Quotes & Sayings About How Depression Feels

Everyday feels the same and yet I crave sameness.
Part of me wants to run away and be free.
I feel trapped in my life I've created to protect myself. — Tina J. Richardson

A tramp, therefore, is a celibate from the moment when he takes to the road. He is absolutely without hope of getting a wife, a mistress, or any kind of woman except - very rarely, when he can raise a few shillings - a prostitute.
It is obvious what the results of this must be: homosexuality, for instance, and occasional rape cases. But deeper than these there is the degradation worked in a man who knows that he is not even considered fit for marriage. The sexual impulse, not to put it any higher, is a fundamental impulse, and starvation of it can be almost as demoralizing as physical hunger. The evil of poverty is not so much that it makes a man suffer as that it rots him physically and spiritually. And there can be no doubt that sexual starvation contributes to this rotting process. Cut off from the whole race of women, a tramp feels himself degraded to the rank of a cripple or a lunatic. No humiliation could do more damage to a man's self-respect. — George Orwell

He feels
ennui
depression
adrift in his life. Purposeless, perhaps because
- dig a well in the Sudan and thejanjaweed come in and shoot the people anyway
- buy mosquito nets and the boys
you save grow up to
- rape women
- set up cottage industries in Myanmar and the army
- steals them and uses the women as slaves and
Ben is starting to be afraid that he is starting to share Chon's opinion of the human species
that people are basically
shit. — Don Winslow

I have every luxury imaginable, I own acres of land, and have enough money to buy the moon were it for sale. Though people think I have everything, it sometimes feels like my possessions own me; towering over me and reducing me into a small bundle of insignificance. — J. Matthew Nespoli

There is evidence that I have survived this before, that I will go on surviving.
There is love. There is love. There is love.
Maybe the Cheshire cat was right. Maybe we are all a little mad. And if we are all in this together, then none of us are truly alone. That means me. But it also means you.
Across these pages, I reach out to you, dear one whose heart feels so alone.
This too shall pass.
And we will all be okay. — Clementine Ford

Judy's friend that she has known the longest has just broken up with her boyfriend and is depressed. Judy likes her more now that she is depressed and feels unmotivated in life. Judy feels unmotivated in life. — Ellen Kennedy

Everything feels like a badly designed computer game in which you fall into a pit that doesn't kill you but from which there's absolutely no escape. For a while you kick against the walls, but the walls get higher no matter how hard and fast you press all the buttons you can find. And sooner or later you'll realize there's one you haven't tried yet. The power switch.[ ... ] So she began reaching for the button herself, but she never tried quite hard enough, because some part of her was still alive. She didn't want to throw the machine away. She just wanted to start again. — Michael Marshall Smith

When it is all too much; when the news is so bad meditation itself feels useless, and a single life feels too small a stone to offer on the altar of Peace, find a Human Sunrise. Find those people who are committed to changing our scary reality. Human sunrises are happening all over the earth, at every moment. People gathering, people working to change the intolerable, people coming in their robes and sandals or in their rags and bare feet, and they are singing, or not, and they are chanting, or not. But they are working to bring peace, light, compassion, to the infinitely frightening downhill slide of Human life. — Alice Walker

Depression is also smaller than you. Always, it is smaller than you, even when it feels vast. It operates within you, you do not operate within it. It may be a dark cloud passing across the sky but - if that is the metaphor - you are the sky. You were there before it. And the cloud can't exist without the sky, but the sky can exist without the cloud. — Matt Haig

There are peaks, there are valleys. But they're all kind of carved and smoothed out, and it feels like a low level of despair you live in. Where you're not getting any answers, but you're living OK. And you can smile at the office. You know? But it's a low level of despair. I was on Prozac for a long time. It may have helped me out of a jam for a little bit, but people stay on it forever. I had to get off at a certain point because I realized that, you know, everything's just OK. — Jim Carrey

For instance man feels the sensation of joy and depression in the center called solar plexus; however, this does not mean that joy or depression is there, but that this center is sensitive to such experiences. — Hazrat Inayat Khan

The circles of shame are vicious. Painful feelings of shame help cause people to be depressed and suicidal, these in turn become shameful aspects of the self. Being angry does not necessarily cause more anger, being envious does not necessarily cause more envy (though once we envy, we can also envy someone's lack of envy), but, in our culture at least, shame (and envy and self-pity) are things to be ashamed about. The two common feelings of suicide are hopelessness and powerlessness; each is shameful, and this additional experience of shame adds pain on pain. A man who despairs because he feels his prospects of having a family are hopeless also feels he will never lose the feeling of shame over being wifeless and childless. To be powerless to change one's life in ways that others can is cause to feel ashamed of one's powerlessness. — David L. Conroy

The part of us that feels anger and depression is the same part that feels peace and love. If you refuse to feel the anger and the pain of a loss, you will not be able to feel anything else until that area heals. In other words, stay out of your own way. Let yourself feel bad if you want to feel bad. Feel joy, too. Healing is taking place. Give yourself the gift of healing. — Peter McWilliams

In the throws of depression, one reaches a strange point at which it is impossible to see the line between ones own theatricality and the reality of madness. I discovered two conflicting qualities of character. I am melodramatic by nature; on the other hand, I can go out and "seem normal" under the most abnormal of circumstances. Antonin Artaud wrote on one of his drawings, "never real and always true", and that is how depression feels. You know that it is not real, that you are someone else, and yet you know that it is absolutely true. Its very confusing. — Andrew Solomon

In depression, your capacity to feel just flattens and disappears and what you feel is pain and a kind of pain that you can't describe to anybody. So it's an isolating pain, a completely isolating pain. — Kay Redfield Jamison

When they ask me why I jumped off the roof of my brother's apartment building, I will tell them it was because I wanted the sky to mourn me.

And because I wanted to know what it feels like to hit something so hard it shatters me into bits that they can never sew back together. — Kady Hunt

I spend a lot of time wondering what dying feels like. What dying sounds like. If I'll burst like those notes, let out my last cries of pain, and then go silent forever. Or maybe I'll turn into a shadowy static that's barely there, if you just listen hard enough. — Jasmine Warga

I want to say that yes, it was worth it; that I could suffer through pain and torture for her and go through a lot more than what Puck and his friends are capable of, and I can do it for all of eternity; suffer, until she realizes how much I love her.
But she's gone before I can say any of it.
I wait till she's left.
And then I reach for my wallet.
Hidden inside one of the flaps is a piece of paper that barely conceals a razorblade. Its frayed edges still have my blood on them. The blood is from the previous cuts I've made and I carry it around like a trophy, like Dexter carries around his victims' blood on slides. I use that blade to give myself a cut and it starts bleeding. Right away, it feels as though the pressure that has been building inside me ever since that confrontation with Puck is lifted.
I feel free again. — Kady Hunt

What's wrong with me? I lose my footing, in here.' He touched his head. 'When a neuro-typical looses their footing, they yell or escape to the TV, or maybe the doctor throws them on depression meds. But when I slip, I fall all the way through. I feel the ground give way and I'm gone. It's a crack
a crack in what's real, and beneath there I'm stuck. Then, I guess I become someone else. Mom says I still know my name, but I walk a different world. The shrink calls it DID
Dissociative Identity Disorder
with a little added autism to spice up my other personality. I suppose he's right, but only I know how it feels to slip through the cracks. Then the monster shows up. — Jonathan Friesen

It's a strange poverty of the English language, and indeed, of many other languages, that we use this same word, "depression" to describe how a kid feels when it rains on his birthday, and to describe how somebody feels the minute before they commit suicide. — Andrew Solomon

Mary Lou suddenly realizes that Mack calls the temperature number because he is afraid to talk on the telephone, and by listening to a recording, he doesn't have to reply. It's his way of pretending that he's involved. He wants it to snow so he won't have to go outside. He is afraid of what might happen. But it occurs to her that what he must really be afraid of is women. Then Mary Lou feels so sick and heavy with her power over him that she wants to cry. She sees the way her husband is standing there in a frozen pose. Mack looks as though he could stand there all night with the telephone receiver against his ear. — Bobbie Ann Mason

My stepfather, John O'Hara, was the goodest man there was. He was not a man of many words, but of carefully chosen ones. He was the one parent who didn't try to fix me. One night I sat on his lap in his chair by the woodstove, sobbing. He just held me quietly and then asked only, "What does it feel like?" It was the first time I was prompted to articulate it. I thought about it, then said, "I feel homesick." That still feels like the most accurate description - I felt homesick, but I was home. — Sarah Silverman

He wants to run, but where? However far he goes, he will not escape, cannot escape his own loathsome self. He will always be trapped within his own body, his own mind. The emotional pain that comes with this realization is so strong, it feels physical. He senses it knotting and twisting inside his body, ready to destroy him from within. He is losing his grip, he is losing his mind. Does anyone else know what it is to be dead yet still alive? This is it. This is it . A half-world of torment, where memories frozen into oblivion slowly begin to thaw. A place where everything hurts, where your conscious mind has neither the strength to let you function in the real world, nor the power to return you to hibernation. — Tabitha Suzuma

Depression means self-loathing, self-disgust, and the kind of emotional numbness that feels like psychic death. — William Deresiewicz

Don't ask me those questions! Don't ask me what life means or how we know reality or why we have to suffer so much. Don't talk about how nothing feels real, how everything is coated with gelatin and shining like oil in the sun. I don't want to hear about the tiger in the corner or the Angel of Death or the phone calls from John the Baptist. — Susanna Kaysen

It is important to remember that at first blush, going sane feels just like going crazy. — Julia Cameron

Sometimes, in the stillness of my room, my mom's voice came to me, repeating things she'd said for months. Like, "My skin is melting off my face, isn't it?" And, "My whole body feels dead from the crap they're pouring into me. Do I look green to you?" And, "When I'm naked, I can see my heart beating. — Laura Anderson Kurk

Depression feels a bit like that, it creeps in on you and settles, until you think it'll never lift, but in time it always does. That's why it's so tragic if people don't reach out to anyone when they feel low, because if they do, the mist will usually lift in the end. — Sita Brahmachari

And I know, knew for sure, with an absolute certainty, that this is rock bottom, this what the worst possible thing feels like. It is not some grand, wretched emotional breakdown. It is, in fact, so very mundane: ... Rock Bottom is an inability to cope with the commonplace that is so extreme it makes even the grandest and loveliest things unbearable ... Rock bottom is feeling that the only thing that matters in all of life is the one bad moment ... Rock bottom is everything out of focus. It's a failure of vision, a failure to see the world how it is, to see the good in what it is, and only to wonder why the hell things look the way they do and not - and not some other way. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

Some people can't keep fighting. Some people want to escape. Some people are not ready - are not able - to find a way to deal with what's in front of them. Sometimes there's no one to help them. Sometimes they don't know how to ask for help. Sometimes it feels like there's no choice but to end it. No other way out. And sometimes it's impossible to see past that. — Sarah Fine

Life has moments that feel as if the sun has blackened to tar and the entire world turned to ice. It feels as if Hades and his vile demons have risen from the depths of Tartarus solely for the purpose of banding to personally torture you, and that their genuine intent of mental, emotional, and spiritual anguish is tearing you to shreds. Your heart weighs as heavily as leaden legs which you would drag yourself forward with if not for the quicksand that pulls you down inch by inch, paralyzing your will and threatening oblivion. And all the while fire and brimstone pour from the sky, pelting only you.
Truly, that is what it feels like. But that feeling is a trial that won't last forever. Never give up. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Patient reluctant to be with people when depressed because she feels her depression is such an intolerable burden on others; — Kay Redfield Jamison

Sometimes it feels like we're all living in a Prozac nation. The United States of Depression. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

Any time I let it, the weight of living creeps in and starts to drag her down. It would be too easy to say that I feel invisible. Instead, I feel painfully visible, and entirely ignored. People talk to her, but it feels like they are outside a house, talking through the walls. There are friends, but they are people to spend time with, not people to share time with. There's a false beast that takes the form of instinct and harps on the pointlessness of everything that happens. — David Levithan

Antonin Artaud wrote on one of his drawings, "Never real and always true," and that is how depression feels. You know that it is not real, that you are someone else, and yet you know that it is absolutely true. — Andrew Solomon

Great griefs exhaust. They discourage us with life. The man into whom they enter feels something taken from him. In youth, their visit is sad; later on, it is ominous. — Victor Hugo

When you make sex to a person, woman or man, you think it unites you. For a moment it gives you the illusion of unity, and then a vast division suddenly comes in. That's why after every sex act, a frustration, a depression sets in. One feels that one is so far away from the beloved. Sex divides, and when love goes deeper and deeper and unites more and more, there is no need for sex. Your inner energies can meet without sex, and you live in such a unity. — Rajneesh

Everyone feels depressed, angry or frustrated at times; it's a crossroads not a dead end. — Sam Owen

Everything hurts. He can barely lie still. He feels caught. He wants to run, but where? He feels certain he will always remain like this - trapped within his own body, his own mind. The emotional pain is so strong, it becomes physical. He feels it knotting and twisting inside him, ready to crush him, suffocate him. He is losing his grip, he is losing his mind. He thought he had it all back under control, but suddenly nothing makes sense any more. Does anyone else know what it's like to be stuck somewhere between dead and alive? I't s a half-world of incoherent pain where emotions you put on ice start slowly thawing again. A place where everything hurts, where your mind is no longer strong enough to force your feelings back into hibernation. — Tabitha Suzuma

Sometimes giving up feels like the easiest thing to do.
But then the easiest thing has never produced more than a garden full of weeds. — Richelle E. Goodrich

We are created for adventure, and if we cannot find one, we start blowing things out of proportion so it feels like we have one. — John Eldredge

I am, as it happens, a baby boomer, but not one who feels any broad-gauge nostalgia for the '60s and '70s. My attitude resembles that of my parents, who were born in the '20s and lived through the Great Depression and World War II. — Terry Teachout

I can only speak from my own experience, and I would say that the depression I experienced feels like a chemical change. When it came over me, when it comes over me, it feels like it's coming over me like a flu. — Sarah Silverman

Many depressed people have been hurt and rejected by others. They feel as though basic relational needs have not been met, and they will be stuck in depression until they are. Rejection from parents, spouses, or friends has left a profound emptiness that feels like an emotional handicap. What does this have to do with the heart? Consider first the example of Jesus. He is God, but he was truly human. If anything is clear from his life, he didn't get love from people, he never prayed that he would know the love of other people, and he didn't seem emotionally undone by rejection and misunderstanding. Rather, his deepest needs, as noted in his prayers, were for the glory of his Father to be revealed and for his spiritual children to be protected from the evil one and united in love (John 17). The — Edward T. Welch

The fact is that when you admit that you can't blame anyone or anything else, you begin to blame yourself. The human mind gives up trying to find an executioner, but still it must blame someone. Anger that is not expressed tends to turn inward and, instead, attacks the very one who feels it. You move from anger and guilt into depression. — Kate McGahan

I sit in front of the notebook and feel like it's just too late for me. And that this book isn't working, nothing's working, everything feels like it's made of spiders. — Jessica Abel

If you are reading this book and you feel that way too then you are not alone. I understand how you feel. I think that anyone who has suffered from even mild depression understands how it feels. Yet we forget that others understand our suffering. We withdraw, isolate or shut down completely. We lose ourselves in our selves, and in the illness.
It doesn't have to be that way. If we connect with even one other human being who understands, we take one step out of the illness. Life is about connection. There is nothing else. Depression is the opposite; it is an illness defined by alienation. So I offer this book by way of connection. I offer it, too, as a source of hope. I hope that by sharing what I was like, what happened and what I am like now, that it may bring someone else comfort. — Sally Brampton

Even among familiar faces, people often feel invisible and desolate, like an island in cold waters or a shadow apart from the crowd. Be the reason another never feels alone. — Richelle E. Goodrich

The madness of depression is, generally speaking, the antithesis of violence. It is a storm indeed, but a storm of murk. Soon evident are the slowed-down responses, near paralysis, psychic energy throttled back close to zero. Ultimately, the body is affected and feels sapped, drained. — William Styron

Manic-depression distorts moods and thoughts, incites dreadful behaviors, destroys the basis of rational thought, and too often erodes the desire and will to live. It is an illness that is biological in its origins, yet one that feels psychological in the experience of it, an illness that is unique in conferring advantage and pleasure, yet one that brings in its wake almost unendurable suffering and, not infrequently, suicide. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Mild depression is a gradual and sometimes permanent thing that undermines people the way rust weakens iron. It is too much grief at too slight a cause, pain that takes over from the other emotions and crowds them out. Such depression takes up bodily occupancy in the eyelids and in the muscles that keep the spine erect. It hurts your heart and lungs, making the contraction of involuntary muscles harder than it needs to be. Like physical pain that becomes chronic, it is miserable not so much because it is intolerable in the moment as because it is intolerable to have known it in the moments gone and to look forward only to knowing it in the moments to come. The present tense of mild depression envisages no alleviation because it feels like knowledge. — Andrew Solomon

A lot of people don't realize that depression is an illness. I don't wish it on anyone, but if they would know how it feels, I swear they would think twice before they just shrug it. — Jonathan Davis