Depressive Quotes

I think that for thousands of years people have made the observation that there are certain kinds of extreme depressive states that seem to be more likely to produce philosophers, people in the arts, unusually brilliant scientists.

I think you have waves of awareness and one of the things that I found with grief was actually - I was well prepared for it by the cyclicality of my manic depressive illness because I was used to things coming and going and so forth.

Nowadays you envy a manic-depressive. Half the time he's happy, the other half he's right.

Sometimes you can know too much. A lot of brainy people like Stephen Fry are quite depressive.

Being a mathematician is a bit like being a manic depressive: you spend your life alternating between giddy elation and black despair.

What I cannot follow are the manic-depressive fluctuations from total control to no control, from the serialization of all elements to chance.

Work ethic and this determination is all part of escaping the depressive side. Of course I'm manic depressive, maybe not to the degree that Exley was, but I think all writers are. There are highs and lows. Look at David Foster Wallace.

If you're in this business, like any high-stakes business, the highs and lows can make you a manic-depressive person, if you weren't that way to start with. 'Cause it's just so crazy on your psyche. A lot of it has to do with people thinking they're greater than someone else.

Every now and then I hear voices in my head, but not very clear. I can't understand what they are saying. It's a mental illness. I have been diagnosed as a manic depressive.

My dad is actually a manic depressive, which is very exciting half the time.

I am a monopolar depressive descended from monopolar depressives. That's how come I write so good.

Getting my father to throw anything away was pretty difficult. He was not trying to hide who he was, and he said, you don't have to hide the fact that I'm manic-depressive. You can tell people that's who I am. It's - explains a lot about your situation.

By birth and upbringing, I think I'm emotionally resilient. I don't feel like I'm a depressive person.

With my art, it's the one thing that I know will outlive me and outlive my feelings. It will outlive my depressive seasons.

Remember that the stock market is manic-depressive.

I'm constantly having to be vigilant with a depressive tendency, an addictive tendency.

Depressive lucidity, usually described as a radical withdrawal from ordinary human concerns, generally manifests itself by a profound indifference to things which are genuinely of minor interest. Thus it is possible to imagine a depressed lover, while the idea of a depressed patriot seems frankly inconceivable.

I am a smiling depressive.

The first person who ever told me that happiness was work was this manic-depressive artist I knew when I was in my 20s. I was like, 'What are you talking about? Happiness just happens. That's even the root of that word. How could it be work?

One of the most common outcomes of a depressive illness is a mistreated body. Now is the time to treat your body well. The more you learn to treat yourself well now, the less treatment you'll need down the road.

People that keep stiff upper lips find that it's hard to smile.

I'm a happy-go-lucky manic-depressive. It does get very deep and dark for me, and it gets scary at times when I feel I can't pull out of it. But I don't consider myself negative-negative. I'm positive-negative.

The cynic sees only cynicism, the depressive can taint creation with one glance

I am a rapid-cycling manic-depressive, bi-polar one disorder, which means I can have thirty or forty episodes a year, and I used to have thirty to forty episodes a year.

Depression is not sobbing and crying and giving vent, it is plain and simple reduction of feeling.

I had a husband who, I'm convinced, was an undiagnosed manic depressive. He didn't treat me as if I had a brain - I was just this beautiful little doll he could show off.

Depression, when it's clinical, is not a metaphor. It runs in families, and it's known to respond to medication and to counseling. However truly you believe there's a sickness to existence that can never be cured, if you're depressed you will sooner or later surrender and say: I just don't want to feel bad anymore. The shift from depressive realism to tragic realism, from being immobilized by darkness to being sustained by it, thus strangely seems to require believing in the possibility of a cure.

I suffer from manic-depressive disorder, and I've chosen not to take medication for it. Because of that, every once in a while I go through manic episodes and really depressed episodes.

When the depressive psychosis has become manifest, its cardinal feature seems to be a mental inhibition which renders a rapport between the patient and the external world more difficult.

I don't know what other singers feel when they articulate lyrics, but being an 18-karat manic-depressive and having lived a life of violent emotional contradictions, I have an overacute capacity for sadness as well as elation.

It’s amazing how much you’re missing in a depressive state until you start to come out on the other side. It’s like breathing again after being underwater for far too long.

At heart, I have always been a coper, I've mostly been able to walk around with my wounds safely hidden, and I've always stored up my deep depressive episodes for the weeks off when there was time to have an abbreviated version of a complete breakdown. But in the end, I'd be able to get up and on with it, could always do what little must be done to scratch by.

I think people don't understand how intimately tied suicide is to mental illness, particularly to depressive illness and bipolar illness.

I have often asked myself whether, given the choice, I would choose to have manic-depressive illness. If lithium were not available to me, or didn't work for me, the answer would be a simple no... and it would be an answer laced with terror. But lithium does work for me, and therefore I can afford to pose the question. Strangely enough, I think I would choose to have it. It's complicated.

My biography of Frank Sinatra is not paean to his music but rather an illumination of the man behind the music, who once described himself as 'an 18-karat manic-depressive who lived a life of violent emotional contradictions with an over-acute capacity for sadness as well as happiness.

Being in good physical shape is the best way to combat depression. You just have endorphins running around your body. It is the best anti-depressive that there is.

I didn't want people to accuse me of being really depressive. I really tried to fight against that and not have a complete downer about the subject.

If you're manic-depressive and you're functioning in this world and doing it all well, I think, wow, you should be proud of being able to say, this is what I'm getting through right now.

I think that feminism permits women to speak among themselves, instead of simply being resentful, having personal complaints, which get them nowhere and which make them sick and ill-tempered, depressive and poison the lives of their husbands and children. It's much better to arrive at a collective consciousness of this problem, which is both a kind of therapy and the basis for a struggle.

I was in danger of having my children taken away from me when I needed five weeks in psychiatric care ... There is the smiling depressive which is the biggest time bomb and when they go they usually go with a bang, which was me.

Nature is, above all, profligate. Don't believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to the soil. Wouldn't it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first place? This deciduous business alone is a radical scheme, the brainchild of a deranged manic-depressive with limitless capital. Extravagance! Nature will try anything once.

The tragedy of a species becoming unfit for life by over-evolving one ability is not confined to humankind. Thus it is thought, for instance, that certain deer in paleontological times succumbed as they acquired overly-heavy horns. The mutations must be considered blind, they work, are thrown forth, without any contact of interest with their environment. In depressive states, the mind may be seen in the image of such an antler, in all its fantastic splendour pinning its bearer to the ground.

My mom was a manic depressive schizophrenic who, after a year in prison, went home and shot herself. My sister, Kirsten, an amazing poet, who was raised by this woman, and was dating a guy who broke up with her for the fourth time in three weeks. And one day, she came to his house, got a gun, and blew her brains out all over his headboard. I just went through a divorce, five years in court and cost me $2 million dollars. If anyone, by law, should be forced to take antidepressants it's me... But instead, I choose to be an antidepressant. And you can take me with alcohol.

Even in my first analysis of a depressive psychosis, I was immediately struck by its structural similarity with obsessional neurosis.

My stay in Camp Betty was the longest I'd been without drink or drugs in my adult life. [...] At first, they put me in a room with a guy who owned a bowling alley, but he snored like an asthmatic horse, so I moved and ended up with a depressive mortician. [...] The mortician snored even louder than the bowling alley guy - he was like a moose with a tracheotomy.

All writers are egomaniacal, manic-depressive, drug-addicted alcoholics. You want to have that fix again.

I spoke so much about being a manic-depressive. I want to bring everyone back to my earliest memories of this companion of mine. Some people call this companion I have an ailment, or worse a terrible nightmare from which some people cannot awaken. I know that I have nothing to be ashamed of. I have nothing that should garner a stigma.

Despite popular opinion, there are no important parallels between Madonna and Monroe, who was a virtuoso comedienne but who was in secure, depressive, passive-aggressive, and infuriatingly obstructionist in her career habits. Madonna is manic, perfectionist, workaholic. Monroe abused alcohol and drugs, while Madonna shuns them. Monroe had a tentative, melting, dreamy solipsism; Madonna has Judy Holliday's wisecracking smart mouth and Joan Crawford's steel will and bossy, circus master managerial competence.

Alcohol had a lot to do with it, too, and mental instability. All writers are narcissistic, manic-depressive drug addicts and alcoholics, and I am no exception.

Far too many doctors-many of them excellent physicians-commit suicide each year; one recent study concluded that, until quite recently, the United States lost annually the equivalent of a medium-sized medical school class from suicide alone. Most physician suicides are due to depression or manic-depressive illness, both of which are eminently treatable. Physicians, unfortunately, not only suffer from a higher rate of mood disorders than the general population, they also have a greater access to very effective means of suicide.