Susanna Kaysen Quotes

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?

I never define depression, clinical or otherwise. It's the basis of most life, it seems to me, in the modern world. We're all depressed.

I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away - yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth's orbit ——————————— and wanted to shoot myself.

Despondency is not religion, whatever else it may be.

It was such a depressing time. I didn't look very depressed, maybe, but it was really dire. I made a conscious decision not to stop, but it could have gone the other way.

I was tired and crazy and rushed, and every time I boarded a plane, I wanted the plane to crash. I envied people dying of cancer. I hated my life. I was tired and bored with my job and my furniture, and I couldn’t see any way to change things. Only end them.

That's the whole trouble. When you're feeling very depressed, you can't even think.

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

One of the things that frequently gets lost in descriptions of depression is that the depressed person often knows that it is a ludicrous condition to feel so disabled by the ordinary business of quotidian life.

There's definitely sadness happening in this band. I get melancholy every day about things.

'Melancholy' is prettier than 'depression'; it connotes a kind of nocturnal grace. Makes one feel more innocently beleaguered.

I'm always sad.

Depression is about as close as you get to somewhere between dead and alive, and it's the worst.

It was one of those times when you can feel the air in a room. Everything stood still. I can remember the T-shirt I was wearing and the bag I was carrying. I don't think I breathed for 15 minutes. It was a devastating moment. They said they wanted me to experience more things. OK. I began contemplating things. Maybe I should take LSD or become a hooker. I left Juilliard and was just meandering and drifting for a while. Thank God I had support from my family and close friends. Bad times.

Do I want to die from the inside out or the outside in?

My twenties were a write-off. It's a cruel illness, because you can't see it and you can hide it so well.

It is a time when one's spirit is subdued and sad, one knows not why; when the past seems a storm-swept desolation, life a vanity and a burden, and the future but a way to death.

I'm really quite bipolar, and the depressed times, when everything felt like night, sometimes you get to such a low point that you physically beat at it until it bleeds - as you would say - bleeds till sunshine. You get to a point where you say, 'I will not take it anymore! I'm gonna do something drastic if I stay this depressed. I've got to break out of there!'

A terrible depression yesterday. Visions of my life petering out into a kind of soft-brained stupor from lack of use.

Sometimes I wish I had an easy answer for why I'm depressed.

Your melancholy. Or depression. Along with nine-tenths of the afflictions I've studied, diagnosed, attempted to treat. Call them whatever you like, but they're just different names for loneliness. That's what lets the darkness in. That's what you have to fight.

Doubt is thought's despair; despair is personality's doubt. . . . Doubt and despair . . . belong to completely different spheres; different sides of the soul are set in motion. . . . Despair is an expression of the total personality, doubt only of thought.

Very depressed today. Unable to write a thing. Menacing gods. I feel outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness.

And Levin, a happy father and a man in perfect health, was several times so near suicide that he hid the cord, lest he be tempted to hang himself, and was afraid to go out with his gun, for fear of shooting himself. But Levin did not shoot himself, and did not hang himself; he went on living.

It is thus that the few rare lucid well-disposed people who have had to struggle on the earth find themselves at certain hours of the day or night in the depth of certain authentic and waking nightmare states, surrounded by the formidable suction, the formidable oppression of a kind of civic magic which will soon be seen appearing openly in social behavior.