John D. MacDonald Quotes

I don't know as I am fit for anything and I have thought that I could wish to die young and let the remembrance of me and my faults perish in the grave rather than live, as I fear I do, a trouble to everyone.... Sometimes I could not sleep and have groaned and cried till midnight.

When even despair ceases to serve any creative purpose, then surely we are justified in suicide.

Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness.

The root of the problem I have is anxiety, and it's all derived from something - I'm just going to say it, some kind of sadness. It manifests in so many different ways and it affects people differently.

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

When you commit your life to something and it doesn't work out, it is a tough place to be. Suicide can be the spiritual reprieve of a faithless person. I knew I could always just end it, and there was solace in that.

How could you not want to draw breath one more day? How could your own life be such a cheap commodity? But then I started to understand: when your existence is hell, death must be heaven.

It's very hard, feeling that you're no more than a piece of unwanted furniture in this world.

They always call depression the blues, but I would have been happy to waken to a periwinkle outlook. Depression to me is urine yellow, washed out, exhausted miles of weak piss.

Loneliness is something you can't walk away from.

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 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.

...too much sadness hath congealed your blood,And melancholy is the nurse of frenzy.

The various forms of despair at the various stations on the road.

Last time I talked to her she didn't sound like herself. She's depressed. It's awful what happens when people run out of money. They start thinking they're no good.

She felt worthless and hollow. There was no hope of fixing this. And when hope is gone, time is punishment.

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 feel dead, wasted, awful, broken and useless. It's not the kind of feeling you forget.

And so I leave this world, where the heart must either break or turn to lead (suicide note)

Discouragement is simply the despair of wounded self-love.

When the suicide arrived at the sky, the people there asked him: "Why?" He replied: "Because no one admired me.

Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.

My own life was filled with so much love and joy that when depression struck, it was like a prison door slamming shut and I was being placed in an isolation cell. No one else could possibly be feeling what I was. I hated my depression and all of its symptoms.

Depression can seem worse than terminal cancer, because most cancer patients feel loved and they have hope and self-esteem.

I thought I wasn't attractive or talented anymore. I cried easily and was depressed and removed. I became emotionally insecure about what the second half of my life would bring. I was angry, scared, frightened and lonely.