I’m officially off the rails.
You should try it.
— Effy Stonem, Skins
I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn’t have a god, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. I didn’t make for an interesting person. I didn’t want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone.
— Charles Bukowski
Some people, they can just move on, you know, mourn and cry and be done with it. Or at least seem to be. But for me, I don’t know. I didn’t want to fix it, to forget. It wasn’t something that was broken. It’s just something that happened. And I’m just finding ways, every day, of working around it. Respecting and remembering and getting on at the same time.
— Sarah Dessen (The Truth About Forever)
There are some things about myself I can’t explain to anyone. There are some things I don’t understand at all. I can’t tell what I think about things or what I’m after. I don’t know what my strengths are or what I’m supposed to do about them. But if I start thinking about these things in too much detail the whole thing gets scary. And if I get scared I can only think about myself. I become really self-centered, and without meaning to, I hurt people. So I’m not such a wonderful human being.
— HARUKI MURAKAMI
“Don’t make me happy. Please, don’t fill me up and let me think that something good can come out of any of this. Look at my bruises. Look at this cut. Do you see the cut inside of me? Do you see it growing before your very eyes, eroding me? I don’t want to hope for anything anymore.”
-Markus Zusak
Sometimes. Mostly, no. It’s like the people who believe they’ll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn’t work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you. If you see what I mean.
— THE GRAVEYARD BOOK, NEIL GAIMAN
Depression is such a cruel punishment. There are no fevers, no rashes, no blood tests to send people scurrying in concern. Just the slow erosion of self, as insidious as any cancer. And like cancer, it is essentially a solitary experience. A room in hell with only your name on the door.
— MARTHA MANNING, UNDERCURRENTS
When asked to name the one person absent from her life that she missed the most, she responded...
“The person I hoped I’d be by this point in my life”
Alice came to a fork in the road. ‘Which road do I take?’ she asked. ‘Where do you want to go?’ responded the Cheshire cat. ‘I don’t know,’ Alice answered. ‘Then,’ said the cat, ‘it doesn’t matter.’
Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.
— CARL JUNG
Didn’t you often feel as if the only way you could fully truly change yourself in the powerful way you yearned for was to die and then start again from scratch? Didn’t you often feel as if all the symbols and ideas fed to you since birth had become worn out like old shoes? Didn’t you ache for change but you didn’t know how to achieve it? And even if you knew how to do it, would you have had the guts to go forth?
— DOUGLAS COUPLAND
