Melvyn Bragg Quotes

I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.

I'm very emotional; I think I may go mad in several years' time.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I hear voices in my mind and you're worried that you're the freak,” he laughed.

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.

There's nothing wrong with me...except acute chronic fear.

They must take me for a fool, or even worse, a lunatic. And no wonder ,for I am so intensely conscious of my misfortune and my misery is so overwhelming that I am powerless to resist it and am being turned into stone, devoid of all knowledge or feeling.

For years my life alternated between depression and acute anxiety. One night I woke up in a state of dread and intense fear, more intense than I had ever experienced before. Life seemed meaningless, barren, hostile. It became so unbearable that suddenly the thought came into my mind, I cannot live with myself any longer.

Depression...so mysteriously painful and elusive.

my brain had begun to endure its familiar siege: panic and dislocation, and a sense that my thought processes were being engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world.

People who are extremely inside their head, like he was, are caught in a neurosis that goes round and round. Then something will hook them and take them to their end and they can't control it.

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.

My soul is dark with stormy riot: directly traced over to diet.

You never really shake depression and that's a tough road you have to deal with.

Nine men in ten are would be suicides.

... madness entered my veins.

There's something messed up with my brain.

Like Jesus, every human being has enough memories in his past to occupy his time and thoughts continually. It is not the remembrance of these incidents but the reliving of them that creates havoc in our souls.

I've always had mental problems, so to speak.

In Paris on a chilling evening late in October of 1985 I first became fully aware that the struggle with the disorder in my mind - a struggle which had engaged me for several months - might have a fatal outcome.

Manic depression's touching my soul. I know what I want, but I just don't know how to go about getting it.

In my view, suicide is not really a wish for life to end.' What is it then?' It is the only way a powerless person can find to make everybody else look away from his shame. The wish is not to die, but to hide.