James Howard Kunstler Quotes

Underneath our nice, friendly facades there is great unease. If I were to scratch below the surface of anyone I would find fear, pain, and anxiety running amok. We all have ways to cover them up. We overeat, over-drink, overwork; we watch too much television.

I was so unhappy during the last months on 'Bonanza' I was really neurotic. I was anti-social.

Modern man is probably a more humiliated and depressed creature than he dares to know.

During the lifetime of Japan I became very neurotic, very paranoid.

Of course there are times when I think, 'I'd be better out of this.'

I have a lot of bad days.

Worry - a God, invisible but omnipotent. It steals the bloom from the cheek and lightness from the pulse; it takes away the appetite, and turns the hair gray.

You know sometimes when you're in a really bad mood and you're not sure why? That's how I get sometimes.

I read 'The Bell Jar' as an adolescent and, like most teenagers, had no problem identifying with a young woman who had everything going for her - looks, talent, opportunity, with her 'whole life ahead of her,' yadda, yadda, yadda - yet was spiraling into misery.

I don't know if this is the same for everybody, but for me, sometimes I get depressed, where I wake up and I can feel a change. Something went wrong, and it's almost like you feel tingly in a way where you know something is off, and from that point forward, this anxiety kicks in where you just worry and worry... this cyclical, terrible nature.

I was not a happy teenager in the slightest.

As a teenager, even as a younger girl, I had some depression but no one really noticed that it was depression nor did I know in those days that that's what it was but I did feel different from other people.

I think my real depressions started when I was about 16 and doing The Patty Duke Show. I would go to bed at about 10 o'clock on a Friday night and not get up again until 6:30 Monday morning.

I'm afraid of happy people. They're chemically unbalanced.

Any time I got in emotional turmoil, I felt sick all the time, like at any minute I would die.

There are days when I should be writing, and I am so tired that I can't. And the fatigue also affects my emotions, making me not even care about writing. There are days when I wake up so angry I can barely speak, and also days when I am so sad.

I have my own demons and dark moods. It's weird.

At times, I feel overwhelmed and my depression leads me into darkness.

I suffer depression only in the sense that I am a writer. We don't have proper jobs to go to. We are on our own all day. Show me a writer who doesn't get depressed: who has a completely stable mood. They'd be a garage mechanic or something.

I can work myself up into a fearful, paralyzing state of mind that can last for days, weeks even months where I feel mad, totally isolated and alone, overwhelmed and completely out of control.

Perhaps not being very self-aware in the past masked depression. I think I was confused. I think I was immature. I think I probably was quite depressed.

In all of my looking at happiness, one thing I noticed right away is that the opposite of happiness isn't unhappiness or even depression, it's anxiety. It is something that can constantly block our happiness, or our chance to reach that sort of meditative state in our work or our home lives.

I don't know what anxiety is like anymore.

Despair often breeds disease.

I was really worried that sitting at home by myself in front of a computer was going to make me crazy.