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“The rose-garden world of perfection is a lie... and a bore, too!”
― Joanne Greenberg, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

“Later, they began to explore the secret idea that Deborah shared with all the ill—that she had infinitely more power than the ordinary person and was at the same time also his inferior.”
― Joanne Greenberg, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

“A nut is someone whose noose broke.”
― Joanne Greenberg, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

“ghosts of the past still clutch at you in the present”
― Joanne Greenberg, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

“What good is your reality, when justice fails and dishonesty is glossed over and the ones who keep faith suffer”
― Joanne Greenberg, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”
― William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness

“This memory of my relative indifference is important because such indifference demonstrates powerfully the outsider’s inability to grasp the essence of the illness.”
― William Styron, Darkness Visible

“The danger is especially apparent if the young person is affected by what has been termed “incomplete mourning”—has, in effect, been unable to achieve the catharsis of grief, and so carries within himself through later years an insufferable burden of which rage and guilt, and not only dammed-up sorrow, are a part, and become the potential seeds of self-destruction. In”
― William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness

“The libido also made an early exit, as it does in most major illnesses—it is the superfluous need of a body in beleaguered emergency.”
― William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness

“In the absence of hope we must still struggle to survive, and so we do - by the skin of our teeth.”
― William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness

“Of the many dreadful manifestations of the disease, both physical and psychological, a sense of self-hatred—or, put less categorically, a failure of self-esteem—is one of the most universally experienced symptoms, and I had suffered more and more from a general feeling of worthlessness as the malady had progressed.”
― William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness

“...with their minds turned agonizingly inward, people with depression are usually dangerous only to themselves. The madness of depression is, generally speaking, the antithesis of violence.”
― William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness

“While I was able to rise and function almost normally during the earlier part of the day, I began to sense the onset of the symptoms at midafternoon or a little later- -gloom crowding in on me, a sense of dread and alienation and, above all, stifling anxiety.”
― William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness

“Respecting things that are difficult to measure, rather than dismissing them as unreal, is not rejecting science. It’s embracing science.”
― Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond

“Actually, very few topics of scientific research can be studied with controlled experiments. There are many fields that everyone accepts as science, even though laboratory experiments are difficult if not impossible—fields like astronomy, evolutionary biology, geology, and paleontology. The prestigious British Medical Journal published a tongue-in-cheek article claiming to examine whether parachutes help prevent deaths in people who jump out of airplanes. The authors had eliminated anecdotal evidence from consideration, including in their review only randomized controlled trials. Of course, they couldn’t find a single experiment in which people were randomly assigned to jump out of an airplane either with or without a parachute. They concluded: “The perception that parachutes are a successful intervention is based largely on anecdotal evidence.”
― Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond

“I hope to show that science and spirituality are compatible, that being spiritual doesn’t require you to abandon science”
― Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond

“There are many paths up the mountain to reach God and it really doesn’t matter which one you take, because when you get there to that mountaintop it is all the same love, light, peace, harmony, gratitude, wisdom, truth, and victory for everybody. There are no religions in heaven, just ‘jelly.”
― Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond

“A phenomenon that a number of people have noted while in deep depression is the sense of being accompanied by a second self �� a wraithlike observer who, not sharing the dementia of his double, is able to watch with dispassionate curiosity as his companion struggles against the oncoming disaster, or decides to embrace it. There is a theatrical quality about all this, and during the next several days, as I went about stolidly preparing for extinction, I couldn't shake off a sense of melodrama �� a melodrama in which I, the victim-to-be of self-murder, was both the solitary actor and lone member of the audience.”
― William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness

“We each devise our means of escape from the intolerable.”
― William Styron, A Tidewater Morning

“There are friends one makes at a youthful age in whom one simply rejoices, for whom one possesses a love and loyalty mysteriously lacking in the friendships made in after-years, no matter how genuine.”
― William Styron, Sophie’s Choice

“Everyone has the right to tell the truth about her own life.”
― Ellen Bass, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse

“To heal from child sexual abuse you must believe that you were a victim, that the abuse really did take place. This is often difficult for survivors. When you’ve spent your life denying the reality of your abuse, when you don’t want it to be true, or when your family repeatedly calls you crazy or a liar, it can be hard to remain firm in the knowledge that you were abused.”
― Ellen Bass, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse

“If you feel happy, enjoy it, because happiness doesn’t last forever. The nature of feelings is that they change. Go with the shifts in your own emotional rhythm.”
― Laura Davis, Allies in Healing: When the Person You Love Is a Survivor of Child Sexual Abuse

“A sense of humor is the best indicator that you will recover; it is often the best indicator that people will love you. Sustain that and you have hope.”
― 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

“I was overpowered by being in the world, by other people and their lives I couldn’t lead, their jobs I couldn’t do - overpowered even by jobs I would never want or need to do.”
― Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

“You don’t think in depression that you’ve put on a grey veil and are seeing the world through the haze of a bad mood. You think that the veil has been taken away, the veil of happiness, and that now you’re seeing truly.”
― Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon

“Then I repeated these words to my spirits: 'Leave me be; give me peace; and let me do the work of my life. I will never forget you.' Something about that incantation was particularly appealing to me. 'I will never forget you'-- as though one had to address the pride of the spirits, as though one wanted them to feel good about being exorcised.”
― Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

“Other illnesses, from alcoholism to heart disease, mask depression when it causes them; if one takes that into consideration, depression may be the biggest killer on earth.”
― Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon

“I still remember the moment. I ordered a chicken salad and it tasted like chalk. I knew I was depressed. And I went downhill so fast. That’s when I really started drinking. I just did everything to fuck myself up to the bitter end. I would just black out and drink and black out and drink and black out and drink. I always left suicide notes: if I don’t wake up, call my mother. I was using alcohol to kill myself. It was the easiest drug I knew; it was cheap; it was accessible. And it is respectable.”
― Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression