I thought members of this board might benefit from this, so here are a few of my favorite quotes - some about depression, some inspirational, some about being happy, some about nothing at all, but hopefully there's at least one that someone can relate to. I decided to pull all of these from books I've read or heard about so it wouldn't just be a random search in google for 'depression/inspirational quotes', and these are all quotes I've written down in my diary. I hope this helps someone, *anyone*, and if you have any book quotes of your own, feel free to post them in the replies! And let me know if you relate to any of these.
"It was one shining moment of glory that was instantly gone. Whereas life, real life, is different and can’t even be appraised as simply “happy”, but only in terms of “Yes, I’ll take it all, thanks,” or “no, I believe I won’t.” Happy, as my poor father used to say, is a lot of hooey. Happy is a circus clown, a sitcom, a greeting card. Life, though, life’s about something sterner. But also something better. A lot better. Believe me."
- Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land, p 255, Alfred A. Knopf, 2006
"We've all got meanness in us but we've all got goodness too and the only thing worth living for is the good and that is why we've got to make sure and pass it on."
Where the Heart Is
"Stuff your eyes with wonder… live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories."
-Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
"Being in love was like China: you knew it was there, and no doubt it was very interesting, and some people went there, but I never would. I'd spend all my life without ever going to China, but it wouldn't matter, because there was all the rest of the world to visit... And I thought: am I really going to spend the rest of my life without feeling that again? I thought: I want to go to China. It's full of treasures and strangeness and mysteries and joy."
The Amber SpyglassPhilip Pullman
"The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance, but live right in it, under its roof."
— Barbara Kingsolver (Animal Dreams)
"She wants to know if I love her, that's all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there, like new batteries in the flashlight in the emergency kit in the hall closet."
— EL&IC
"She had learned early in her life that if you discovered something that made you tighten inside, you had better try to learn more about it. If you simply ignored the feeling, you would never know what might happen, and in many ways that was worse than finding out you were wrong in the first place. Because if you were wrong, you could go forward in your life without ever looking back over your shoulder and wondering what might have been."
- Message in a Bottle
"Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost."
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
"We all need someone to look at us. we can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under. the first category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, in other words, for the look of the public. the second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes. they are the tireless hosts of cocktail parties and dinners. they are happier than the people in the first category, who, when they lose their public, have the feeling that the lights have gone out in the room of their lives. this happens to nearly all of them sooner or later. people in the second category, on the other hand, can always come up with the eyes they need. then there is the third category, the category of people who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love. their situation is as dangerous as the situation of people in the first category. one day the eyes of their beloved will close, and the room will go dark. and finally there is the fourth category, the rarest, the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. they are the dreamers."
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
"There had to be the dark and muddy waters so that the sun could have something to background its flashing glory."
~"A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" Betty Smith
“Her face occupied that place I thought I lived in alone.”
The Time of Our Singing by Richard Powers
"Some people feel like they don't deserve love. They walk away quietly into empty spaces, trying to close the gaps of the past."
~ Chris McCandless (Into the Wild)
"She did refer, however, to her own misfortune at the hands of love some sixty years earlier. 'You never get over it ... But you get to where it doesn't bother you so much.' "
~"The Virgin Suicides" Jeffrey Eugenides
"Maybe everyone can live beyond what they're capable of."
— Markus Zusak (I Am the Messenger)
“You gave your life to become the person you are right now. Was it worth it?”
Richard Bach (One)
"The trouble with words is that no matter how much sense they make in theory, they can't change what you feel inside."
~"Beautiful Malice" Rebecca James
"The man carried index cards in his pocket, and his children often saw him writing on these cards. They thought he was writing notes about farm chores. When he died, one of his kids discovered the index cards were a running diary; they were notes of desperation to himself. He wanted a bigger life than the farm, but was destined to die never having tried for that life.
It was a town filled with people like that."
Dale Maharidge (Denison, Iowa)
“We take our own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities of the angels, so we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear.”
- G.K. Chesterton, “Orthodoxy”
“We must continue to struggle through our confusion, to insist on being human.”
R.D. Lang
“Even though you’re refracted, you’re still you.”
From Steve Martin’s play “Picasso at the Lapin Agile”
"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing but burn, burn, burn like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww'."
On the Road--Jack Kerouac
And I'll cap this off with my ultimate favorite two quotes, ever, both from Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik:
“You can’t run away from a.) Reality, b.) American Culture, or c.) Yourself,” our friends all said compositely.
“But you can run away,” we said under our breaths, and we did.
-
The hardest thing to convey is how lovely it all is and how that loveliness seems all you need. The ghosts that haunted you in New York or Pittsburgh will haunt you anywhere you go, because they’re your ghosts and the house they haunt is you. But they become disconcerted, shaken confused for half a minute, and in that moment on a December at four o’clock when you’re walking from the bus stop to the rue Saint-Dominique and the lights are twinkling across the river–only twinkling in the bateaux-mouches, luring the tourists, but still…–you feel as if you’ve escaped your ghosts if only because, being you, they’re transfixed looking at the lights in the trees on the other bank, too, which they haven’t seen before, either.
It’s true that you can’t run away from yourself. But we were right: you can run away.
"It was one shining moment of glory that was instantly gone. Whereas life, real life, is different and can’t even be appraised as simply “happy”, but only in terms of “Yes, I’ll take it all, thanks,” or “no, I believe I won’t.” Happy, as my poor father used to say, is a lot of hooey. Happy is a circus clown, a sitcom, a greeting card. Life, though, life’s about something sterner. But also something better. A lot better. Believe me."
- Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land, p 255, Alfred A. Knopf, 2006
"We've all got meanness in us but we've all got goodness too and the only thing worth living for is the good and that is why we've got to make sure and pass it on."
Where the Heart Is
"Stuff your eyes with wonder… live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories."
-Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
"Being in love was like China: you knew it was there, and no doubt it was very interesting, and some people went there, but I never would. I'd spend all my life without ever going to China, but it wouldn't matter, because there was all the rest of the world to visit... And I thought: am I really going to spend the rest of my life without feeling that again? I thought: I want to go to China. It's full of treasures and strangeness and mysteries and joy."
The Amber SpyglassPhilip Pullman
"The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance, but live right in it, under its roof."
— Barbara Kingsolver (Animal Dreams)
"She wants to know if I love her, that's all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there, like new batteries in the flashlight in the emergency kit in the hall closet."
— EL&IC
"She had learned early in her life that if you discovered something that made you tighten inside, you had better try to learn more about it. If you simply ignored the feeling, you would never know what might happen, and in many ways that was worse than finding out you were wrong in the first place. Because if you were wrong, you could go forward in your life without ever looking back over your shoulder and wondering what might have been."
- Message in a Bottle
"Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost."
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
"We all need someone to look at us. we can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under. the first category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, in other words, for the look of the public. the second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes. they are the tireless hosts of cocktail parties and dinners. they are happier than the people in the first category, who, when they lose their public, have the feeling that the lights have gone out in the room of their lives. this happens to nearly all of them sooner or later. people in the second category, on the other hand, can always come up with the eyes they need. then there is the third category, the category of people who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love. their situation is as dangerous as the situation of people in the first category. one day the eyes of their beloved will close, and the room will go dark. and finally there is the fourth category, the rarest, the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. they are the dreamers."
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
"There had to be the dark and muddy waters so that the sun could have something to background its flashing glory."
~"A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" Betty Smith
“Her face occupied that place I thought I lived in alone.”
The Time of Our Singing by Richard Powers
"Some people feel like they don't deserve love. They walk away quietly into empty spaces, trying to close the gaps of the past."
~ Chris McCandless (Into the Wild)
"She did refer, however, to her own misfortune at the hands of love some sixty years earlier. 'You never get over it ... But you get to where it doesn't bother you so much.' "
~"The Virgin Suicides" Jeffrey Eugenides
"Maybe everyone can live beyond what they're capable of."
— Markus Zusak (I Am the Messenger)
“You gave your life to become the person you are right now. Was it worth it?”
Richard Bach (One)
"The trouble with words is that no matter how much sense they make in theory, they can't change what you feel inside."
~"Beautiful Malice" Rebecca James
"The man carried index cards in his pocket, and his children often saw him writing on these cards. They thought he was writing notes about farm chores. When he died, one of his kids discovered the index cards were a running diary; they were notes of desperation to himself. He wanted a bigger life than the farm, but was destined to die never having tried for that life.
It was a town filled with people like that."
Dale Maharidge (Denison, Iowa)
“We take our own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities of the angels, so we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear.”
- G.K. Chesterton, “Orthodoxy”
“We must continue to struggle through our confusion, to insist on being human.”
R.D. Lang
“Even though you’re refracted, you’re still you.”
From Steve Martin’s play “Picasso at the Lapin Agile”
"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing but burn, burn, burn like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww'."
On the Road--Jack Kerouac
And I'll cap this off with my ultimate favorite two quotes, ever, both from Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik:
“You can’t run away from a.) Reality, b.) American Culture, or c.) Yourself,” our friends all said compositely.
“But you can run away,” we said under our breaths, and we did.
-
The hardest thing to convey is how lovely it all is and how that loveliness seems all you need. The ghosts that haunted you in New York or Pittsburgh will haunt you anywhere you go, because they’re your ghosts and the house they haunt is you. But they become disconcerted, shaken confused for half a minute, and in that moment on a December at four o’clock when you’re walking from the bus stop to the rue Saint-Dominique and the lights are twinkling across the river–only twinkling in the bateaux-mouches, luring the tourists, but still…–you feel as if you’ve escaped your ghosts if only because, being you, they’re transfixed looking at the lights in the trees on the other bank, too, which they haven’t seen before, either.
It’s true that you can’t run away from yourself. But we were right: you can run away.