Herta Muller Quotes

Grief comes and goes, but depression is unremitting.

And so I leave this world, where the heart must either break or turn to lead (suicide note)

Depression is a feeling without a cause. Mourning has a cause.

People die because they find living too painful.

I actually found it very moving how destructive depression is. I was really saddened by this burden people have to handle.

Emptiness will always cripple me.

I'm broken from the inside. The depression that has slowly eaten away at me has finally consumed me, and I couldn't beat it.

During depression the world disappears. Language itself. One has nothing to say. Nothing. No small talk, no anecdotes. Nothing can be risked on the board of talk. Because the inner voice is so urgent in its own discourse: How shall I live? How shall I manage the future? Why should I go on?

The healthy can't understand the emptied, the broken.

But those with shattered souls find it very difficult to speak.

Very slowly he turned his head back to look at Shmuel, who wasn't crying anymore, merely staring at the floor and looking as if he was trying to convince his soul not to live inside his tiny body anymore, but to slip away and sail to the door and rise up into the sky, gliding through the clouds until it was very far away.'' -The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

Sometimes, I get so consumed by depression that it is hard to believe that the whole world doesn't stop and suffer with me.

Misery pulls away the brackets of life leaving you to free fall.

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.

I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.

One of the things that happens to people in grief is they secretly think they're crazy, because they realize they are thinking things that don't make sense.

I really wanted to die at certain periods in my life.

The problem is, when I talk about heartbreak or whatever, people want to melt it down to some break-up of a relationship, but it's not about that. If you're a sensitive person, just stepping outside can be heartbreaking.

My nightmare is that I don't want to be OK.

Victims always feel alone and helpless.

Sometimes my heart hurts so much, I beat it with my fists. I try to run. But you cannot run from this. It waits for you. Even when you think you have escaped it, it is there.

Living, it's awful for me.

I can't even say what my greatest fear is because I, I can't even imagine. Being without my family... I can't even say it because it makes me cry.

Here is the tragedy: when you are the victim of depression, not only do you feel utterly helpless and abandoned by the world, you also know that very few people can understand, or even begin to believe, that life can be this painful. There is nothing I can think of that is quite as isolating as this.

I can feel myself dying inside.