“But it's precisely in this cold, loathsome half-despair, half-belief, in this deliberate burying of yourself underground for forty years out of sheer pain, in this assiduously constructed, and yet somewhat dubious hopelessness, in all this poision of unfulfilled desires turned inward, this fever of vacillations, of resolutions adopted for eternity, and of repentances a moment later that you find the very essence of that strange, sharp pleasure.”

“It's precisely in despair that you find the most intense pleasure, especially if you are already powerfully conscious of the hopelessness of your predicament.”

“It's in despair that you find the sharpest pleasures, particularly when you are most acutely aware of the hopelessness of your position.”

“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.”

“And yet, and yet, in these our ghostly lives,Half night, half day, half sleeping, half awake,How if our waking life, like that of sleep,Be all a dream in that eternal lifeTo which we wake not till we sleep in death”

“...the past: It drifts, it gathers. If you are not careful, it will bury you. This is half the reason for the cure: It clean-sweeps; it makes the past, and all its pain, distant, like the barest impression on sparkling glass.”