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“Depressed people cannot lead a revolution because depressed people can barely manage to get out of bed and put on their shoes and socks.”
― The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
― The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
“It is too often the quality of happiness that you feel at every moment its fragility, while depression seems when you are in it to be a state that will never pass. Even if you accept that moods change, that whatever you feel today will be different tomorrow, you cannot relax into happiness like you can into sadness. For me, sadness has always been and still is a more powerful feeling; and if that is not a universal experience, perhaps it is the base from which depression grows. I hated being depressed, but it was also in depression that I learned my own acreage, the full extent of my soul. When I am happy, I feel slightly distracted by happiness, as though it fails to use some part of my mind and brain that wants the exercise. Depression is something to do. My grasp tightens and becomes acute in moments of loss: I can see the beauty of glass objects fully at the moment when they slip from my hand toward the floor.”
― The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
― The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
“There is a moment, if you trip or slip, before your hand shoots out to break your fall, when you feel the earth rushing up at you and you cannot help yourself, a passing, fraction-of-a-second terror. I felt that way hour after hour after hour. Being anxious at this extreme level is bizarre. You feel all the time that you want to do something, that there is some affect that is unavailable to you, that there’s a physical need of impossible urgency and discomfort for which there is no relief, as though you were constantly vomiting from your stomach but had no mouth.”
― The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
― The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
“Live by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.”
― Cat’s Cradle
― Cat’s Cradle
“The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality and my life, as I write this, is vital even when sad. I may wake up sometime next year without my mind again; it is not likely to stick around all the time. Meanwhile, however, I have discovered what I would have to call a soul, a part of myself I could never have imagined until one day, seven years ago, when hell came to pay me a surprise visit. It's a precious discovery. Almost every day I feel momentary flashes of hopelessness and wonder every time whether I am slipping. For a petrifying instant here and there, a lightning-quick flash, I want a car to run me over...I hate these feelings but, but I know that they have driven me to look deeper at life, to find and cling to reasons for living, I cannot find it in me to regret entirely the course my life has taken. Every day, I choose, sometimes gamely, and sometimes against the moment's reason, to be alive. Is that not a rare joy?”
― The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
― The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
Melissa’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Melissa’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
784 books
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58 friends
784 books
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98 friends
347 books
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62 friends
511 books
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40 friends
325 books
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99 friends
481 books
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35 friends
138 books
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38 friends
531 books
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337 friends
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