Famous Quotes & Sayings

Sylvia Plath

I’ll never speak to God again.

Sylvia Plath

It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next. It made me tired just to think of it.

Sylvia Plath

... I keep wanting to crawl back into the womb ...

Sylvia Plath

... you looked around and saw everybody either married or busy and happy and thinking and being creative, and you felt scared, sick, lethargic, worst of all, not wanting to cope. You saw visions of yourself in a straightjacket, and a drain on the family, murdering your mother in actuality, killing the edifice of love and respect built up over the years in the hearts of other people.

Sylvia Plath

Look at that ugly dead mask here and do not forget it. It is a chalk mask with dead dry poison behind it, like the death angel. It is what I was this fall, and what I never want to be again. The pouting disconsolate mouth, the flat, bored, numb, expressionless eyes: symptoms of the foul decay within.

Sylvia Plath

Very depressed today. Unable to write a thing. Menacing gods. I feel outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness.

Sylvia Plath

Tomorrow I will curse the dawn, but there will be other, earlier nights, and the dawns will be no longer hell laid out in alarms and raw bells and sirens.

Sylvia Plath

When you are insane, you are busy being insane-all the time ... when I was crazy, that was all I was.

Sylvia Plath

You have lost all delight in life. Ahead is a large array of blind alleys. You are half-deliberately, half-desperately cutting off your grip on creative life. You are becoming a neuter machine. You cannot love, even if you knew how to begin to love. Every thought is a devil, a hell-if you could do a lot of things over again, ah, how differently you would do them! You want to go home, back to the womb. You watch the world bang door after door in your face, numbly, bitterly. You have forgotten the secret you knew, once, ah, once, of being joyous, of laughing, of opening doors.

Sylvia Plath

A terrible depression yesterday. Visions of my life petering out into a kind of soft-brained stupor from lack of use.

Sylvia Plath

It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative--which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.

Sylvia Plath

because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

Sylvia Plath

The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence.

Sylvia Plath

I didn’t want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn’t know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I’d cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.

Rollo May

If we admit our depression openly and freely, those around us get from it an experience of freedom rather than the depression itself.

Rollo May

Depression is the inability to construct a future.

Rollo May

If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.

Tom Bosley

I want to help people with depression understand that there is hope, so that they can get the help they need to live rich, fulfilling lives.

V. S. Pritchett

Sooner or later, the great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing.

Susanne Bier

I think it is kind of depressing how few female filmmakers there are. I think it is in general depressing how few women there are in ... important positions in society

Susanna Kaysen

... now I was safe, now I was really crazy, and nobody could take me out of there.

Susanna Kaysen

Don’t ask me those questions! Don’t ask me what life means or how we know reality or why we have to suffer so much. Don’t talk about how nothing feels real, how everything is coated with gelatin and shining like oil in the sun. I don’t want to hear about the tiger in the corner or the Angel of Death or the phone calls from John the Baptist.

Susanna Kaysen

Lunatics are similar to designated hitters. Often an entire family is crazy, but since an entire family can't go into the hospital, one person is designated as crazy and goes inside. Then, depending on how the rest of the family is feeling that person is kept inside or snatched out, to prove something about the family's mental health.

Suzanne Collins

Something small and quiet, like a match being struck, lights up the gloom inside of me.

Stephen King

Madness is a kind of mental suicide.

Stephen King

What happens to the wide-eyed observer when the window between reality and unreality breaks and the glass begins to fly?

Stephen King

He realized now that a lot of the problem had been his own mind, which was usually moving at a speed ten or twenty times that of his classmates. They had thought him strange, weird, or even suicidal, depending on the escapade in question, but maybe it had been a simple case of mental overdrive-if anything about being in constant mental overdrive was simple. Anyway, it was the sort of thing you got under control after a while-you got it under control or you found outlets for it ...

Stephen King

And all that weirdness isn't just going on outside. It's in you too, right now, growing in the dark like magic mushrooms. Call it the Thing in the Cellar. Call it the Blow Lunch Factor. Call it the Loony Tunes File. I think of it as my private dinosaur, huge, slimy, and mindless, stumbling around in the stinking swamp of my subconscious, never finding a tar pit big enough to hold it.

It's easy to imagine ways the future can be ugly and depressing. It's harder, but more worthwhile, to imagine plausible ways we can make it better.

Stanley Kubrick

The world's religions, for all their parochialism, did supply a kind of consolation for this great ache... This shattering recognition of our mortality is at the root of far more mental illness than I suspect even psychiatrists are aware.

Soren Kierkegaard

In order to learn true humility (I use this expression to describe the state of mind under discussion), it is good for a person to withdraw from the turmoil of the world (we see that Christ withdrew when the people wanted to proclaim him king as well as when he had to walk the thorny path), for in life either the depressing or the elevating impression is too dominant for a true balance to come about. Here, of course, individuality is very decisive.

Stephenie Meyer

I kept pushing against the black, though, almost a reflex. I wasn't trying to lift it. I was just resisting. Not allowing it to crush me completely. I wasn't Atlas, and the black felt as heavy as a planet; I couldn't shoulder it. All I could do was not be entirely obliterated.

Stefan Zweig

I am not fooling myself with dreams of immortality, know how relative all literature is, don't have any faith in mankind, derive enjoyment from too few things. Sometimes these crises give birth to something worth while, sometimes they simply plunge one deeper into depression, but, of course, it is all part of the same thing.