Tao Lin Quotes

The gloom encroaches upon my mind, and my heart flutters like a bird held fast in a fist.

I've never had a person come to me and say, 'I want to take down this person.' They come and say, 'I need help. This thing is killing me. It's weighing me down. It's sitting in the pit of my stomach.'

Everyone has something wrong. And for a while, her heart just sort of flat lined.

Look at it this way: There are many here among us for whom the life force is best represented by the livid twitching of one tortured nerve, or even a full-scale anxiety attack. I do not subscribe to this point of view 100 percent, but I understand it, have lived it. Thus the shriek, the caterwaul, the chainsaw gnarlgnashing, the yowl and the whizz that decapitates may be reheard by the adventurous or emotionally damaged as mellifluous bursts of unarguable affirmation.

My heart is heavy, she thought. It’s not just a saying. It is what is—heavy, a great stone lodged in my breast, pressing down my whole being. How can I even stand straight and look out upon the world? I am doubled over into myself and, for all the weight, find only emptiness.

Depression - that limp word for the storm of black panic and half-demented malfunction - had over the years worked itself out in Charlotte's life in a curious pattern. Its onset was often imperceptible: like an assiduous housekeeper locking up a rambling mansion, it noiselessly went about and turned off, one by one, the mind's thousand small accesses to pleasure.

He thought that he was sick in his heart if you could be sick in that place.

My heart was broken and my head was just barely inhabitable

I can hear him weeping but I don't care. They probably won't even bother to question her, she's so far gone. Gone right off the deep end years ago in her Games. There's a good chance I'm headed in the same direction. Maybe I'm already going crazy and no one has the heart to tell me. I feel crazy enough.

But he [Depression] just gives me that dark smile, settles into my favorite chair, puts his feet on my table and lights a cigar, filling the place with his awful smoke. Loneliness watches and sighs, then climbs into my bed and pulls the covers over himself, fully dressed, shoes and all. He's going to make me sleep with him again tonight, I just know it.

I'll never forget how the depression and loneliness felt good and bad at the same time. Still does.

Elaine is just in pain. I think Elaine has become very, very sad woman. She is someone who is in deep need of many hours of analysis and I like to think that I'm not that type of person.

The root of the problem I have is anxiety, and it's all derived from something - I'm just going to say it, some kind of sadness. It manifests in so many different ways and it affects people differently.

I hit my head against the wall because I don't want to know all the terrible things that I know about. I don't want to feel all these wretched things, but they're in me already. If I don't get rid of them, I'm not ever going to feel anything else.

Mix an anorexic body with a heart made of pure fire and you are going to go with a savagery that's hard to explain.

When you commit your life to something and it doesn't work out, it is a tough place to be. Suicide can be the spiritual reprieve of a faithless person. I knew I could always just end it, and there was solace in that.

Melancholy is the nurse of frenzy.

She used to tell me that she couldn't feel the sunlight anymore, not even when she was standing in it, not even when it was hot on her cheeks

I feel my heart ache, but I've forgotten what that feeling means.

Delia's arms were inscribed with a grid of self- inflicted wounds, an intricate text of self-loathing

This is an hour of history that troubles our minds and hurts our hearts.

I am unable to describe exactly what is the matter with me; now and then there are horrible fits of anxiety, apparently without cause, or otherwise a feeling of emptiness and fatigue in the head.

They always call depression the blues, but I would have been happy to waken to a periwinkle outlook. Depression to me is urine yellow, washed out, exhausted miles of weak piss.

She'd never imagined it like this-when she thought of someone (a woman like herself)losing her mind, she'd imagined shrieks and wails, hallucinations; but at that moment it had seemed clear that there was another way, far quieter; a way that was numb and hopeless, flat, so much so that an emotion as strong as sorrow would have been a relief.

Can’t sleep ‘cause all the dirt make my heart hurt