Anthony Ray Hinton Quotes

I really wanted to die at certain periods in my life.

Nothing good comes out of depression.

I might look successful and happy being in front of you today, but I once suffered from severe depression and was in total despair.

I truly, truly suffered depression, to the deep core.

That was the day my whole world went black. Air looked black. Sun looked black. I laid up in bed and stared at the black walls of my house….Took three months before I even looked out the window, see the world still there. I was surprised to see the world didn’t stop.

Darkness does not leave us easily as we would hope.

I don't smile much, and I never laugh. If you'd been through what I've been through, you wouldn't be smiling, either.

Suicide doesn't solve your problems. It only makes them infinitely, un-countably worse.

Depression is a feeling without a cause. Mourning has a cause.

Let me die because I do not want to see the sun again.

Life is absolutely horrific, leading up to absolute horror.

Grief comes and goes, but depression is unremitting.

Depression can take you into a black hole, so it is terrible.

If killing yourself is not an option anymore, you have to sink into the darkness instead, and make something out of it.

Wish you could turn off the questions, turn off the voices, turn off all sound. Yearn to close out the ugliness, close out the filthiness, close out all light. Long to cast away yesterday, cast away memory, cast away all jeapordy. Pray you could somehow stop uncertainty, somehow stop the loathing, somehow stop the pain. Act on your impulse, swallow the bottle, cut a little deeper, put the gun to your chest.

The lows were absolutely horrible. It was like falling into a manhole and not being able to lift the lid and climb out.

I'll never be happy. I believe I'll die alone. I would want it that way. I've been a loner all my life with my secrets and my pain. I'm really lost, but I'm trying to find myself. I'm really a sad, pathetic case. My whole life has been a waste. I've been a failure. I just want to escape.

Depression is a lot like that: slowly, over the years, the data will accumulate in your heart and mind, a computer program for total negativity will build into your system, making life feel more and more unbearale. But you won't even notice it coming on, thinking that it is somehow normal, something about getter older, about turning eight or about turning twelve or turning fifteeen, and then one day you realize that your entire life is just awful, not worth living, a horror and a black blot on the white terrain of human existence. One morning you wake up afraid you are going to live.

What was more brutal than loss of hope?

I suffered from post-natal depression after Rowan was born. I had a healthy, beautiful baby girl and I couldn't look at her. I couldn't hold her, smile at her. All I wanted was to disappear and die.

The people I am most interested in are the ones on the edge of losing everything and falling into the last bit of despair. I'm trying to write about how people exist on that edge and how they can come back.

It's easier to identify with loss than love, because we have had so much more experience of it.

In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality.

Despair often breeds disease.