#depress

I find nothing more depressing than optimism. ↗

— Paul Fussell

#find #i #more #nothing #optimism

After Bush was elected in 2004 - please note that I didn't say 're-elected' - and I was walking around in my befuzzed state of confusion and low-grade depression, I set out more or systematically to read writers who'd grappled with that fundamental question of what America is, why it is the way it is. ↗

— Ben Fountain

#america #around #bush #confusion #depression

Hospitals are closing across the country due to the burden of illegal immigration, college students find that summer jobs have dried up due to illegal immigration, and wages across the board are depressed by the overwhelming influx of cheap and illegal labor. ↗

— Elton Gallegly

#board #burden #cheap #closing #college

This is the great lesson the depressive learns: Nothing in the world is inherently compelling. Whatever may be really “out there” cannot project itself as an affective experience. It is all a vacuous affair with only a chemical prestige. Nothing is either good or bad, desirable or undesirable, or anything else except that it is made so by laboratories inside us producing the emotions on which we live. And to live on our emotions is to live arbitrarily, inaccurately—imparting meaning to what has none of its own. Yet what other way is there to live? Without the ever-clanking machinery of emotion, everything would come to a standstill. There would be nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to be, and no one to know. The alternatives are clear: to live falsely as pawns of affect, or to live factually as depressives, or as individuals who know what is known to the depressive. How advantageous that we are not coerced into choosing one or the other, neither choice being excellent. One look at human existence is proof enough that our species will not be released from the stranglehold of emotionalism that anchors it to hallucinations. That may be no way to live, but to opt for depression would be to opt out of existence as we consciously know it. ↗

— Thomas Ligotti

#emotion #the-horror #experience

Some people say my work is often depressing and pessimistic, with the emphasis on death, blood, overcrowding, strange beings and so on, but I don't really think it is. ↗

— H. R. Giger

#blood #death #depressing #emphasis #i

I, I don't think anybody's continually happy, uh, except idiots, you know. You know, you have to have little moments of depression. ↗

— Rube Goldberg

#continually #depression #except #happy #i

Lately, though, he'd just been tired in general. Tired of people. Tired of books and TV and the nightly news and songs on the radio he'd heard years before and hadn't liked much in the first place. He was tired of his clothes and tired of his hair and tired of other people's clothes and other people's hair. He was tired of wishing things made sense. He'd gotten to a point where he was pretty sure he'd heard everything anyone had to say on any given subject and so it seemed he spent his days listening to old recordings of things that hadn't seemed fresh the first time he'd heard them. Maybe he was simply tired of life, of the absolute effort it took to get up every goddamned morning and walk out with into the same fucking day with only slight variations in the weather and food. He wondered if this was what clinical depression felt like, a total numbness, a weary lack of hope. ↗

— Dennis Lehane

#food

When I’m feeling down, I make myself a big bowl of Up Soup. The bowl only looks empty, but in reality it’s full of hope. Grab a spoon, there’s plenty for both of us. 
 ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#bowl #depressed #depression #eat #empty

Good humor is a tonic for mind and body. It is the best antidote for anxiety and depression. It is a business asset. It attracts and keeps friends. It lightens human burdens. It is the direct route to serenity and contentment. ↗

— Grenville Kleiser

#anxiety #asset #attracts #best #body

Jam on a winter took away the blue devils. It was like tasting summer. ↗

— Sandra Dallas

#food #jam #food