jahr geht vom Winterschlaf in die Frühjahrsmüdigkeit, von der Frühjahrsmüdigkeit ins Sommerloch, vom Sommerloch in die Herbstdepression und dann direkt in den Winterschlaf über - und zwischendurch gibt's Momente, die sind gut.” - Christiane Rösinger

27. “I start to get the feeling that something is really wrong.” - Elizabeth Wurtzel

28. “Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don't believe it. Seek out the memories depression takes away and project them into the future. Be brave; be strong; take your pills. Exercise because it's good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds. Eat when food itself disgusts you. Reason with yourself when you have lost your reason.” - Andrew Solomon

29. “عادة ما أشعر انى خفيفة قادرة على ان أطير وأنا مستقرة فى مقعد أقرأ رواية ممتعة. حين أشعر بنفسى ثقيلة أعرف أنى على مشارف نوبة جديدة من الاكتئاب” - رضوى عاشور

30. “In my case, I was not frightened in the least bit at the thought that I might live because I was certain, quite certain, that I was already dead. ” - Elizabeth Wurtzel

31. “Some catastrophic moments invite clarity, explode in split moments: You smash your hand through a windowpane and then there is blood and shattered glass stained with red all over the place; you fall out a window and break some bones and scrape some skin. Stitches and casts and bandages and antiseptic solve and salve the wounds. But depression is not a sudden disaster. It is more like a cancer: At first its tumorous mass is not even noticeable to the careful eye, and then one day -- wham! -- there is a huge, deadly seven-pound lump lodged in your brain or your stomach or your shoulder blade, and this thing that your own body has produced is actually trying to kill you. Depression is a lot like that: Slowly, over the years, the data will accumulate in your heart and mind, a computer program for total negativity will build into your system, making life feel more and more unbearable. But you won't even notice it coming on, thinking that it is somehow normal, something about getting older, about turning eight or turning twelve or turning fifteen, and then one day you realize that your entire life is just awful, not worth living, a horror and a black blot on the white terrain of human existence. One morning you wake up afraid you are going to live.In my case, I was not frightened in the least bit at the thought that I might live because I was certain, quite certain, that I was already dead. The actual dying part, the withering away of my physical body, was a mere formality. My spirit, my emotional being, whatever you want to call all that inner turmoil that has nothing to do with physical existence, were long gone, dead and gone, and only a mass of the most fucking god-awful excruciating pain like a pair of boiling hot tongs clamped tight around my spine and pressing on all my nerves was left in its wake.That's the thing I want to make clear about depression: It's got nothing at all to do with life. In the course of life, there is sadness and pain and sorrow, all of which, in their right time and season, are normal -- unpleasant, but normal. Depression is an altogether different zone because it involves a complete absence: absence of affect, absence of feeling, absence of response, absence of interest. The pain you feel in the course of a major clinical depression is an attempt on nature's part (nature, after all, abhors a vacuum) to fill up the empty space. But for all intents and purposes, the deeply depressed are just the walking, waking dead.And the scariest part is that if you ask anyone in the throes of depression how he got there, to pin down the turning point, he'll never know. There is a classic moment in The Sun Also Rises when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt, and all he can say in response is, 'Gradually and then suddenly.' When someone asks how I love my mind, that is all I can say too” - Elizabeth Wurtzel

32. “sufferers of depression, who can elect to keep their feelings private, experience chronic, unremitting emotional alienation. Each moment spent “passing” as normal deepens the sense of disconnection generated by depression in the first instance. In this regard, depression stands as a nearly pure case of impression-management. For depressed individuals, the social requirement to “put on a happy face” requires subjugation of an especially intense inner experience. Yet, nearly unbelievably, many severely depressed people “pull off the act” for long periods of time. The price of the performance is to further exacerbate a life condition that already seems impossibly painful” - David A. Karp

33. “In the morning you were never violently sorry-- you made no resolutions, but if you had overdone it and your heart was slightly out of order, you went on the wagon for a few days without saying anything about it, and waited until an accumulation of nervous boredom projected you into another party.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

34. “If you want to conquer the anxiety of life, live in the moment, live in the breath.” - Amit Ray

35. “You don't seem mad at all,' she said.But I am, although I'm undergoing a cure, because my problem is that I lack a particular chemical. However, while I hope that the chemical gets rid of my chronic depression, I want to continue being mad, living life the way I dream it, and not the way other people want it to be. Do you know what exists out there, beyond the walls of Villete?” - Paulo Coelho

36. “You know all that sympathy that you feel for an abused child who suffers without a good mom or dad to love and care for them? Well, they don't stay children forever. No one magically becomes an adult the day they turn eighteen. Some people grow up sooner, many grow up later. Some never really do. But just remember that some people in this world are older versions of those same kids we cry for.” - Ashly Lorenzana

37. “...Sometimes they open it up like a package in the presence of a person they can talk to,' she said. 'Someone they can trust.' She held out her hands. 'Any person who is carrying a lot of sadness,' she said, 'needs to be able to rest sometimes, and to put it down.” - Julia Schumacher

38. “You didn't get past something like that, you go through it -- and for that reason alone, I understood more about her than she ever would have guessed.” - Jodi Picoult

39. “My stepfather, John O'Hara, was the goodest man there was. He was not a man of many words, but of carefully chosen ones. He was the one parent who didn't try to fix me. One night I sat on his lap in his chair by the woodstove, sobbing. He just held me quietly and then asked only, "What does it feel like?" It was the first time I was prompted to articulate it. I thought about it, then said, "I feel homesick." That still feels like the most accurate description - I felt homesick, but I was home.” - Sarah Silverman

40. “...the heart has no tears to give,--it drops only blood, bleeding itself away in silence.” - Harriet Beecher Stowe

41. “Depression - that limp word for the storm of black panic and half-demented malfunction - had over the years worked itself out in Charlotte's life in a curious pattern. Its onset was often imperceptible: like an assiduous housekeeper locking up a rambling mansion, it noiselessly went about and turned off, one by one, the mind's thousand small accesses to pleasure.” - Sebastian Faulks

42. “Bad enough to be ill, but to feel compelled to deny the very thing that, in its worst and most active state, defines you is agony indeed.” - Sally Brampton

43. “Master Nathaniel looked at him. The fixed stare, the slightly-open mouth, the rigid motionless body, fettered by a misery too profound for restlessness — how well he knew the state of mind these things expressed! But there must surely be relief in thus allowing the mood to mould the body's attitude to its own shape. He had no need now to ask his son for explanations. He knew so well both that sense of emptiness, that drawing in of the senses (like the antennae of some creature when danger is no longer imminent, but there), so that the physical world vanishes, while you yourself at once swell out to fill its place, and at the same time shrink to a millionth part of your former bulk, turning into a mere organ of suffering without thought and without emotions; he knew also that other phase, when one seems to be flying from days and months, like a stag from its hunters — like the fugitives, on the old tapestry, from the moon.But when it is another person who is suffering in this way, in spite of one's pity, how trivial it all seems! How certain one is of being able to expel the agony with reasoning and persuasion!” - Hope Mirrlees

44. “my mother, poor fish,wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times aweek, telling me to be happy: "Henry, smile!why don't you ever smile?"and then she would smile, to show me how, and it was thesaddest smile I ever saw” - Charles Bukowski

45. “Everyone's screaming,I try to make a sound,But no one hears me” - Simple Plan

46. “The lotus is the most beautiful flower, whose petals open one by one. But it will only grow in the mud. In order to grow and gain wisdom, first you must have the mud --- the obstacles of life and its suffering. ... The mud speaks of the common ground that humans share, no matter what our stations in life. ... Whether we have it all or we have nothing, we are all faced with the same obstacles: sadness, loss, illness, dying and death. If we are to strive as human beings to gain more wisdom, more kindness and more compassion, we must have the intention to grow as a lotus and open each petal one by one. ” - Goldie Hawn

47. “One of the terrible fallacies of contemporary psychotherapy is that if people would just say how they felt, a lot of problems could be solved. ” - Elizabeth Wurtzel

48. “There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds.” - Laurell K. Hamilton

49. “tiny: but there is the word, this word phil wrayson taught me once: weltschmerz. it's the depression you feel when the world as it is does not line up with the world as you think it should be. i live in a big goddamned weltzschermz ocean, you know? and so do you.” - David Levithan

50. “All of us have two minds, a private one, which is usually strange, I guess, and symbolic, and a public one, a social one. Most of us stream back and forth between those two minds, drifting around in our private self and then coming forward into the public self whenever we need to. But sometimes you get a little slow making the transition, you drag out the private part of your life and people know you’re doing it. They almost always catch on, knowing that someone is standing before them thinking about things that can’t be shared, like the one monkey that knows where a freshwater pond is. And sometimes the public mind is such a total bummer and the private self is alive with beauty and danger and secrets and things that don’t make any sense but that repeat and repeat and demand to be listened to, and you find it harder and harder to come forward. The pathway between those two states of mind suddenly seems very steep, a hell of a lot of work and not really worth it. Then I think it becomes a matter of what side of the great divide you get caught on. Some people get stuck on the public, approved side and they’re all right, for what it’s worth. And some people get stuck on the completely strange and private side of the divide, and that’s what we call crazy and its not really completely wrong to call it that but it doesn’t say it as it truly is. It’s more like a lack of mobility, a transportation problem, getting stuck, being the us we are in private but not stopping…” - Scott Spencer

51. “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

52. “I was sure that if I could just scale this fortress I would reach a height with a sunny blue sky and fresh air. I would stand there and experience myself as redeemable rather than ruined. I had no idea what kind of animal I was facing.If you had suggested to me at the time that my problems were due to some faulty wiring, some chemistry experiment gone wrong in my brain, I'd have said you were suggesting that I not take responsibility for my own choices. Now I know I was wrong. Now when I'm haunted by the specter of depression, I recognize it for what it is. I don't systematically dismantle my life every time depression pops out from behind a tree. But at that time, I was sure it was fixable if the world would just change faster, or if I would.” - Jillian Lauren

53. “Some people are just not meant to be in this world. It's just too much for them.” - Phoebe Stone

54. “Like antidepressants, a substantial part of the benefit of psychotherapy depends on a placebo effect, or as Moerman calls it, the meaning response. At least part of the improvement that is produced by these treatments is due to the relationship between the therapist and the client and to the client's expectancy of getting better. That is a problem for antidepressant treatment. It is a problem because drugs are supposed to work because of their chemistry, not because of the psychological factors. But it is not a problem for psychotherapy. Psychotherapists are trained to provide a warm and caring environment in which therapeutic change can take place. Their intention is to replace the hopelessness of depression with a sense of hope and faith in the future. These tasks are part of the essence of psychotherapy. The fact that psychotherapy can mobilize the meaning response - and that it can do so without deception - is one of its strengths, no one of its weaknesses. Because hopelessness is a fundamental characteristic of depression, instilling hope is a specific treatment for it it. Invoking the meaning response is essential for the effective treatment of depression, and the best treatments are those that can do this most effectively and that can do without deception.” - Irving Kirsch

55. “Many of the benefits of CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) can be obtained without going into therapy. There are a number of self-help books, CDs and computer programs that have been used to treat depression and some of these have been tested in clinical trials with positive results. I can particularly recommend these two books. One is 'Control Your Depression', the lead author of which is Peter Lewinsohn, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Oregon. ... The other book that I can recommend with confidence is 'Feeling Good' by the psychiatrist David Burns. 'Control Your Depression' emphasizes behavioral techniques like increasing pleasant activities, improving social skills and learning to relax. 'Feeling Good' puts greater emphasis on changing the way people think about themselves. But both books include both cognitive and behavioral techniques.” - Irving Kirsch

56. “I needed her to stop. Needed not to hear the pain in her voice--to see the way she was twisting the pocketbook strap. If she kept talking, she might break down and tell me everything.” - Wally Lamb

57. “If I could just write it down in a piece of paper, then maybe she could get a decent night's sleep, eat a little of her dinner. Maybe she could have a minute's worth of peace.” - Wally Lamb

58. “Anger, resentment and jealousy doesn't change the heart of others-- it only changes yours.” - Shannon Alder

59. “I enjoy almost everything. Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say “This is it”? My depression is a harassed feeling. I’m looking: but that’s not it — that’s not it. What is it? And shall I die before I find it?” - Virginia Woolf

60. “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,And Mourners to and froKept treading – treading – till it seemedThat Sense was breaking through – And when they all were seated,A Service, like a Drum – Kept beating – beating – till I thoughtMy Mind was going numb – And then I heard them lift a BoxAnd creak across my SoulWith those same Boots of Lead, again,Then Space – began to toll,As all the Heavens were a Bell,And Being, but an Ear,And I, and Silence, some strange RaceWrecked, solitary, here – And then a Plank in Reason, broke,And I dropped down, and down – And hit a World, at every plunge,And Finished knowing – then –” - Emily Dickinson

61. “It was deeply a part of Lee's kindness and understanding that man's right to kill himself is inviolable, but sometimes a friend can make it unnecessary” - John Steinbeck

62. “A game is an opportunity to focus our energy, with relentless optimism, at something we’re good at (or getting better at) and enjoy. In other words, gameplay is the direct emotional opposite of depression.” - Jane McGonigal

63. “These thoughts are depressing I know. They are depressing, I wish I was more cheerful, it is more pleasant,Also it is a duty, we should smile as well as submitting To the purpose of One Above who is experimentingWith various mixtures of human character which goes best, All is interesting for him it is exciting, but not for us. There I go again. Smile, smile, and get some work to doThen you will be practically unconscious without positively having to go.” - Stevie Smith

64. “We have a task before us which must be speedily performed. We know that it will be ruinous to make delay. The most important crisis of our life calls, trumpet-tongued, for immediate energy and action. We glow, we are consumed with eagerness to commence the work, with the anticipation of whose glorious result our whole souls are on fire. It must, it shall be undertaken to-day, and yet we put it off until to-morrow; and why? There is no answer, except that we feel perverse, using the word with no comprehension of the principle. To-morrow arrives, and with it a more impatient anxiety to do our duty, but with this very increase of anxiety arrives, also, a nameless, a positively fearful, because unfathomable, craving for delay. This craving gathers strength as the moments fly. The last hour for action is at hand. We tremble with the violence of the conflict within us, — of the definite with the indefinite — of the substance with the shadow. But, if the contest have proceeded thus far, it is the shadow which prevails, — we struggle in vain. The clock strikes, and is the knell of our welfare. At the same time, it is the chanticleer-note to the ghost that has so long overawed us. It flies — it disappears — we are free. The old energy returns. We will labor now. Alas, it is too late!” - Edgar Allan Poe

65. “Somehow however just knowing that I could fully expect unhappiness to return – if not predictably then nevertheless reliably – was strangely liberating. The point was that even chaos had a structure a beginning and eventually an end. It was possible to live through it. I’d been doing as much for twenty years.” - Caroline Kettlewell

66. “I was moving in a narrow range between busy distractedness and a pervasive sadness whose granules seemed to enter each cell, weighing it down... I ghosted between islands of anxiety... a fatigue that dulled my zest, decanted it. Sorrow felt like a marble coat I couldn’t shed.” - Diane Ackerman

67. “Man disavows, and Deity disowns me;Hell might afford my miseries a shelter;Therefore Hell keeps her ever-hungry mouths allBolted against me.Hard lot! encompassed with a thousand dangers,Weary, faint, trembling with a thousand terrors,I'm called, if vanquished, to receive a sentenceWorse than Abiram's.Him the vindictive rod of angry JusticeSent quick and howling to the centre headlong;I, fed with judgement, in a fleshy tomb, amBuried above ground.” - William Cowper

68. “Some people us language to describe the lives they lead, and other people use language to create the lives they lead.” - Steve Chandler

69. “It’s all about self-discipline. Like, self-obsession is connected completely with self-loathing, and it’s the same with, if you’ve got a weight problem. It’s all about… finding some worth in yourself, knowing that you’ve got the discipline to do it, and knowing that other people maybe can’t do it. And it’s also, I think, really connected to the fact that you almost feel, like, silent, you have no voice, you’re mute, there’s just no, you’ve got no option. Even if you could express yourself nobody would listen anyway. Things that go on inside you, there’s no other way to get rid of them.” - Richey Edwards

70. “Depression comes in bouts. Like boxing. Dad is in the blue corner.” - Joe Dunthorne

71. “One of the things that therapists do if you are suicidal, like a trick, is ask you about the future. They want to know what your plans are. Do you want to be the president? Do you want to be a rock star? They want to know if you want to live later even if you want to die now.” - Albert Borris

72. “Owen: depressed people don't have the energy to kill themselves. that's what mr clark saidOwen: he said it's not when people are depressed that you have to worry about them. it's when someone depressed suddenly has energy. that means they decided to kill themselves. to actOwen: and that makes them happy” - Albert Borris

73. “When things get unbearable, I wrap myself into a tight ball and shut my eyes. Every muscle in my body is tense. I open my eyes and I'm still where I was when I closed them to escape. Nothing's changed.” - Elizabeth Wurtzel

74. “What happened when you woke up?" "I was having a dream. I don’t know what it was, but when I woke up, I had this awful realization that I was awake. It hit me like a brick in the groin." "Like a brick in the groin, I see.""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." "And what is that nightmare, Craig?""Life." "Life is a nightmare.""Yes.” - Ned Vizzini

75. “You want to play video games twenty-four hours a day?""Or watch. I just want to not be me. Whether it's sleeping or playing video games or riding my bike or studying. Giving my brain up. That's what's important.” - Ned Vizzini

76. “The rain fell like dead bullets.” - Scott Nicholson

77. “Like Sylvia Plath, Natalie Jeanne Champagne invites you so close to the pain and agony of her life of mental illness and addiction, which leaves you gasping from shock and laughing moments later: this is both the beauty and unique nature of her storytelling. With brilliance and courage, the author's brave and candid chronicle travels where no other memoir about mental illness and addiction has gone before. The Third Sunrise is an incredible triumph and Natalie Jeanne Champagne is without a doubt the most important new voice in this genre.” - Andy Behrman

78. “An intensely gripping narrative...expertly crafted and totally addictive...a must read!” - Maggie Reese

79. “There are no windows within the dark house of depression through which to see others, only mirrors.” - Miriam Toews

80. “It was more that he did better being busy, keeping to a routine. It helped hold the black dogs of thought at bay. Also he had learned that a person could be happy with having done the best they could under the circumstances. It didn't always have to be bright and shiny and impressive to the outside observer.” - Ellen Airgood

81. “Like if Leonardo from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles started being all bummed out about everything. How were we going to kick arse if our Leonardo was wearing a black eye-band instead of a blue one?” - Dougie Poynter

82. “The lesson of the Funk Dog: “You can forget what it used to feel like to feel good about life; feeling rotten—or just a low-grad funk—seems normal and therefore acceptable. I just don’t believe that God intended for any of his creatures to be petted with sticks.” - Jill Conner Browne

83. “I think I've lost my faith and I can't stop writingbecause I don't know howmuch longer I can hold on.” - Emma Forrest

84. “He meant everything he said, when he said it. But this is his default. And it won out. Right now you're depressed about one thing. Before you were depressed about everything. These are good times for you.""I'm afraid of loving again. I'm afraid I've lost my faith.""You haven't.""The trapdoor I have in my mind? That can go to those bad places? It's almost gave way again.""You know the ways to keep it nailed shut.” - Emma Forrest

85. “Feeling sorry for myself was an art.” - Benjamin Alire Saenz

86. “If she could have died...if she could have disappeared forever...but the solid surface of things refused to dissolve around her, and her body, her hateful hermaphrodite's body, continued in its stubborn, lumpen way, to live...” - J.K. Rowling

87. “Bruce has wrestled with his moods, and a psyche genetically prone to extremes, for most of his adult life. Decades of psychotherapy helped reveal and cast light on some of his most primal traumas and conflicts, but his raw moods, and occasional descents into full-blown depression, never quite went away. "You go through periods of being good, then something stimulates it," he says. "The clock, some memory. You never know. The mind wants to link all your feelings to a cause. I'm feeling that because I'm doing this, or because that happened."Eventually Bruce realized that his worst moods had nothing to do with what was actually taking place in his life. Awful, stressful things could happen - conflicts, stress, disappointments, death - and he'd be unflappable. Then things would be peaceful and easy and he'd find himself on his knees. "You're going along fine, and then boom, it hits you. Things that just come from way down in the well. Completely noncasual, but it's part of your DNA, part of the way your body cycles."Bruce knows his particular brain chemistry will never leave him completely in the clear. "You manage it, you learn and evolve, but another recognition you gotta have is that these are the cards you were dealt," he says. "These things are never going to be out of your life. You gotta be constantly vigilant and realistic about these things.” - peter ames carlin

88. “Do research. Feed your talent. Research not only wins the war on cliche, it's the key to victory over fear and it's cousin, depression.” - Robert McKee

89. “La tristesse durera toujours.[The sadness will last forever.]” - Vincent Van Gogh

90. “Emma is not a person; Emma is a place that you get stuck in; Emma is a pain that you cannot erase.” - Justin Vernon

91. “On an incredibly simplistic level, you can think of depression as occurring when your cortex thinks an abstract thought and manages to convince the rest of the brain that this is as real as a physical stressor.” - Robert M. Sapolsky

92. “Depression is not generalized pessimism, but pessimism specific to the effects of one's own skilled action.” - Robert M. Sapolsky

93. “It felt like this was never going to end. The world wasn't going to stop crashing down until there was nothing left of me but dust.” - Keary Taylor

94. “…depressive realism. Depression is not the near death experience described by so many, [Kayla Dunn] suggests, but a rebirth in which the new psyche has removed self-delusion. Compared with so-called healthy individuals, depressives are more realistic in their worldview.” - Jan Wong

95. “It would be nice if life worked this way, stripping the dirt from our lives and sending us back out into the world clean. But some dirt is destined to lingered.” - Veronica Roth

96. “...for if we try to go on protecting them we prevent them from growing up to be ordinary, confident adults, capable of looking after themselves.” - Dorothy Rowe

97. “When a depressed person shrinks away from your touch it does not mean he is rejecting you. Rather he is protecting you from the foul, destructive evil which he believes is the essence of his being and which he believes can injure you.” - Dorothy Rowe

98. “I didn't answer. Just shook my head and let the tears roll. "I just want it to go away. I just want all the drama to stop. Nobody would believe me anyway," I whispered. "Nobody would care.” - Jennifer Brown

99. “Everyone's moving on without me, into a world I don't understand.” - Sophie Kinsella

100. “When people call it that I always get pissed off because I always think depression sounds like you just get like really sad, you get quiet and melancholy and just like sit quietly by the window sighing or just lying around. A state of not caring about anything. A kind of blue kind of peaceful state.” - David Foster Wallace

101. “It's so hard to find the place somewhere in the middle of the best and worst I've felt.” - Ashly Lorenzana

102. “We may seem fine, even when the pain remains right there beneath our surface.” - Ashly Lorenzana

103. “To fall in the void as I fell: none of you knows what that means… I went down into the void, to the most absolute bottom conceivable, and once there I saw that the extreme limit must have been much, much farther below, very remote, and I went on falling, to reach it.” - Italo Calvino

104. “By the time it has gotten dressed, it has become he; has become already more or less George — though still not the whole George they demand and are prepared to recognize. Those who call him on the phone at this hour of the morning would be bewildered, maybe even scared, if they could realize what this three-quarters-human thing is what they are talking to. But, of course, they never could—its voice's mimicry of their George is nearly perfect.” - Christopher Isherwood

105. “Znati kako je biti sam u mraku, u mracnoj sobi. A samo jedan mali prozorcic je tamo, tamo na onom zidu. Gde i onu jarku zutu svetlost presecaju niti metalne, koje nisu bas slabasnog karaktera.Eh. Pa nije svako te srece da okusi tugu.” - Марко Соколовић

106. “Lately, though, he'd just been tired in general. Tired of people. Tired of books and TV and the nightly news and songs on the radio he'd heard years before and hadn't liked much in the first place. He was tired of his clothes and tired of his hair and tired of other people's clothes and other people's hair. He was tired of wishing things made sense. He'd gotten to a point where he was pretty sure he'd heard everything anyone had to say on any given subject and so it seemed he spent his days listening to old recordings of things that hadn't seemed fresh the first time he'd heard them.Maybe he was simply tired of life, of the absolute effort it took to get up every goddamned morning and walk out with into the same fucking day with only slight variations in the weather and food.He wondered if this was what clinical depression felt like, a total numbness, a weary lack of hope.” - Dennis Lehane

107. “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

108. “A friend called the other day.'How are you?' she said.The sun was shining, the sky a merciless blue. It was only eleven in the morning but I had been awake since three twenty. I was in bed because, as usual, I could think of nowhere else to go. I said that I was feeling low. Low is the depressive's euphemism for despair.She said: 'How can you be depressed on a day like this?'I wanted to say: 'If I had flu, would you ask me how I could be sick on a day like this?” - Sally Brampton

109. “If you put the wrong foods in your body, you are contaminated and dirty and your stomach swells. Then the voice says, Why did you do that? Don't you know better? Ugly and wicked, you are disgusting to me.” - Bethany Pierce

110. “Moisture falls from the sky, cleansing the world and sustaining precious life. But it's the gloom—the cold, dark air—that receives notice. We fail to see the miracle of raindrops through our own tears.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

111. “The English language lacks the words to mourn an absence. For the loss of a parent, grandparent, spouse, child or friend, we have all manner of words and phrases, some helpful some not. Still we are conditioned to say something, even if it is only “I’m sorry for your loss.” But for an absence, for someone who was never there at all, we are wordless to capture that particular emptiness. For those who deeply want children and are denied them, those missing babies hover like silent ephemeral shadows over their lives. Who can describe the feel of a tiny hand that is never held?” - Laura Bush

112. “Mary Lou suddenly realizes that Mack calls the temperature number because he is afraid to talk on the telephone, and by listening to a recording, he doesn’t have to reply. It’s his way of pretending that he’s involved. He wants it to snow so he won’t have to go outside. He is afraid of what might happen. But it occurs to her that what he must really be afraid of is women. Then Mary Lou feels so sick and heavy with her power over him that she wants to cry. She sees the way her husband is standing there in a frozen pose. Mack looks as though he could stand there all night with the telephone receiver against his ear.” - Bobbie Ann Mason

113. “My mom was sitting at the kitchen table. She’d set her coffee down, making a noise that made me look her way. I’d begun to notice her less and less often, like her colors were fading and blending in with walls. She was shrinking. Or maybe her sphere of influence in the family was shrinking. My dad glanced at her, too, and then wrote something on a napkin. He slid it across the counter to me—Don’t worry. Come home in one piece. Have fun and act like a sixteen-year-old for a change.” - Laura Anderson Kurk

114. “For action, whatever its immediate purpose, also implies relief at doing something, anything, and the joy of exertion. This is the optimism that is inherent in, and proper and indispensable to action, for without it nothing would ever be undertaken. It in no way suppresses the critical sense or clouds the judgment. On the contrary this optimism sharpens the wits, it creates a certain perspective and, at the last moment, lets in a ray of perpendicular light which illuminates all one's previous calculations, cuts and shuffles them and deals you the card of success, the winning number.” - Blaise Cendrars

115. “Happiness is only for a short time then comes sadness which proceeds on overtime” - A.N. Knight

116. “Anna Petrovna: Do you know what, Kolya? Try and sing, laugh, get angry, as you once did... You stay in, we'll laugh and drink fruit liqueur and we'll drive away your depression in a flash. I'll sing if you like. Or else let's go and sit in the dark in your study as we used to, and you'll tell me about your depression... You have such suffering eyes. I'll look into them and cry, and we'll both feel better.” - Anton Chekhov

117. “However, robust evidence shows that people systematically overestimate the probability of positive future contingencies, and underestimate the probability of negative ones — only those who are depressed or dysphoric come to accurate assessments.” - Daniel Nettle