What we call "normal" is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection, and other forms of destructive actions on experience. . . It is radically estranged from the structure of being.
The way out of the depression is to start spending and doing things.
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.
Self-acceptance is my refusal to be in an adversarial relationship to myself.
You shall be free indeed when your days are not without a care, nor your nights without a want and a grief, but rather when these things girdle your life and yet you rise above them naked and unbound.
I have studiously tried to avoid ever using the word 'madness' to describe my condition. Now and again, the word slips out, but I hate it. 'Madness' is too glamorous a term to convey what happens to most people who are losing their minds. That word is too exciting, too literary, too interesting in its connotations, to convey the boredom, the slowness, the dreariness, the dampness of depression.
Human misery must somewhere have a stop; there is no wind that always blows a storm.
It's all a matter of history. Brandy is no solace. Librium only lies me down like a dead snow queen. Yes! I am still the criminal.
I don't believe in depression. There's no such thing. It's an invention. It's bullshit, it's a cop out.
The decline is in paper values, not in tangible goods and services. . . America is now in the eighth year of prosperity as commercially defined. The former great periods of prosperity in America averaged eleven years. On this basis we now have three more years to go before the tailspin.
If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.
Many of us spend our whole lives running from feeling with the mistaken belief that you can not bear the pain. But you have already borne the pain. What you have not done is feel all you are beyond that pain.
Every man has his secret sorrows.
I was horribly depressed, and I felt like I had failed as a band leader, a professional, as a person.
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.
The world leans on us. When we sag, the whole world seems to droop.
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.
Keep painting your demons.
With depression, you can go in and out of it and not really know whether it's still there or not. Sometimes I'd find myself bursting into tears for no reason.
If you look at what happened, I came in the middle of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. And unlike Franklin Delano Roosevelt who waited, well, didn't take office until about three years into the Great Depression, it was happening just as I was elected.