John Boyne Quotes

Grief comes and goes, but depression is unremitting.

I understand the power of sorrow, and I understand how far it can take us from ourselves if we let it.

Exhaustion was pressing upon and overpowering her. "Good-by--because I love you." He did not know; he did not understand. He would never understand. Perhaps Doctor Mandelet would have understood if she had seen him--but it was too late; the shore was far behind her, and her strength was gone. She looked into the distance, and the old terror flamed up for an instant, then sank again.

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

You can hide beneath the covers and study your pain, make crosses from your lovers, throw roses in the rain. Waste your summer praying in vain, for a savior to rise from these streets.

I wonder how many times each day she dies a little.

One of the things that happens to people in grief is they secretly think they're crazy, because they realize they are thinking things that don't make sense.

My father's death, my move, and my frightening and difficult delivery created a tremendous amount of stress, pain, and sadness for me. I was practically devastated beyond recovery.

Grief seems at first to destroy not just all patterns, but also to destroy a belief that a pattern exists.

When it was all over, and I was left alone in my office, I put my face in my hands and wept. I could do nothing less.

I was so broken when I did the first record. I was living in my parents' basement, I didn't know anyone. I was broken-hearted and writing this really dark record. I was at the bottom of a well.

When you are debilitated, and you're very depressed, and you believe there's no hope, you cannot get a better potpourri of down.

I am a broken person.

Grief, for me, is a moment-to-moment experience.

During depression the world disappears. Language itself. One has nothing to say. Nothing. No small talk, no anecdotes. Nothing can be risked on the board of talk. Because the inner voice is so urgent in its own discourse: How shall I live? How shall I manage the future? Why should I go on?

This morning, for the first time in a long time, the joy again of imagining a knife twisted in my heart.

Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair.

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.

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

Misery pulls away the brackets of life leaving you to free fall.

You don't really care about the trials of tomorrow, rather lay awake in a bed full of sorrow

I rode all day. I cried all night. The moon didn’t glow. The sun didn’t rise. A comet blazed Between my eyes. West and South, Wind and rain. Every way is Just the same. Pray give me a box To hide inside. Pray give me a spade To dig my own grave.

If anyone could look into my head See or feel the dread that has captured Me or see within this sad, unhappy brain They would only turn away Turn away.

You might find it difficult to see anything but your own sadness, the way smoke can cover a landscape so that all anyone can see is black. You may find that if someone pours water all over you, you are damp and distracted, but not cured of your sadness, the way a fire department can douse a fire but never recover what has been burnt down.

Oh! Stars and clouds and winds, ye are all about to mock me; if ye really pity me, crush sensation and memory; let me become as nought; but if not, depart, depart, and leave me in darkness.