Ashley > Ashley's Quotes

“Real love amounts to withholding the truth, even when you're offered the perfect opportunity to hurt someone's feelings”
― David Sedaris, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

“Since I am writing a book about depression, I am often asked in social situations to describe my own experiences, and I usually end by saying that I am on medication.
“Still?” people ask. “But you seem fine!” To which I invariably reply that I seem fine because I am fine, and that I am fine in part because of medication.
“So how long do you expect to go on taking this stuff?” people ask. When I say that I will be on medication indefinitely, people who have dealt calmly and sympathetically with the news of suicide attempts, catatonia, missed years of work, significant loss of body weight, and so on stare at me with alarm.
“But it’s really bad to be on medicine that way,” they say. “Surely now you are strong enough to be able to phase out some of these drugs!” If you say to them that this is like phasing the carburetor out of your car or the buttresses out of Notre Dame, they laugh.
“So maybe you’ll stay on a really low maintenance dose?” They ask. You explain that the level of medication you take was chosen because it normalizes the systems that can go haywire, and that a low dose of medication would be like removing half of your carburetor. You add that you have experienced almost no side effects from the medication you are taking, and that there is no evidence of negative effects of long-term medication. You say that you really don’t want to get sick again. But wellness is still, in this area, associated not with achieving control of your problem, but with discontinuation of medication.
“Well, I sure hope you get off it sometime soon,” they say. ”
― Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

“You are constantly told in depression that your judgment is compromised, but a part of depression is that it touches cognition. That you are having a breakdown does not mean that your life isn't a mess. If there are issues you have successfully skirted or avoided for years, they come cropping back up and stare you full in the face, and one aspect of depression is a deep knowledge that the comforting doctors who assure you that your judgment is bad are wrong. You are in touch with the real terribleness of your life. You can accept rationally that later, after the medication sets in, you will be better able to deal with the terribleness, but you will not be free of it. When you are depressed, the past and future are absorbed entirely by the present moment, as in the world of a three-year-old. You cannot remember a time when you felt better, at least not clearly; and you certainly cannot imagine a future time when you will feel better.”
― Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

“Depressed people cannot lead a revolution because depressed people can barely manage to get out of bed and put on their shoes and socks.”
― Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

“Me being in love with a girl and wanting her to be with me, doing what I need to do to make her stay with me; it affects no one, yet it’s terrifying to people and they think you’re a monster.”
― Sara Quin

“I live my life in a way that I feel completely comfortable with. I don't struggle with who I am, who I date, who I love, what I say or what I stand for, not just sexuality but everything.”
― Sara Quin

“The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.”
― Nat King Cole

“Even as a junkie I stayed true [to vegetarianism] - 'I shall have heroin, but I shan't have a hamburger.' What a sexy little paradox.”
― Russell Brand, My Booky Wook

“Have you been out in society recently? 'Cause it's SHIT.”
― Russell Brand

“Be led by your talent, not by your self-loathing; those other things you just have to manage.”
― Russell Brand, My Booky Wook

“For me happiness occurs arbitrarily: a moment of eye contact on a bus, where all at once you fall in love; or a frozen second in a park where it's enough that there are trees in the world.”
― Russell Brand

“Music has touched me deeply, sometimes to tears. But at the same time it's been life-affirming, because I've been grateful for the fact that I'm alive and human and capable of being so moved.”
― Brian Molko

“There's homophobia in every corner and pocket of this world but at the core you just love someone and want to make mixed tapes for them.”
― Sara Quin

“This is your captain speaking. Welcome aboard flight...one, from...here to there. We'll be cruising at a height of ten feet, going up to twelve and a half feet if we see anything big. And our copilot today is a flask of coffee.”
― Eddie Izzard

“Gay kids aren’t a “plot point” that you can play with. Gay kids are real, actual kids, teenagers, growing up into awesome adults, and they don’t have the books they need to reflect that. Growing up, my nose was constantly stuck in a book. Growing up as a lesbian, I was told over and over and over by the lack of gayness in said books that I did not exist. That I wasn’t important enough to tell stories about. That I was invisible. Why are we telling our kids this? Why are we telling them that they’re a minority, and they don’t deserve the same rights as straights, that they’re going to grow up in a world that despises them, that the intolerance of humanity will never change, that they’re worthless. It’s not true.”
― Sarah Diemer

“I don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there.”
― Oscar Wilde

“There's more to life than books, you know. But not much more.”
― Morrissey

“To me you are a work of art, and I would give you my heart - that's if I had one.”
― Morrissey

“You are who you are when nobody's watching.”
― Stephen Fry

“If you know someone who’s depressed, please resolve never to ask them why. Depression isn’t a straightforward response to a bad situation; depression just is, like the weather.

Try to understand the blackness, lethargy, hopelessness, and loneliness they’re going through. Be there for them when they come through the other side. It’s hard to be a friend to someone who’s depressed, but it is one of the kindest, noblest, and best things you will ever do.”
― Stephen Fry

“The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriousity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.”
― Stephen Fry, The Fry Chronicles

“If I had a large amount of money I should certainly found a hospital for those whose grip upon the world is so tenuous that they can be severely offended by words and phrases and yet remain all unoffended by the injustice, violence and oppression that howls daily about our ears.”
― Stephen Fry, Paperweight

“There’s a famous quote which goes something like, ‘You are what you are, having secretly become what you wanted to be’. Maybe there’s some truth to that. We like to think that society shapes us, but I don’t think that that’s the way it happens. Select, 1991”
― Mark Simpson, Saint Morrissey

“That, in essence, is the catastrophe of suicide for those who survive: not only the loss of someone, but the loss of the chance to persuade that person to act differently, the loss of the chance to connect.”
― Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

“There is something ironic in prejudice against the disabled and their families, because their plight might befall anybody. Straight men are unlikely to wake up gay one morning, and white children don't become black; but any of us could be disabled in an instant. People with disabilities make up the largest minority in America; they constitute 15 percent of the population, though only 15 percent of those were born with their disability and about a third are over sixty-five. Worldwide, some 550 million people are disabled. The disability-rights scholar Tobin Siebers has written, "The cycle of life runs in actuality from disability to temporary ability back to disablity, and that only if you are among the most fortunate.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

“If you wake up feeling no pain, you know you're dead. (Russian expression)”
― Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

“I met people on college campuses who were defining themselves as genderqueer to express revolutionary feelings, or to communicate their individuality; they were gender fluid without being gender dysphoric. This phenomenon may be culturally significant, but it has only a little bit in common with the people who feel they can have no authentic self in their birth gender.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

“The Internet," [Judy] Singer said, "is a prosthetic device for people who can't socialize without it." For anyone challenged by language and social rules, a communication system that does not operate in real time is a godsend.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

“Belonging is one of the things that makes life bearable, and it can be tough to look at a binary world and choose against both sides.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols