Quotes by British Authors - Page 497

It’s a weird thing, depression. Even now, writing this with a good distance of fourteen years from my lowest point, I haven’t fully escaped. You get over it, but at the same time you never get over it. It comes back in flashes, when you are tired or anxious or have been eating the wrong stuff, and catches you off guard. I woke up with it a few days ago, in fact. I felt its dark wisps around my head, that ominous life-is-fear feeling. But then, after a morning with the best five- and six-year-olds in the world, it subsided. it is now an aside. Something to put brackets around. Life lesson: the way out is never through yourself.
Matt Haig
The days passed, the weeks. But everything seemed to have fused, gone into a conglomerated mass. He could not tell one day from another, hardly one place from another. Nothing was distinct or distinguishable. Often he lost himself for an hour at a time, could not remember what he had done.
D.H. Lawrence
Like depression, loneliness arises from unhappiness creating thoughts feeding into the insula, deepening the negative spiral of thoughts and feelings.
David Michie
I wanted to be dead. No. That's not quite right. I didn't want to be dead, I just didn't want to be alive.
Matt Haig
I was nothing more to him than a prison sentence, trapping him inside my walls and persecuting him for a crime he was tricked into committing.
Nikki Kelly
this is only the beginning. Many die, many kill their bodies and souls, but they cannot kill the justice of God, even they cannot kill the eternal spirit. From their very degradation that spirit will rise up to demand of the world compassion and justice
Radclyffe Hall
People with mental illnesses aren't wrapped up in themselves because they are intrinsically any more selfish than other people. Of course not. They are just feeling things that can't be ignored. Things that point the arrows inward.
Matt Haig
I didn't totally fit in. I kind of disintegrated around people and became what they wanted me to be. But paradoxically, I felt an intensity inside me all the time. I didn't know what it was, but it kept building, like water behind a dam. Later, when I was properly depressed and anxious, I saw the illness as an accumulation of all that thwarted intensity. A kind of breaking through. As though, if you find it hard enough to let your self be free, your self breaks in, flooding your mind in an attempt to drown all those failed half-versions of you.
Matt Haig
It fascinated me how depression and anxiety overlap with post-traumatic stress disorder. Had we been through some trauma we didn't know about? Was the noise and speed of modern life the trauma for our caveman brains? Was I that soft? Or was life a kind of war most people didn't see?
Matt Haig
The scabs feel like I have a message on my arm. Something that needs to be read, urgently, by someone. It was only years later that I realized the person I had written that message to- the person who wasn't listening- was me. I was the one who should have been staring at that arm, and working out what the red hieroglyphics meant. Had I translated them, I would have realized those red lines read: 'Never feel this bad again. Never come back to this place, where only a knife will do. Live a gentle and kind life. Don't do things that make you want to hurt yourself. Whatever you do, every day, remember this- then steer away from here.
Caitlin Moran
I want to drag knives over my skin, just so that I can feel something other than shame, but I'm not even brave enough to do that.
Paula Hawkins
I was the climber of a sheer cliff, dragging myself on bleeding hands towards a summit that I'd never reach and sometimes didn't want to reach. The things I cared about were the hooks I'd driven into the rock face. Depression snapped them, one by one, one by one. My only certainty was the fall.
Alexis Hall
Who can tell? It may be that there must always be growth - and that if one does not grow kinder and wiser and greater, then the growth must be the other way, fostering the evil things. Or it may be that the life they all led was too shut in, too folded back upon itself - without breadth or vision. Or it may be that, like a disease of crops, it is contagious, that first one and then another is sickened.
Agatha Christie
A Depressive?' 'Smiles in ballrooms, weeps in bedrooms. Ill in her head.' Olive tapped her temple. 'And here.' She touched her heart.
Jessie Burton
Watching me, judging me, smelling the crippling failure oozing from my skin, my desperation clawing and all-consuming panic drenching me as I gape in horror at the world and wonder why everyone is smiling and looking at me with secret knowledge of my aching shame.
Sarah Kane
Once more, my harp! once more, although I thoughtNever to wake thy silent strings again,A wandering dream thy gentle chords have wrought,And my sad heart, which long hath dwelt in pain,Soars, like a wild bird from a cypress bough,Into the poet's Heaven, and leaves dull grief below
Caroline Norton
It's what the loss uncovers in you that brings on despair, not the loss itself.
Nicci French
You can't quell depression by making love. But we tried. But we tried, oh, we did.
Yrsa Daley-Ward
One cliche attached to bookish people is that they are lonely, but for me books were my way out of being lonely.
Matt Haig
The way out is never through yourself.
Matt Haig
Life doesn’t need to be difficult to become impossible.
PJ Bayliss
... I have always found that the Trough periods of the human undulation provide excellent opportunity for all sensual temptations, particularly those of sex. This may surprise you, because, of course, there is more physical energy, and therefore more potential appetite, at the Peak periods; but you must remember that the powers of resistance are then also at their highest. The health and spirits which you... use in producing lust can also... be very easily used for work or play or thought or innocuous merriment. The attack has a much better chance of success when the man's whole inner world is drab and cold and empty. And it is also to be noted that the Trough sexuality is subtly different in quality from that of the Peak - much less likely to lead to... "being in love," much more easily drawn into perversions, much less... generous and imaginative and even spiritual... It is the same with other desires of the flesh. You are much more likely to make [a] man a sound drunkard by pressing drink on him as an anodyne when he is dull and weary... than... when he is happy...
C.S. Lewis
What doesn't kill you very often makes you weaker. What doesn't kill you can leave you limping for the rest of your days. What doesn't kill you can make you scared to leave your house, or even your bedroom, and have you trembling, or mumbling incoherently, or leaning with your head on a window pane, wishing you could return to the time before the thing that didn't kill you.
Matt Haig
Forcing yourself to see the world through love's gaze can be healthy. Love is an attitude to life. It can save us.
Matt Haig
That kind of monotony that running generates - the one soundtracked by heavy breathing and the steady rhythm of feet on pavements - became a kind of metaphor for depression.
Matt Haig
Depressed states can make us feel like we're constantly fighting against ourselves but we must engage in that fight for ourselves.
Sam Owen
Some people, perhaps those with more dignity and less rage gnawing at the roots of their being, are nicer as failures, For me, it was like descending a deep pit that had no bottom
Amanda Craig
That is the worst thing about despair: it is not constant, any more than love is.
Amanda Craig
I remember only images, snapshots burned into me, bleeding into each other until I no longer knew the order in which they had happen.
Laure Eve
I'm so glad I didn't die on the various occasions I have earnestly wished I might, for I would have missed a lot of lovely weather.
Elizabeth von Arnim
Gerald Middleton was a man of mildly but persistently depressive temperament. Such men are not at their best at breakfast, nor is the week before Christmas their happiest time.
Angus Wilson
Time they say is a great healer, but in this case, I am not sure that is true.
Emily Williams
It wasn't that I stopped caring about life, but that I've stopped being able to care.
Ruby Elliot
...this was as if an actual steamroller driven by a crazy grinning idiot had trundled through the door and flattened my entire life into a sad pancake of nothingness.
Ruby Elliot
Why would I want to take baby steps? Babies are shit at walking - think about it. To move forward I'll be taking jazzy little lizard steps.
Ruby Elliot
Everyone feels depressed, angry or frustrated at times; it’s a crossroads not a dead end.
Sam Owen
I'm going to lie down. Please wake me up in a couple of don't.
Ruby Elliot
And then it happens. The panic. It's slow at first, creeping through the cracks in my thoughts until everything starts to feel heavy. It builds; it becomes something physical that clutches at my insides and squeezes out the air and the blood.
Sara Barnard
Our “increasing mental sickness” may find expression in neurotic symptoms. These symptoms are conspicuous and extremely distressing. But “let us beware,” says Dr. Fromm, “of defining mental hygiene as the prevention of symptoms. Symptoms as such are not our enemy, but our friend; where there are symptoms there is conflict, and conflict always indicates that the forces of life which strive for integration and happiness are still fighting.” The really hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. “Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does.” They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted, still cherish “the illusion of individuality,” but in fact they have been to a great extent deindividualized. Their conformity is developing into something like uniformity. But “uniformity and freedom are incompatible. Uniformity and mental health are incompatible too. . . . Man is not made to be an automaton, and if he becomes one, the basis for mental health is destroyed.
Aldous Huxley
Those drugs were either going to bring me nirvana or they were going to kill me. I was sure of it. And I was comfortable with it.
Joss Sheldon
Complaints of feeling cut off, shut off, out of touch, feeling apart or strange, of things being out of focus or unreal, of not feeling one with people, or of the point having gone out of life, interest flagging, things seeming futile and meaningless, all describe in various ways this state of mind. Patients usually call it 'depression', but it lacks the heavy, black, inner sense of brooding, of anger and of guilt, which are not difficult to discover in classic depression. Depression is really a more extraverted state of mind, which, while the patient is turning his aggression inwards against himself, is part of a struggle not to break out into overt angry and aggressive behaviour. The states described above are rather the 'schizoid states'. They are definitely introverted. Depression is object-relational. The schizoid person has renounced objects, even though he still needs them.
Harry Guntrip
The word “depressed” is spoken phonetically as “deep rest”. We can view depression not as a mental illness, but on a deeper level, as a profound, and very misunderstood, state of deep rest, entered into when we are completely exhausted by the weight of our own identity.
Jeff Foster
However, I must admit that keeping myself to myself has not always been comforting. At times, I seemed to suffer spells of depression and loneliness, longing to become healthy again; of going out and facing a world of injustices, of misery, of widespread indifference.
Lawrence G. Taylor
What was wrong with
Rhiannon Thomas
It is actually okay to stop trying to solve the problem of feeling bad. In fact it is wise because our habitual ways of solving problems almost invariably wind up making things worse.
Mark Williams
Mindfulness could also be described as "heartfulness" because it is really about a compassionate awareness.
Mark Williams
Gunner shook his head; he wasn't in the mood. He stared down at his bottle as he spoke. "Yeah, and what if I do go after it and what if I find no one, and I'm alone for the next sixty years? What then? Huh? Friends and family will get married. I'll be stuck buying gifts. Years pass: children, birthday parties. At dinner parties, I'll be odd man out, forcing people to arrange five chairs around a table instead of four or six. Or, okay, let's say maybe twenty years down the line I meet someone nice and I've already given up on ever finding true love. Let's say the girl is a few pounds overweight, has fizzy hair and an annoying laugh, but at this point, I'm also a few pounds overweight and my hair is thinning and my laughter is annoying. Maybe then the two of us get married, and both our groups of friends will say, 'See I told you that you'd find true love. It just took a while.' And we'll smile, but we'll both know it's a lie--
Michael Anthony
I sit up in bed slowly, feeling the disappointment trickle away like puddles after a rain shower.
Scarlett Thomas
If someone asks you how you are, you are meant to say FINE. You are not meant to say that you cried yourself to sleep last night because you hadn't spoken to another person for two consecutive days. FINE is what you say.
Gail Honeyman
I can understand why some people might look at me and say, 'What's she got to be depressed about?' I get that a lot in Britain, where mental health issues seem to be a big taboo.
Natalie Imbruglia
A human being can only endure depression up to a certain point; when this point of saturation is reached it becomes necessary for him to discover some element of pleasure, no matter how humble or on how low a level, in his environment if he is to go on living at all. In my case these insignificant birds with their subdued colourings have provided just sufficient distraction to keep me from total despair. Each day I find myself spending longer and longer at the window watching their flights, their quarrels, their mouse-quick flutterings, their miniature feuds and alliances. Curiously enough, it is only when I am standing in front of the window that I feel any sense of security. While I am watching the birds I believe that I am comparatively immune from the assaults of life. The very indifference to humanity of these wild creatures affords me a certain safeguard. Where all else is dangerous, hostile and liable to inflict pain, they alone can do me no injury because, probably, they are not even aware of my existence. The birds are at once my refuge and my relaxation.
Anna Kavan
Yet, I believe that my experience of depression has helped me to be a more humane and understanding therapist. Psychiatrists get depressed too, more often than other doctors. Being an expert in depression doesn't confer any immunity from it and I am aware that I don't have all the answers.
Linda Gask
My brain, having been suspended in a state of hyper-vigilance for such a long time, just packed in and said 'No more, your job now is to lie on the sofa incredibly still and just work on evaporating, you useless towel'. And so I did.
Ruby Elliot
Because the silence is exhausting and isolating in a way it needn't be.
Ruby Elliot
She was tranquil, but it was with the quietness of exhausted grief, not of resignation; and she looked back upon the past, and awaited the future, with a kind of out-breathed despair.
Ann Radcliffe
Much of his time at Oxford passed by his own account under a dark cloud of listlessness and depression. He was dismayed by the undergraduates' relentless snobbery and unremitting emphasis on money.
Hilary Spurling
What I do know is that when a person is first asked to explain what is wrong, they may find it almost impossible to articulate exactly what the problem is. They may not yet have matched words to the feelings they can sense in the hidden rooms of their mind. They may still have no clear ideas about the "what", "why" or "how" relating to the origins of their difficulties. Instead of words, their angst may be expressed in behaviour which may be hard for them, or anyone else, to make sense of and can manifest itself as irritability, anger or withdrawal. Sometimes they will delay seeking help until they are in a state of crisis. It's not easy to ask; I struggled at first, too.
Linda Gask
Perhaps my depression coincided with the start of every academic year and the subsequent increase in my workload. Or maybe there was a more biological explanation linked to the fact that I, like many people with depressed mood, find the absence of light at these latitudes intolerable in the winter months. I didn't know the answer - I still don't. This is who I am. I cope most of the time; I am well for months, sometimes even for more than a year; but there are recurring periods in my life when the world seems a darker, more hostile and unforgiving place. I am a person who gets depressed.
Linda Gask
the capture the rapture the rupture of a soula solo symphony
Sarah Kane
No, no, no, no. Don't get carried away, man. One thaw is not the summer.
Andrea Levy