Edmond de Goncourt Quotes

I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind - and to work some of those contradictions out for myself.

We've all got darkness inside us. And I've got quite a lot of darkness.

I'm an extremist, I have to deal with my own extreme personality, and I walk the fine line of wanting to die and wanting to be the ruler of it all.

This is what I am. I have periods of enormous self-destructive depression, where I go completely off my trolley and lose all sight of reality and reason.

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

From the wrestling of his own soul with the great enemy, comes that depth and mystery which startles us in Hamlet.

Sufferers of depression have 'episodes' the same way those who suffer from multiple sclerosis do. It comes, wipes the floor with you, and then somehow returns you to the world. But it comes back.

I don't think any human being/artist is 100% emotionally stable, based on the human condition and our emotions that relate to it.

Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives.

It is not seen as insane when a fighter, under an attack that will inevitable lead to his death, chooses to take his own life first. In fact, this act has been encouraged for centuries, and is accepted even now as an honorable reason to do the deed. How is it any different when you are under attack by your own mind?

I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.

My demons and I are not compatible. We never have been and never will be.

I have moments of darkness, of anger, and moments of rage. They do creep up at the most inopportune times. Not to recognize that in my music would give people a sense of sainthood that I don't necessarily have or even want to have.

As a kid, I was depressed and riddled with anxiety. The bottom dropped out when I was 19.

There's something messed up with my brain.

For thousands of years, we have gained the power to control the world outside us but not to control the world inside. You could stop a river from flowing, but you could not stop your body from becoming old. You could kill mosquitoes, but you could not kill annoying thoughts buzzing inside your head.

I have never met anyone who wasn't confused inside.

Every soul is a battlefield.

Anxiety was born in the very same moment as mankind. And since we will never be able to master it, we will have to learn to live with it—just as we have learned to live with storms.

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 have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons, knocking on a door. It opens. I've been knocking from the inside.

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.

Neurosis is an inner cleavage-the state of being at war with oneself.

Inside every sane person there's a madman struggling to get out," said the shopkeeper. "That's what I've always thought. No one goes mad quicker than a totally sane person.

When the beginnings of self destruction enter the heart, it seems no bigger than a grain of sand.