#press

The diabolical thing about melancholy is not that it makes you ill but that it makes you conceited and shortsighted; yes almost arrogant. You lapse into bad taste, thinking of yourself as Heine's Atlas, whose shoulders support all the world's puzzles and agonies, as if thousands, lost in the same maze, did not endure the same agonies. ↗

— Hermann Hesse

#melancholy

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

The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny. ↗

— Edward Abbey

#oppression #subversion #totalitarianism #tyranny #wit

Bipolar robs you of that which is you. It can take from you the very core of your being and replace it with something that is completely opposite of who and what you truly are. Because my bipolar went untreated for so long, I spent many years looking in the mirror and seeing a person I did not recognize or understand. Not only did bipolar rob me of my sanity, but it robbed me of my ability to see beyond the space it dictated me to look. I no longer could tell reality from fantasy, and I walked in a world no longer my own. ↗

— Alyssa Reyans

#bipolar-disorder #bipolar-mother #depression #insanity #mental-health

[S]he stood for some moments gazing at the sisters, with affection beaming in one eye, and calculation shining out of the other. ↗

— Charles Dickens

#expression #eyes #hypocrisy #hypocrisy

I was sixteen and my mother was about to throw me out of the house forever, for breaking a very big rule, even bigger than the forbidden books. The rule was not just No Sex, but definitely No Sex With Your Own Sex. ↗

— Jeanette Winterson

#books #books-express #sex #sexuality #winterson

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