“Somehow, like so many people who get depressed, we felt our depressions were more complicated and existentially based than they actually were.”

“If people could just understand how it actually felt to be depressed, obsessed, frightened, out of control, maybe they’d be more tolerant, more understanding.”

“There is no point treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, 'There now, hang on, you'll get over it.' Sadness is more or less like a head cold- with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.”

“If we were never depressed we should not be alive; it is the nature of a crystal never to be depressed.”

“I was so scared to give up depression, fearing that somehow the worst part of me was actually all of me. ”

“The rudeness of many Americans depressed him, a rudeness based on a solid ignorance of the whole concept of manners, and on the proposition that for social purposes, all people are more or less equal and interchangeable.”