Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

And an inky-colored despair of rejection enveloped me like the black tortilla of depression around a pain burrito.

…she felt depressed beyond any thing she had ever known before.

The smarter you are, the more reasons you have to be miserable.

Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance. It is tumbleweed distress that thrives on thin air, growing despite its detachment from the nourishing earth. It can be described only in metaphor and allegory

It is clear to me that one of the biggest obstacles we face as human beings is the pain we put ourselves through when we resist and wrestle with our emotions.

I know so many people who are eaten up by regret. It manifests itself in so many ways. They either become mentally a bit off, or they get very fat, or they are just horribly depressed.

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

In so far as the mind is stronger than the body, so are the ills contracted by the mind more severe than those contracted by the body.

... madness entered my veins.

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

Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or broken up with someone. But these experiences carry with them feelings. Depression, instead, is flat, hollow, and unendurable. ... You're frightened, and you're frightening, and you're 'not at all like yourself but will be soon,' but you know you won't.

They flank me - depression on my left, loneliness on my right. They don't need to show their badges. I know these guys very well. ... Then they frisk me. They empty my pockets of any joy I had been carrying there. Depression even confiscates my identity; but he always does that.

Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering—this is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general and fairly salutary day-time advice for everyone. But at three o’clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work—and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.

I was in such a state of mental shock and quickly spiraled into a depression at the multitude of loss. My husband, I thought, was going to leave me. I was cut off from this mentor and someone I cared for very much, David Petraeus, who also did nothing to stand up for me and in fact, empowered his surrogates to throw me under the bus, and that was devastating.

Well, you know, there's depression and depression. What I mean by depression in my own case is that depression isn't just the blues. It's not just like I have a hangover in the weekend ... the girl didn't show up or something like that. It isn't that. It's not really depression, it's a kind of mental violence which stops you from functioning properly from one moment to the next. You lose something somewhere and suddenly you're gripped by a kind of angst of the heart and of the spirit.

Cutting pain was a different flavor of hurt. It made it easier not to think about having my body and my family and my life stolen, made it easier not to care... -Wintergirls

Its so hard to talk when you want to kill yourself. That's above and beyond everything else, and it's not a mental complaint-it's a physical thing, like it's physically hard to open your mouth and make the words come out. They don't come out smooth and in conjunction with your brain the way normal people's words do; they come out in chunks as if from a crushed-ice dispenser; you stumble on them as they gather behind your lower lip. So you just keep quiet.

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

A sick thought can devour the body's flesh more than fever or consumption.

I do not believe anyone can be perfectly well, who has a brain and a heart

still, what could i say? that i didn't just feel depressed - instead, it was like the depression was the core of me, of every part of me, from my mind to my bones? that if he got blue, i got black? that i hated those pills so much, because i knew how much i relied on them to live?

Madness is a kind of mental suicide.

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

The pain of the mind is worse than the pain of the body.

If a scientist were to cut his ear off, no one would take it as evidence of a heightened sensibility.