Daphne Merkin > Quotes

“Spring and Fall” …cannot be said to be about depression - but of course, to someone who is depressed, everything is about depression. …For some of us, the sadness running under the skin of things begins as a trickle and ends up a hemorrhage, staining everything.”
― Daphne Merkin, This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression

“I feel less and less up to the requirements of my life,”
― Daphne Merkin, This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression

“I also recognize, however, that you can talk yourself blue in the face in a therapist’s office about crucial failures of love or nurturance with little effect on the inner blackness you carry around with you.”
― Daphne Merkin, This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression

“Sometimes it seems to me that the private life no longer suffices for many of us, that if we are not observed by others doing glamorous things, we might as well not exist.”
― Daphne Merkin, The Fame Lunches: On Wounded Icons, Money, Sex, the Importance of Handbags, and Other Cultural Inquiries

“You see, down here, where life hangs heavy like a suffocating cloak, I can’t remember that I’ve ever felt any other way. I need to be reminded that there are reasons in the world to hold on, even if I have forgotten them; I tell myself if I can just hold on I will remember them, these reasons, they will come back to me.”
― Daphne Merkin, This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression

“to someone who is depressed, everything is about depression.”
― Daphne Merkin, This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression

“What would it be like as an adult to open my eyes with a feeling of even mild anticipation?”
― Daphne Merkin, This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression

“Despair is always described as dull, when the truth is that despair has a light all its own, a lunar glow, the color of mottled silver.”
― Daphne Merkin, This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression

“Then there is also this: How do you give up something that’s nestled in your marrow, this particular taste in loving, one that is crisscrossed with hate, with specks of long-ago humiliations endured but never forgotten? What I’m referring to is an appetite for a certain degree of debasement, being reduced to a panting, abject creature in the name of sexual pleasure. The fine-tuning of relative power that naturally obtains between couples pitched way up into the insistent blare of one who dominates and one who submits.”
― Daphne Merkin, 22 Minutes of Unconditional Love

“Should you chance to read it a second or third time, Wuthering Heights comes at you afresh, in part because the novel seems to vanish into its own delirious origins once you've finished it, leaving no footprints, and in part because it is a literary force of nature such as you've never encountered before.”
― Daphne Merkin

“It was one thing to be depressed in your twenties or thirties, when the aspect of youth gave it an undeniable poignancy, a certain tattered charm; it was another thing entirely to be depressed in middle age, when you were supposed to have come to terms with life’s failings, as well as your own.”
― Daphne Merkin, This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression

“even on medication, there is nothing tempting enough to make me want to rise,”
― Daphne Merkin, This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression

“I imagine a belief in God must come with a dazzling sense of purpose.”
― Daphne Merkin, This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression

“to be awake is to be hauled back into a pained consciousness?”
― Daphne Merkin, This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression