Anhedonia Que Quotes & Sayings

For the hair has grown on my upper lip
And the clergy are all clean-shaven — George Orwell

One of my dinner companions invited me on a strip-club excursion. I demurred, spoiled by the erotic revues of Anhedonia, where the performers remain fully clothed but get emotionally naked, delivering monologues about their top-shelf disappointments, and times when they were almost happy. Hard to enjoy American-style strip clubs after that. Once you go bleak, you never go back. — Colson Whitehead

Everything else just kept picking and picking, hacking away. And nothing was interesting, nothing. The people were restrictive and careful, all alike. And I've got to live with these fuckers for the rest of my life, I thought. — Charles Bukowski

It's the opening line of a football game returned for a touchdown. Or fumbled.

It's what orange juice is to breakfast, the first minutes of a blind date, a salesman's opening remarks.

It sets the tone, lights the stage, greases the skids for everything to follow.

It's the most important part of everything you'll ever write because if it doesn't work, whatever follows won't matter. It won't get read.

It's your opening paragraph. And enough can't be said about its importance.

Seduction. That's basically what leads are all about--enticing the reader across the threshold of your book, novel or article--because nothing happens until you get 'em inside.

And you literally have only seconds to do it because surveys show that eight out of ten people quit reading whatever it is they've started after the first fifty words. — Lionel Fisher

Life is a series of unlikely events, isn't it? Hers certainly is. One unlikely event after another, adding up to a rich, complicated whole. And who knows what's still to come? — Judy Blume

We Anhedonians have adapted to long periods between good news. Our national animal is the hope camel. We have no national bird. All the birds are dead. — Colson Whitehead

And her mother says I'm handsome. That's really all her mum ever says to me. "Don't you look handsome, Simon."
What would she say to Baz? "Don't you look handsome, Basil. Please don't slaughter my family with your hideous fangs. — Rainbow Rowell

Kate Gompert's always thought of this anhedonic state as a kind of radical abstracting of everything, a hollowing out of stuff that used to have affective content. Terms the undepressed toss around and take for granted as full and fleshy - happiness, joie de vivre, preference, love - are stripped to their skeletons and reduced to abstract ideas. They have, as it were, denotation but not connotation. The anhedonic can still speak about happiness and meaning et al., but she has become incapable of feeling anything in them, of understanding anything about them, of hoping anything about them, or of believing them to exist as anything more than concepts. Everything becomes an outline of the thing. Objects become schemata. The world becomes a map of the world. An anhedonic can navigate, but has no location. I.e. the anhedonic becomes, in the lingo of Boston AA, Unable To Identify. — David Foster Wallace

populated the hills above it, taking small consolation in the fact that every day — Toni Morrison

Yelling while eating was like swallowing anger. It's simply not good for us. It leaves us unhappy and unsatisfied, as if the meal didn't count or wasn't good, and an hour later we're back looking for something to make us feel better. — Mary DeTurris Poust

When some of the neural "lights" in question have been switched off by injury, the outcome can be connected to a form of generalized depression, or what Dr. Jim Pfaus of Concordia University calls "anhedonia" - a state of pleasurelessness, bleakness, or grayness, in perceptions of the world. — Naomi Wolf

You'd have to think that if he'd been around today, Rod Laver would have been Rod Laver. — Jim Courier

We must especially learn the art of directing mindfulness into the closed areas of our life. — Jack Kornfield

Something that looks like a protocol but does not accomplish a task is not a protocol - it's a waste of time. — Bruce Schneier

the gods are created by poets" --Ovid — Ovid