Neal Shusterman Quotes

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

I felt nobody would understand what was going on in my mind.

I felt like I was the only person on the planet with this 'thing called depression', and I remember being frightened. I was knocked out and dopey, and I cried all of the time.

When people are acutely depressed, many of them seem to want to hide.

For every single person who's struggled with depression, there's this weird part of your brain that tells you you're the only person who's ever felt like that, even if you know for a fact it's not true.

They put me in solitary confinement, and although I went on to do 8,755 days of solitary in total, the first two were the hardest. I almost went mad, beating my head against the wall.

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.

Just leave me alone. I'm not myself. I'm falling apart, and I don't want you here.

What am I always going to do? I'm going to go home and freak out.I'm going to sit with my family and try not to talk about myself and what's wrong. Im going to try and eat. Then I'm going to try and sleep. I dread it. I can't eat and I can't sleep. I'm not doing well in terms of being a functional human, you know?

... you looked around and saw everybody either married or busy and happy and thinking and being creative, and you felt scared, sick, lethargic, worst of all, not wanting to cope. You saw visions of yourself in a straightjacket, and a drain on the family, murdering your mother in actuality, killing the edifice of love and respect built up over the years in the hearts of other people.

I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over.

When you're too mad and too rattled to see straight, you're bound to make mistakes. You can't go on and on for years being miserable about a situation and not have it change you. You get so you can't stand yourself.

It's the boredom that kills you. You read until you're tired of that. You do crossword puzzles until you're tired of that. This is torture. This is mental torture.

Sometimes I think I'm the craziest person on the planet.

I realize that I live on the bubble of insanity. I feel the weight of human suffering, loneliness and despair on me all the time. It's not getting easier; if anything, it's always right on the edge of my skin.

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

I didn't really want to live, so anything that was an investment in time made me angry... but also I just felt sad. When the hopelessness is hurting you, it's the fixtures and fittings that finish you off.

Like everyone else, I've had moments when I've felt that I've been losing my grip.

It's often difficult for those who are lucky enough to have never experienced what true depression is to imagine a life of complete hopelessness, emptiness and fear.

I hate to sound this way but, 'Why me? Why me with dementia?'

We all have times when we go home at night and pull out our hair and feel misunderstood and lonely and like we're falling. I think the brain is such that there is always going to be something missing.

In my own mind, I was sort of a desperate kid.

I cry all the time.

Among young people, often a key factor in them committing suicide is the trauma of transient relationships. They throw themselves into a friendship or network of friendships, then it collapses and they're desolate.