Hector Berlioz Quotes

Choking with dry tears and raging, raging, raging at the absolute indifference of nature and the world to the death of love, the death of hope and the death of beauty, I remember sitting on the end of my bed, collecting these pills and capsules together and wondering why, why when I felt I had so much to offer, so much love, such outpourings of love and energy to spend on the world, I was incapable of being offered love, giving it or summoning the energy with which I knew I could transform myself and everything around me.

... 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.

The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.

I am now a man of despair, rejected, abandoned, shut up in this iron cage from which there is no escape.

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

Living, it's awful for me.

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

I was so broken when I did the first record. I was living in my parents' basement, I didn't know anyone. I was broken-hearted and writing this really dark record. I was at the bottom of a well.

I understand the power of sorrow, and I understand how far it can take us from ourselves if we let it.

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.

For now they kill me with a living death.

I felt myself in a solitude so frightful that I contemplated suicide. What held me back was the idea that no one, absolutely no one, would be moved by my death, that I would be even more alone in death than in life.

...but the truth is that I don't feel like I can carry anyone but myself right now. The streets are empty. I am empty. Or, no--I am full of pain. It's my life that's empty.

Losing my mind From this hollow in my heart

You have left me so long to struggle against death, alone, that I feel and see only death! I feel like death!

Hell is not in torture; Hell is in an empty heart.

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

I rode all day. I cried all night. The moon didn’t glow. The sun didn’t rise. A comet blazed Between my eyes. West and South, Wind and rain. Every way is Just the same. Pray give me a box To hide inside. Pray give me a spade To dig my own grave.

No one who had never been depressed like me could imagine that the pain could get so bad that death became a star to hitch up to, a fantasy of peace someday which seemed better than any life with all this noise in my head.

This affliction--hope--is so cruel and stubborn, I believe it will kill me

Oh! Stars and clouds and winds, ye are all about to mock me; if ye really pity me, crush sensation and memory; let me become as nought; but if not, depart, depart, and leave me in darkness.

I can't read or sleep. Without hope or youth or money I sit constantly wishing I were dead.