[GenCat]

Some of mine are these:

“Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or broken up with someone. But these experiences carry with them feelings. Depression, instead, is flat, hollow, and unendurable. It is also tiresome. People cannot abide being around you when you are depressed. They might think that they ought to, and they might even try, but you know and they know that you are tedious beyond belief: you are irritable and paranoid and humorless and lifeless and critical and demanding and no reassurance is ever enough. You're frightened, and you're frightening, and you're "not at all like yourself but will be soon," but you know you won't.”- Kay Redfield Jamison
“Its so hard to talk when you want to kill yourself. That's above and beyond everything else, and it's not a mental complaint-it's a physical thing, like it's physically hard to open your mouth and make the words come out. They don't come out smooth and in conjunction with your brain the way normal people's words do; they come out in chunks as if from a crushed-ice dispenser; you stumble on them as they gather behind your lower lip. So you just keep quiet.”- Ned Vizzini
“There is no point treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, 'There now, hang on, you'll get over it.' Sadness is more or less like a head cold- with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.”- Barbara Kingsolver
“Some friends don't understand this. They don't understand how desperate I am to have someone say, I love you and I support you just the way you are because you're wonderful just the way you are. They don't understand that I can't remember anyone ever saying that to me. I am so demanding and difficult for my friends because I want to crumble and fall apart before them so that they will love me even though I am no fun, lying in bed, crying all the time, not moving. Depression is all about If you loved me you would.”- Elizabeth Wurtzel

humorless??

I have kept my sense of humor. I can laugh and laugh very hard. And then (quite literally) seconds later - be as dark as I have ever been. Almost as if the laughter made things worse.

I do not know for certain - but I am guessing my sense of humor has been my mask for so long that it functions without any brain waves at all........

[paynful]

"My head betrays me half the time. One day, it tells me I am a god. The other, it tells me that I not only rule hell, but I invented it." --Katy Evans

It is actually about being manic-depressive, but it still resonates with me.

[Altered Moment]

http://forums.psychcentral.com/depre...depressed.html

From an earlier thread.

[Altered Moment]

“That's the thing about depression: A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight. But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it's impossible to ever see the end.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

"the problem is that when i wake,
i can feel that i'm the same.

so i will grab a few blankets,
curl up a bit tighter,
and pretend that i have changed.

i may love myself tomorrow,
but it is still only today"
by k.p.k

"there is something about the people who have seen their own wild darkness
whom had sadness cast itself like iron before them
the ones who have mistook that empty hallway of depression for a mirror.
...
I have seen what spills from this body.
I have listened to the dull lullaby of the bathtub drain,
Fantasized about how many refrains it would take to end it
I have thought about ending it
Getting off this carousel.
Depression is a black sheep we all have one, but some of us still talk to it
some us haven't disowned it yet
Looking back I am thankful this body is an obedient machine it will keep doing what it's doing until it is told not to
looking back I am surprised by how few scars I have.
How I actually f****** survived myself"
by Sierra DeMulder, Ariel (it's on youtube)

[ImNotHere]

“I didn't want to wake up. I was having a much better time asleep. And that's really sad. It was almost like a reverse nightmare, like when you wake up from a nightmare you're so relieved. I woke up into a nightmare.”

[Quarter life]

Nothing comes to those who wish or those who try....only to those that get someone else to do it for them

[tigerlily84]

“In depression this faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come- not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. So the decision-making of daily life involves not, as in normal affairs, shifting from one annoying situation to another less annoying- or from discomfort to relative comfort, or from boredom to activity- but moving from pain to pain. One does not abandon, even briefly, one’s bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes. And this results in a striking experience- one which I have called, borrowing military terminology, the situation of the walking wounded. For in virtually any other serious sickness, a patient who felt similar devistation would by lying flat in bed, possibly sedated and hooked up to the tubes and wires of life-support systems, but at the very least in a posture of repose and in an isolated setting. His invalidism would be necessary, unquestioned and honorably attained. However, the sufferer from depression has no such option and therefore finds himself, like a walking casualty of war, thrust into the most intolerable social and family situations. There he must, despite the anguish devouring his brain, present a face approximating the one that is associated with ordinary events and companionship. He must try to utter small talk, and be responsive to questions, and knowingly nod and frown and, God help him, even smile. But it is a fierce trial attempting to speak a few simple words.”
- William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Darkness

[Quarter life]

As above....Thanks tigerlily84

Yes....Everyone trying to cope with depression should read William Styron's masterpiece 'Darkness Visible'....absolutely brilliant. A short memoir, you'll have it read in an afternoon, and gain imeasurable insight into the nature of this insidious monster called depression.

[Paralian]

Not necessarily my favorites but a few things saved recently:

“No one in my family, not one of my friends or classmates realized that I was going through life asleep.
It was literally true: I was going through life asleep. My body had no more feeling than a drowned corpse. My very existence, my life in the world, seemed like a hallucination. A strong wind would make me think my body was about to be blown to the end of the earth, to some land I had never seen or heard of, where my mind and body would separate forever. ‘Hold tight,’ I would tell myself, but there was nothing for me to hold on to.”
— Haruki Murakami, Sleep

“I have no memory for things I have learned, nor things I have read, nor things experienced or heard, neither for people nor events; I feel that I have experienced nothing, learned nothing, that I actually know less than the average schoolboy, and that what I do know is superficial, and that every second question is beyond me. I am incapable of thinking deliberately; my thoughts run into a wall. I can grasp the essence of things in isolation, but I am quite incapable of coherent, unbroken thinking. I can’t even tell a story properly; in fact, I can scarcely talk.”
— Franz Kafka

Blue Song by Tennessee Williams

I am tired.
I am tired of speech and of action.
If you should meet me upon the
street do not question me for
I can tell you only my name
and the name of the town I was
born in–but that is enough.
It does not matter whether tomorrow
arrives anymore. If there is
only this night and after it is
morning it will not matter now.
I am tired. I am tired of speech
and of action. In the heart of me
you will find a tiny handful of
dust. Take it and blow it out
upon the wind. Let the wind have
it and it will find its way home.

"I wanted to write down
exactly how I felt
but somehow
the paper stayed empty

and I could not have
described it any better"
by wtm