top of page
Depression Quotes


"Depression is the inability to construct a future."


"Depression is something that makes you lose your sight."


"This is what I am. I have periods of enormous self-destructive depression, where I go completely off my trolley and lose all sight of reality and reason."


"My recovery from manic depression has been an evolution, not a sudden miracle."


"Instead of seeing depression as a dysfunction, it is a functioning phenomenon. It stops you cold, sets you down, makes you damn miserable."


"It's like you asked me about the depression thing: you grope towards an understanding of whatever it is your going through, and it's not personal, there are forces in play around you, and you seek to understand them and that way you can go on."


"Not since the Depression has the state been this dry, have our rivers been this low, our water table this low, and our reservoirs this low."


"I've had this problem since I was in my 20s. They don't call it manic depression anymore. They call it a bipolar disorder, and I'm a Type 2."


"I, I don't think anybody's continually happy, uh, except idiots, you know. You know, you have to have little moments of depression."


"I imagine there's a market for total depression. I grew up on George Jones and that really dark stuff."


"Our ages ranged from 22, down to 18, and we had a 6 month contract to go to Bogata, Columbia. And of course, it was during the depression, we were still with our parents, and things were still pretty tough on them back in the United States."


"It was a lack of system that made the '30s Depression as inevitable as all others previously suffered."


"I was tired and crazy and rushed, and every time I boarded a plane, I wanted the plane to crash. I envied people dying of cancer. I hated my life. I was tired and bored with my job and my furniture, and I couldn't see any way to change things.Only end them."


"I buried my head under the darkness of the pillow and pretended it was night. I couldn't see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to."


"If I had not been already been meditating, I would certainly have had to start. I've treated my own depression for many years with exercise and meditation, and I've found that to be a tremendous help."


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


"Depression is close to me, but suicide hasn't been."


"Well, I did know - but I just wanted the day to pass and the next day to come and then I wanted that one to pass. It was a horrible cycle. I felt so close to having to pack the game in."


"This story ["The Depressed Person"] was the most painful thing I ever wrote. It's about narcissism, which is a part of depression. The character has traits of myself. I really lost friends while writing on that story, I became ugly and unhappy and just yelled at people. The cruel thing with depression is that it's such a self-centered illness - Dostoevsky shows that pretty good in his "Notes from Underground". The depression is painful, you're sapped/consumed by yourself; the worse the depression, the more you just think about yourself and the stranger and repellent you appear to others."


"You largely constructed your depression. It wasn't given to you. Therefore, you can deconstruct it."


"I'm the only person of distinction who has ever had a depression named for him."


"Lost serie are full of depression I think or there is some kind of like this... I don't know up to where I could get... but I will try my best."


"When I was in Philadelphia during the Depression in 1930 or '31, I got a very sad job as a night watchman in a garage. The cars in the garage had been abandoned by their owners, since they had lost their jobs and couldn't keep up the payments."


"It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed ... If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything except that pain, a clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting her cell by cell."


"Coming down off crack is like the worst depression. The worst."


"In addition to my other numerous acquaintances, I have one more intimate confidant. My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known - no wonder, then, that I return the love."


"I want to escape from myself. For when I do start up and stare myself seedily in the face, as happens to be my case at present, my blankness is inconceivable--indescribable--my misery amazing."


"We all know pain doesn't exist without some coexisting depression."


"The typical image of a depressed, lazy and tired person is someone hunched over and inert. Often, the assumption is that if one had more enthusiasm and inspiration, he would then stand up straight and move. In many cases, this equation is backward. But, as with everything related to one's physicality, balance is the key. An overly erect and rigid posture may convey confidence and power to some, but it also causes a subtle accumulation of tension and rigidity on various levels, including psychological and emotional."


"We'll take up where we left off, Esther', she had said, with her sweet martyr's smile. 'We'll act as if all this were a bad dream.' A bad dream. To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.A bad dream. I remembered everything."


"Bad thing upon bad thing upon bad thing until you can't take anymore, and then it's off to the nearest multistory car park in the family hatchback with a length of rubber tubing. Surely that's fair enough? Surely the coroner's report should read, "He took his own life after sober and careful contemplation of the fucking shambles it had become."


"In the Depression we had to divert corn acreage."


"I lived in a really dark place. I wasn't safe in my own mind. I woke up every morning hoping to die and then spent the rest of the day wondering if maybe I was already dead because I couldn't even tell the difference."


"Much of what we called "depression" was really dissatisfaction, a result of setting a bar impossibly high or expecting treasures we weren't willing to work for."


"The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower."


"I knew I should be grateful to Mrs Guinea, only I couldn't feel a thing. If Mrs Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn't have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat - on the deck of a ship or a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air."


"Once I had been introduced to depression, I realized if I wanted to help my friend and preserve our friendship, I needed to understand what the illness was all about."


"He was so depressed, he tried to commit suicide by inhaling next to an Armenian."


"My father was always depressed. When he was home and sober, he was mostly in his room."


"There isn't any doubt I'm stuck in stress and depression."



"Though the darkness sometimes lifted just enough so I could construe my surroundings, familiar shapes solidifying like bedroom furniture at dawn, my relief was never more than temporary because somehow the full morning never came, things always went black before I could orient myself and there I was again with ink poured in my eyes, guttering around in the dark."


"Lucas felt uncommonly depressed and careless. Drunkenness, in a man like August Hay, melts the restraints on cheerfulness. On the contrary with Lucas: he kept up courage consciously. Sap his mind, and the lid was lifted from a cesspool of muddy colors."
bottom of page