#press

An unchangeable colour rules over the melancholic: his dwelling is a space the colour of mourning. Nothing happens in it. No one intrudes. It is a bare stage where the inert I is assisted by the I suffering from that inertia. The latter wishes to free the former, but all efforts fail, as Theseus would have failed had he been not only himself but also the Minotaur; to kill him then, he would have had to kill himself ↗

— Alejandra Pizarnik

#melancholy #melancholy

Mental illness is so much more complicated than any pill that any mortal could invent ↗

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

#nationalism

Everything's plastic, we're all going to die sooner or later, so what does it matter. ↗

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

#prozac-nation #nationalism

In my case, I was not frightened in the least bit at the thought that I might live because I was certain, quite certain, that I was already dead. ↗

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

#nationalism

I have never been able to understand the complaint that a story is "depressing" because of its subject matter. What depresses me are stories that don't seem to know these things go on, or hide them in resolute chipperness; "witty stories," in which every problem is the occasion for a joke; "upbeat" stories that flog you with transcendence. Please. We're grown ups now. ↗

— Tobias Wolff

#witty

Never ask while you are doing it if what you are doing is fun. Don't introduce even your most reliably witty acquaintance as someone who will set the table on a roar. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#fun #pressure #wit #witty

Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair. ↗

— Andrew Solomon

#despair #loss #love #love

It's nonverbal: I need love. I need the thing that happens when your brain shuts off and your heart turns on. And I know it's around me somewhere, but I just can't feel it. ↗

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

#memoir #love

I'm in love with someone good and kind and gentle, and he's seen the darkness too, but somehow we've become each other's light. ↗

— Emma Forrest

#love #love

I felt shame - I see this clearly, now - at the instinctive recognition in myself of an awful enfeebling fatalism, a sense that the great outcomes were but randomly connected to our endeavors, that life was beyond mending, that love was loss, that nothing worth saying was sayable, that dullness was general, that disintegration was irresistible. ↗

— Joseph O'Neill

#true #life