Quotes by British Authors - Page 495

Everything was usual. That was depression: being stuck, clinging to an out-of-date version of oneself.
Edward St. Aubyn
There are various kinds of depression, to be sure, and some are the result of the complex physical and physiological disorders. But there are times when we are spiritually depressed for no good reason. There are times when the best thing to do with our feelings is to challenge them: "Why are you cast down, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise Him, my salvation and my God (Psalm 42:11).
Derek W.H. Thomas
The picture of helpless indolence she calls herselfsublimely helpless and impotentI had done living I thoughtWas ever life so like death before? My face was so close against the tombstones, that there seemed no room for tears.
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
I was woken by a shell-burst in the trench of sleep. Heart skipping, with eyes fighting light, my thoughts sprang up like a field of starlings startled by a farmer's gunshot, a thousand separate, autonomous specks that swirled into a single united black shape.
Will Wiles
Depression is a sign of strength – because it means no matter how weak your mind might be to you, your heart is still strong enough to feel.
Emma Hart
I felt as if something hung there in the back of my mind, waiting to tarnish whatever happiness I might find. Is it safer to be unhappy? Nothing ever wants to take that away.
Storm Constantine
One weekend it rained for 48 hours without stopping. The rain beat like bony fingers against the window panes. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Fungus was growing on the walls. I polished off a bottle of gin sitting huddled over the two-bar electric fire and wrote a poem, one of the few that has lasted through the moves and the years. It is called 'Where Can I Go?'If this is not the place where tears are understood where do I go to cry? If this is not the place where my spirits can take wing where do I go to fly?If this is not the place where my feelings can be heard where do I go to speak? If this is not the place where you’ll accept me as I am where can I go to be me? If this is not the place where I can try and learn and grow where can I go to laugh and cry?
Alice Jamieson
If I was set an essay on Friday, I’d spend three hours on Saturday morning in the library. Was that normal? I didn’t know. What I did know was that I felt less prone to depression and more normal walking through Venice or staring out over the lake in Zurich. At home I wrestled continually with my moods. The black thing inside me gnawed like a rat at my self-esteem and self-confidence. I felt there was a happy person inside me too, who wanted to enjoy life, to be normal, but my feelings of self-loathing and the deep distrust I had towards my father wouldn’t allow that sunny person to come out. When the black thing had an iron grip on me, I couldn’t even look at my father: Did you do bad things to me when I was little? Like a line from a song stuck in your brain, the words ran through my head and never once came out of my mouth. Not that I needed to say what was in my mind. I was sure Father could read my thoughts in my moods, in the blank, dead stare of my eyes. It was hardly surprising that there was always an atmosphere of strain and awkwardness in the house, and the blame was always mine: Alice and her moods, Alice and her anorexia; Alice and her low self-esteem; Alice and her inescapable feelings of loss and emptiness.
Alice Jamieson
...perhaps, when it got utterly dark, the peace of the darkness would become the same as light so that my last experience would become as mysterious and musical as my first, so that in my last darkness there might not be the same need of understanding anything so far away as the world anymore.
Derek Raymond
Capitalist realism insists on treating mental health as if it were a natural fact, like weather (but, then again, weather is no longer a natural fact so much as a political-economic effect). In the 1960s and 1970s, radical theory and politics (Laing, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, etc.) coalesced around extreme mental conditions such as schizophrenia, arguing, for instance, that madness was not a natural, but a political, category. But what is needed now is a politicization of much more common disorders. Indeed, it is their very commonness which is the issue: in Britain, depression is now the condition that is most treated by the NHS. In his book The Selfish Capitalist, Oliver James has convincingly posited a correlation between rising rates of mental distress and the neoliberal mode of capitalism practiced in countries like Britain, the USA and Australia. In line with James’s claims, I want to argue that it is necessary to reframe the growing problem of stress (and distress) in capitalist societies. Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill?
Mark Fisher
She wuz depressed. Yeah, she wuz on stuff for it. Like me. Sometimes it jus' takes you over. It's an illness," she said, although she made the words sound like "it's uh nill
Robert Galbraith
It's an illness," she said, although she made the words sound like "it's uh nillness." Nillness, thought Strike, for a second distracted. Sometimes illness turned slowly to nillness, as was happening to Bristow's mother... sometimes nillness rose to meet you out of nowhere, like a concrete road slamming your skull apart.
Robert Galbraith
I woke up feeling alone, so lonely. The night before, I had cried myself to sleep. I lay there on the floor, listening to the tube trains passing beneath me. I thought, All those hundreds and thousands and millions of people. London, London - I hate you. I picked myself up and got ready.
Tracey Emin
Strolling on the plateau of life, desperate for the mountain, I never thought that I would get this far. It's only art that has carried me through, given me faith in my own existence. But now I am approaching a point in my life where I desire more...
Tracey Emin
No Child of YoursI saw a child hide in the cornerSo I went and asked her nameShe was so naive and so petiteWith such a tiny frame. 'No one,' she replied, that's what I am calledI have no family, no one at allI eat, I sleep, I get depressedThere is no life, I have nothing left.''Why hide in the corner?' I had to ask twiceBecause I've been hurt, it not very niceI tried to stop it, it was out of my controlI feared for myself I wanted to go. I begged for my sorrow to disappearI turned in my bed, oh God, I knew they were near'So come on little girl, where do you goA path ahead, or a path to unknown?'With that she arose, her head hung lowShe held herself for only she knowsHer tears held back, her heart like iceIt looks as though she has paid the price.The ice started melting, her tears to flowThe memories flood back, still so many years to goThe pain, the anger all built up insideNowhere to run, nowhere to hide.It will get better, just wait and seeYou'll get a life, though you'll never be fireOpen your heart and love yourselfThe abuse you suffered was NOT your fault.
Teresa Cooper
The words went round and round and round in my mind and my body, until I knew they were no longer my words but something that had been carved into my heart.And now my soul was crying.
Tracey Emin
My New Year's Eve is always 2 July, the night before my birthday. That's the night I make my resolutions. And this year scares the life out of me, because no matter how successful, how good things appear, there is always a deep core of failure within me, although I am trying to deal with it. My biggest fear, this coming year, is that I will be waking up alone.It makes me wonder how many bodies will be fished out of the Thames, how many decaying corpses will be found in one-room flats. I'm just being realistic.
Tracey Emin
No one realized that, being left out in the cold, I was also very much in the dark.
Deborah Curtis
I know why logs spit. I know what it is to be consumed
Winston S. Churchill
Oh she's alright it's just that - I don't want to get mixed up with anyone in the house. I don't want to get mixed up at all with anybody anymore.
Lynne Reid Banks
Is boredom anything less than the sense of one's faculties slowly dying?
John Berger
Always remember, child... that to think bad thoughts is really the easiest thing in the world. If you leave your mind to itself it will spiral you down into ever increasing unhappiness. To think good thoughts, however, requires effort. This is one onf the things that discipline - training - is about.
James Clavell
…it seemed to Kirsch that the most reliable guide to the mental landscape of a patient was the patient himself. He was better placed to explain his behaviour and his experiences than anyone else. Yet wherever Kirsch went, the patient was the very last person anyone thought to consult. Because, of course, the patient was insane.
Philip Sington
Silence is one of worst, most vocal enemies, yet people go through many bouts of depression not sharing what is happening. People don’t understand that, but as someone who suffers from it, I can tell you that it’s difficult to be objective about the gray. I described depression to my therapist as a misty fog that surrounds me, heavy on my shoulders, pervading everything and nothing at all. I liken depression to a bird stealing into the depths of your soul, pecking at your disposition until nothing is left. And that is when you break into pieces.
Rachel Thompson
I feel no peace, I feel nothing. I think I will feel nothing forever.
Philippa Gregory
Lewis encourages his cancer-stricken and temporarily depressed wife that uncertainty rather than hopelessness is our cross.
C.S. Lewis
I used to feel like I was drowning. So I stopped trying to swim.
Oliver Sykes
For a moment you forget how much the loss hurts. Then you remember and it buries you.
Oliver Sykes
You are rotting away, you are falling to pieces. What are you? A bag of filth. Now turn around and look into that mirror again. Do you see that thing facing you? That is the last man. If you are human, that is humanity. Now put your clothes on again.
George Orwell
When people run in circles it's a very very... mad world.
Tears For Fears
There is no loss, if you cannot remember what you have lost.
Claire North
A woman who had fallen out of love with her life
Jhumpa Lahiri
The days and the light feel like brief moments of torture, put here to remind us of what we don’t have any more. Joy is instantaneous, that, is the wonder of joy. Misery and suffering sneak up on someone like a bastard. They drip into your brain slowly, over time. Until one morning you wake up crying and you have no idea why.
Craig Stone
Some days I am the flower beneath the machine. And the machine rolls slowly on, blocking the sun, without a care for what it tramples beneath.
Craig Stone
You wanted to become a doctor to help people and feel better at the end of your job, I think, watching them, as the nurse takes my hand. But I don't think you do feel better at the end of the day. You look like humans have constantly disappointed you.
Caitlin Moran
I sometimes think that I don't have a purpose in this world. I am simply useless and wandering.
Ginger and Rosa
Misery is a routine you can learn to live with. It's like rain. Once you're soaked to the skin, you can't get any wetter.
Alan Gibbons
The iron bolt which so mysteriously fastens the door of hope and holds our spirits in gloomy prison, needs a heavenly hand to push it back.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
That’s why; he’s worried about how his life is turning out, and he’s lonely, and lonely people are the bitterest of them all.
Nick Hornby
There had been a subtle realignment of the spheres. The world was somehow a place I could endure again. If life was a grey corridor lined with doors, it was now within my power to open some of them.
Alexis Hall
The greatest and the best Christians when they are physically weak are more prone to an attack of spiritual depression than at any other time and there are great illustrations of this in the Scriptures.
Martyn Llyod-Jones
I'd wasted so much of my life. So many of my days, and all of my promise, all of my dreams, lost to hospitals, to depression, to wanting to die. This wasn't how it was supposed to be. This is not who I am.Except, of course, it was. It was all there was left to be.
Alexis Hall
When I was lost in the fog, it was as though nothing else existed. And, afterwards, it seemed incomprehensible that I had ever really thought like that. Self-recrimination inevitably followed.
Alexis Hall
Sometimes I though about killing myself. The idea of it circled my head, shining and lovely like a tinsel halo. How beautiful it would be if everything could just stop. If I could stop. If I didn't have to feel like this. Yes, I thought about it and thought about it, but I was too exhausted to do anything about it. That should have been funny, right?
Alexis Hall
The tapestry of my life was a ruin of unravelling threads. The brightest parts were a nonsensical madman's weaving. And now every day was a grey stitch, laid down with an outpatient's patience, one following the next following the next, a story in lines, like a railway track to nowhere, telling absolutely nothing.
Alexis Hall
Days passed in a grey fog. I was becalmed. Without energy, without hope, with no sight of land, I could remember feeling better but I somehow couldn't believe in it. There was nothing but this.
Alexis Hall
I swore as the knife I’d been using to dice our dinner bit into my finger. I dropped it on the floor, blood spattering the counter and cupboard doors a furious red. I watched, mesmerised, as the blood welled up and began to seep down my hand; I tried to catalogue the amount of pain I was in. Surprisingly little, I concluded, pushing at the edges of the wound to see how deep it went. Deep enough. I was starting to feel it now, but it didn’t hurt so much. I’d endured far worse.If it came to it, I could do it. There was comfort in that knowledge.
Hazel Butler
James had taken his own life, but the need to do so was not something easily explained. He had the life he wanted: money, a home, a job, a wife, a good friend. I’d known people who died at their own hand because life became unbearable, or because something happened, something terrible. That wasn’t so for James—there was something inside him, something a part of him, something over which he had no control, but which had absolute control over him.
Hazel Butler
It was a fact that had become the focus of my entire life, a whisper in my heartbeat, a permanent, insidious presence that punctuated my every breath. I couldn’t escape it, that persistent voice, lingering in the blood pulsing through my veins. It said only one thing, over and over, a repetition of inescapable anguish, the knowledge of a thing that could never be undone.James is dead. James is dead. James is dead. James is dead.
Hazel Butler
Death begins before birth. I have always found this an odd notion, but were it not for the death of certain cells during our initial development, humans would be born with webbed toes. Death moulds our physical being from the very start of our existence. It sculpts us, determines how we begin, and where we end. The events in life that define us, that break us and remake us, all stem from death—the death of a place, a time, a relationship, of those we hold most dear, and finally ourselves. Death is the one inescapable aspect of life, the only immutable force, the single thing in this world that cannot and should not be changed.But death is never the end.It is the beginning.
Hazel Butler
Was James bipolar?”The tears returned, and I watched her battle them. “We don’t use that word in our family.”I stared at her for a moment. “Why not?”“Mum and Dad don’t believe in it.” She kept walking. “James was always … troubled. But there was nothing wrong with him, nothing more than anyone else anyway, everyone feels a bit down sometimes.”“Olivia! It was more than feeling down.”She laughed, bitterly. “I know, Dee, fuck, do I know that. I’m just telling you how it goes. The party line—what we told people when they asked.
Hazel Butler
It's too short,' she said, 'ever so much too short.' Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black, half-way down, in the darkness, in the shaft which ran from the sunlight to the depths, perhaps a tear formed; a tear fell; the waters swayed this way and that, received it, and were at rest. Never did anybody look so sad.
Virginia Woolf
I can't stand THE DEPRESSED. It's like a job. It's the only thing they work hard at. Oh good my depression is very well today. Oh good today I have another mysterious symptom and I will have another one tomorrow. The DEPRESSED are full of hate and bile and when they are not having panic attacks they are writing poems. What do they want their poems to DO? Their depression in the most VITAL thing about them. Their poems are threats. ALWAYS threats. There is no sensation keener or more active than their pain. They give nothing back except their depression. It's just another utility. Like electricity and water and gas and democracy. They could not survive without it.
Deborah Levy
The author says that when an angry impulse is not immediately expressed, it turns to melancholy.
Patrick O'Brian
Preaching a man a sermon with a broken head and telling him to be right with God is equal to telling a man with a broken leg to get up and run a race.
Richard Baxter
Larry: She doesn't want to be happy.Dan: Everybody wants to be happy.Larry: Depressives don't. They want to be unhappy to confirm they're depressed. If they were happy they couldn't be depressed anymore. They'd have to go out into the world and live. Which can be depressing.
Patrick Marber
Cross-legged on the floor, you drink, hoping each mouthful will hurt; occasional flurries of spastic movement as you try to work out what to do with your hands. When everyone else is gone, your world is just a tiny box with the walls pressing in. Messages on the phone you can't bear to play, much less listen to, and nothing in the apartment that you can recognize as meaningfully yours.
Michael Marshall Smith
There are times when life seems like a struggle where the only reward you get for hanging on is the chance to struggle some more.
Michael Marshall Smith
Marianne had now been brought by degrees, so much into the habit of going out every day, that it was become a matter of indifference to her, whether she went or not: and she prepared quietly and mechanically for every evening's engagement, though without expecting the smallest amusement from any, and very often without knowing, till the last moment, where it was to take her.
Jane Austen
From that altitude, the world looked calm and vivid and possible. But by the time we landed at Prestwick the clouds were down like the black cap on a hanging judge.
Al Álvarez