Anne Enright Quotes

The neurotic lies awake at night, composing letters to those he hates. He seldom thinks of dropping a line to those he loves.

I have my own demons and dark moods. It's weird.

I think I, like a lot of people, have that type of brain where I find it interesting or fulfilling to worry about something.

We all have our inner demons.

If I knew what I was so anxious about, I wouldn't be so anxious.

Your depression is connected to your insolence and refusal to praise.

If I let a blue mood run rampant, before I know it I'm obsessing about the color of the satin lining in my coffin - will it match my dress? That's when I feel like Alice in Cancerland falling down the rabbit hole and just have to stop.

Worrisome thoughts and their resulting feelings are a form of self strangulation. They not only strangle your emotions. They affect your physical life as well, and your ability to focus and get things done.

When I've gone through those periods of depression or anxiety, it's almost like your body is telling you constantly with these panics that the world really is the terrible place that you think it is, and all the things you fear are true about yourself have to be true.

The darkness, the loop of negative thoughts on repeat, clamours and interferes with the music I hear in my head.

We definitely like to write songs about darker things, but we like to think of it as a celebration of the evil ideas that run through everybody's head.

When I was a kid, I had a period in my life when I was eight or nine when I was so scared of dying that I wouldn't go out of our house for a whole year. I refused to step out of the door because I thought something would happen. I had all these compulsive thoughts or whatever, and my head was really messed up.

I suffer from anxiety, moments of depression. I'm in my head so much, and I'm thinking so much, I'm playing a tug-of-war within my mind.

I have lived one step away from losing my mind for years. I am quick and accurate in spotting unstable streaks in others.

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.

My obsessions used to be my protectors, but now they have taken me prisoner.

I've been outta my mind a long time.

There's always that fear of your own head and the things you're going to think.

I found solitary confinement the most forbidding aspect of prison life. There is no end and no beginning; there is only one's mind, which can begin to play tricks. Was that a dream or did it really happen? One begins to question everything.

If I lose my mind again and I tell you that I'm thinking of getting married, I want you to put me in a straight jacket and take me to the beach at high tide.

What I really hated, of course, was my mind. There must have been an off switch somewhere, but I was damned if I could find it.

A body seriously out of equilibrium, either with itself or with its environment, perishes outright. Not so a mind. Madness and suffering can set themselves no limit.

Suicidal thinking, if serious, can be a kind of death scare, comparable to suffering a heart attack or undergoing a cancer operation. One survives such a phase both warier and chastened. When-ten years ago-I emerged from a bad dip into suicidal speculation, I felt utterly exhausted and yet quite fearless of ordinary dangers, vastly afraid of myself but much less scared of extraneous eventualities.

If people could see the inside of my brain, I would be in prison.

They've lost their minds.