More Depression Quotes And Sayings

by allinspiration.com

Here is another collation of depression quotes and sayings from various authors, celebrities, famous persons, and other sources compiled by allinspiration.com for you to read and enjoy.

“When you are mad, mad like this, you don’t know it. Reality is what you see. When what you see shifts, departing from anyone else’s reality, it’s still reality to you.”
– Marya Hornbacher

“I didn’t realize there was a ranking.” I said. “Sadie frowned. “What do you mean?” “A ranking,” I said. “You know, what’s crazier than what.” “Oh, sure there is,” Sadie said. She sat back in her chair. “First you have your generic depressives. They’re a dime a dozen and usually pretty boring. Then you’ve got the bulimics and the anorexics. They’re slightly more interesting, although usually they’re just girls with nothing better to do. Then you start getting into the good stuff: the arsonists, the schizophrenics, the manic-depressives. You can never quite tell what those will do. And then you’ve got the junkies. They’re completely tragic, because chances are they’re just going to go right back on the stuff when they’re out of here.” “So junkies are at the top of the crazy chain,” I said. Sadie shook her head. “Uh-uh,” she said. “Suicides are.” I looked at her. “Why?” “Anyone can be crazy,” she answered. “That’s usually just because there’s something screwed up in your wiring, you know? But suicide is a whole different thing. I mean, how much do you have to hate yourself to want to just wipe yourself out?”
– Micheal Thomas Ford

“Depression is a painfully slow, crashing death. Mania is the other extreme, a wild roller coaster run off its tracks, an eight ball of coke cut with speed. It’s fun and it’s frightening as hell. Some patients – bipolar type I – experience both extremes; other – bipolar type II – suffer depression almost exclusively. But the “mixed state,” the mercurial churning of both high and low, is the most dangerous, the most deadly. Suicide too often results from the impulsive nature and physical speed of psychotic mania coupled with depression’s paranoid self-loathing.”
– David Lovelace

“Compared to bipolar’s magic, reality seems a raw deal. It’s not just the boredom that makes recovery so difficult, it’s the slow dawning pain that comes with sanity – the realization of illness, the humiliating scenes, the blown money and friendships and confidence. Depression seems almost inevitable. The pendulum swings back from transcendence in shards, a bloody, dangerous mess. Crazy high is better than crazy low. So we gamble, dump the pills, and stick it to the control freaks and doctors. They don’t understand, we say. They just don’t get it. They’ll never be artists.”
– David Lovelace

“But then back on lithium and rotating on the planet at the same pace as everyone else, you find your credit is decimated, your mortification complete: mania is not a luxury one can easily afford. It is devastating to have the illness and aggravating to have to pay for medications, blood tests, and psychotherapy. They, at least, are partially deductible. But money spent while manic doesn’t fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you’re given excellent reason to be even more so.”
– Kay Redfield Jamison

“the intensity, glory, and absolute assuredness if my mind‘s flight made it very difficult for me to believe once I was better, that the illness was one I should willingly give up….moods are such an essential part of the substance of life, of one’s notion of oneself, that even psychotic extremes in mood and behavior somehow can be seen as temporary, even understandable reactions to what life has dealt….even though the depressions that inevitably followed nearly cost me my life.”
– Kay Redfield Jamison

“I know the empathy borne of despair; I know the fluidity of thought, the expansive, even beautiful, mind that hypomania brings, and I know this is quicksilver and precious and often it’s poison. There has always existed a sort of psychic butcher who works the scales of transcendence, who weighs out the bloody cost of true art.”
– David Lovelace

“It’s difficult. I take a low dose of lithium nightly. I take an antidepressant for my darkness because prayer isn’t enough. My therapist hears confession twice a month, my shrink delivers the host, and I can stand in the woods and see the world spark.”
– David Lovelace

“I’ve been accustomed to mysteries, holy and otherwise, since I was a child. Some of us care for orphans, amass fortunes, raise protests or Nielsen ratings; some of us take communion or whiskey or poison. Some of us take lithium and antidepressants, and most everyone believes these pills are fundamentally wrong, a crutch, a sign of moral weakness, the surrender of art and individuality. Bullshit. Such thinking guarantees tragedy for the bipolar. Without medicine, 20 percent of us, one in five, will commit suicide. Six-gun Russian roulette gives better odds. Denouncing these medicines makes as much sense as denouncing the immorality of motor oil. Without them, sooner or later the bipolar brain will go bang. I know plenty of potheads who sermonize against the pharmaceutical companies; I know plenty of born-again yoga instructors, plenty of missionaries who tell me I’m wrong about lithium. They don’t have a clue.”
– David Lovelace

“Love is not enough. It takes courage to grab my father’s demon, my own, or – God help me – my child’s and strap it down and stop its mad jig; to sit in a row of white rooms filled with pills and clubbed dreamers and shout: stop smiling, shut up; shut up and stop laughing; you’re sitting in hell. Stop preaching; stop weeping. You are a manic-depressive, always. your life is larger than most, unimaginable. You’re blessed; just admit it and take the damn pill.”
– David Lovelace

“Suddenly I wanted to get better. Mania wasn’t fun anymore. It wasn’t creative or visionary. It was mean parody at best, a cheap chemical trick. I needed to stop and get better. I’d take whatever they gave me, I pledged silently. I’d take Trilafon or Thorazine or whatever. I just wanted to sleep.”
– David Lovelace

“[ ] manic sex isn’t really intercourse. It’s dicourse, just another way to ease the insatiable need for contact and communication. In place of words, I simply spoke with my skin.”
– Terri Cheney

“I now know for certain that my mind and emotions, my fix on the real and my family‘s well-being, depend on just a few grams of salt. But treatment’s the easy part. Without honesty, without a true family reckoning, that salt’s next to worthless.”
– David Lovelace

“Her parents, she said, has put a pinball machine inside her head when she was five years old. The red balls told her when she should laugh, the blue ones when she should be silent and keep away from other people; the green balls told her that she should start multiplying by three. Every few days a silver ball would make its way through the pins of the machine. At this point her head turned and she stared at me; I assumed she was checking to see if I was still listening. I was, of course. How could one not? The whole thing was bizarre but riveting. I asked her, What does the silver ball mean? She looked at me intently, and then everything went dead in her eyes. She stared off into space, caught up in some internal world. I never found out what the silver ball meant.”
– Kay Redfield Jamison

“There comes a time when the blankness of the future is just so extreme, it’s like such a black wall of nothingness. Not of bad things like a cave full of monsters and so, you’re afraid of entering it. It’s just nothingness, the void, emptiness and it is just horrible. It’s like contemplating a future-less future and so you just want to step out of it. The monstrosity of being alive overwhelms you.”
– Stephen Fry

“In our family “whim-wham” is code, a defanged reference to any number of moods and psychological disorders, be they depressive, manic, or schizoaffective. Back in the 1970s and ’80s – when they were all straight depression – we called them “dark nights of the soul.” St. John of the Cross’s phrase ennobled our sickness, spiritualized it. We cut God out of it after the manic breaks started in 1986, the year my dad, brother, and I were all committed. Call it manic depression or by its new, polite name, bipolar disorder. Whichever you wish. We stick to our folklore and call it the whim-whams.”
– David Lovelace

“I’ve got to that point in life when there’s very few thrills and lots of pills seems we all end up this way. As we wait for our final day. But there’s one thing about the pills I take. My manic episodes have taken a break”
– Stanley Victor Paskavich

“It was as if my father had given me, by way of temperament, an impossibly wild, dark, and unbroken horse. It was a horse without a name, and a horse with no experience of a bit between its teeth. My mother taught me to gentle it; gave me the discipline and love to break it; and- as Alexander had known so intuitively with Bucephalus- she understood, and taught me, that the beast was best handled by turning it toward the sun.”
– Kay Redfield Jamison

“I’ve had this problem since I was in my 20s. They don’t call it manic depression anymore. They call it a bipolar disorder, and I’m a Type 2″
– Ned Beatty

“Manic depression’s touching my soul. I know what I want, but I just don’t know how to go about getting it.”
– Jimi Hendrix

“There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.”
– Aristotle

“Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.”
– Ray Bradbury

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Bipolar disorder can be a great teacher. It’s a challenge, but it can set you up to be able to do almost anything else in your life.”
– Carrie Fisher

“Madness is to think of too many things in succession too fast, or of one thing too exclusively.”
– Voltaire

“What a creature of strange moods [Winston Churchill] is – always at the top of the wheel of confidence or at the bottom of an intense depression.”
– Lord Beaverbrook

“Had [Winston Churchill] been a stable and equable man, he could never have inspired the nation. In 1940, when all the odds were against Britain, a leader of sober judgment might well have concluded that we were finished.”
– Anthony Storr

“If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman. ”
– Plato

“Of all our conversations, I remember most vividly [Robert Lowell's] words about the new drug, lithium carbonate, which had such good results and gave him reason to believe he was cured: “It’s terrible, Bob, to think that all I’ve suffered, and all the suffering I’ve caused, might have arisen from the lack of a little salt in my brain”
– Robert Giroux

“I don’t like standing near the edge of a platform when an express train is passing through. I like to stand right back and if possible get a pillar between me and the train. I don’t like to stand by the side of a ship and look down into the water. A second’s action would end everything. A few drops of desperation. ”
– Winston Churchill

“I’m so happy. Cause today I found my friends. They’re in my head. I’m so ugly. But that’s ok. ‘Cause so are you. We’ve broke our mirrors. Sunday morning. Is everyday for all I care. And I’m not scared. Light my candles. In a daze cause I’ve found god.”
– Lithium by Nirvana

“I am excessively slothful, and wonderfully industrious–by fits. There are epochs when any kind of mental exercise is torture, and when nothing yields me pleasure but the solitary communion with the ‘mountains & the woods’–the ‘altars’ of Byron. I have thus rambled and dreamed away whole months, and awake, at last, to a sort of mania for composition. Then I scribble all day, and read all night, so long as the disease endures.”
– Edgar Allen Poe

“There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you’re high it’s tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars….But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against–you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable….It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.”
– Kay Redfield Jamison

“I want to apologize for plaguing you with so many telephone calls last November and December. When the ‘enthusiasm’ is coming on me it is accompanied by a feverish reaching out to my friends. After its over I wince and wither.”
– Robert Lowell

“I finally came to terms with manic depression and lithium. I’ve taken lithium regularly for the past few years and have had no further bouts with manic depression.”
– Charley Pride

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