Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

I've had days when I go in my bedroom for 24 hours at a time. I call them my Cilla Black days, and they're literally black days. It's like the old Boomtown Rats song 'I Don't Like Mondays.' You just want to shut the whole day down.

I've suffered through depression and anxiety my entire life.

I believe that everyone experiences depression to some degree at some time in their lives. And there are probably millions of people who live with a low level of sadness and heaviness day in and day out.

I couldn't deal with a normal life.

I personally dealt with a lot of depression and anxiety in my life.

I had gone through a really rough patch in my life, struggling with anxiety and depression for the first time ever, and it was totally new to me. I really had no idea what was going on, and it was all I could think about, so it was all I could write about.

When I stopped wrestling, I literally lay in bed for two weeks.

There was one day where I had to be hysterical all day, then of course it's going to affect you. You're going to go home and feel drained, or feel like you need to let off steam.

You might find it difficult to see anything but your own sadness, the way smoke can cover a landscape so that all anyone can see is black. You may find that if someone pours water all over you, you are damp and distracted, but not cured of your sadness, the way a fire department can douse a fire but never recover what has been burnt down.

There are some days when I can do my thing and be in the world and walk around, and it's fine. And then there are other days where it's totally not fine, and I want to crawl into a hole and die. And it's the most invasive and worst.

I've definitely had times in my life where I've been depressed and not able to do anything at all.

I think I ran so hard and so fast, in a lot of ways, from my life and I kind of took a fall. It was like - what do they call it? - post-traumatic stress syndrome.

I have had issues with depression all my life, and it's probably true to say there was a tendency towards it even when I was very young, during my schooldays. There was often - and this is quite common with comics - a sense of not feeling as if I belonged anywhere.

Cutting, and suicide, two very different symptoms of the same problem, are gaining on us. I personally don't know a single person who doesn't know at least two of these victims personally.

People respond differently to people who are grieving. They reach out. But depression is so very isolating. It's hard to explain to anyone who has never been depressed how isolating it is. Grief comes and goes, but depression is unremitting.

Depression, if it's an unconsciously elected experience, is a luxury.

It is always consoling to think of suicide: in that way one gets through many a bad night.

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

I'm just sittin here trying not to be unhappy.

There was a time when I was 19 when I really, really, really thought I was going crazy. I was exhausted and going through a terrible depression.

Depression is so smart - it uses all your references and patterns.

I've read a couple of things that I was sort of close to having a nervous breakdown. But I don't think I was. I was very, very tired. It was a really difficult time.

Grief comes and goes, but depression is unremitting.

From 1994 to 1997, I did nothing. I slept and slept and slept. If I was awake, I had to deal with things, I had to do things. In order to avoid that, I would just stay in bed.

I can certainly see how people are overcome by depression.