Andrew Solomon - The Noonday Demon (2000)

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Depressed people cannot lead a revolution because depressed people can barely manage to get out of bed and put on their shoes and socks.

Andrew Solomon
It is easy to keep secrets by being honest in an ironic tone of voice.

Andrew Solomon
I can see the beauty of glass objects fully at the moment when they slip from my hand

Andrew Solomon
We live in the right time, even if it doesn't always feel like it.

Andrew Solomon
You don't think in depression that you've put on a gray veil and are seeing the world through the haze of a bad mood. You think that the veil has been taken away, the veil of happiness, and that now you're seeing truly.

Andrew Solomon
Living with depression is like trying to keep your balance while you dance with a goat -- it is perfectly sane to prefer a partner with a better sense of balance.

Andrew Solomon
Psychologically, I will not have to seek far if I decide to kill myself, because in my mind and heart I am more ready for this than for the unplanned daily tribulations that mark off the mornings and afternoons.

Andrew Solomon
Mild depression is a gradual and sometimes permanent thing that undermines people the way rust weakens iron... Like physical pain that becomes chronic, it is miserable not so much because it is intolerable in the moment as because it is intolerable to have known it in the moments gone and to look forward only to knowing it in the moments to come.

Andrew Solomon
A large proportion of my best friends are a little bit crazy.... I try to be cautious with my friends who are too sane. Depression is itself destructive, and it breeds destructive impulses: I am easily disappointed in people who don't get it...

Andrew Solomon
If one imagines a soul of iron that weathers with grief and rusts with mild depression, then major depression is the startling collapse of the whole structure.

Andrew Solomon
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
Antonin Artaud wrote on one of his drawings, "Never real and always true," and that is how depression feels. You know that it is not real, that you are someone else, and yet you know that it is absolutely true.

Andrew Solomon
A sense of humor is the best indicator that you will recover; it is often the best indicator that people will love you. Sustain that and you have hope.

Andrew Solomon
People … don't want to be cured or changed or eliminated. They want to be whoever it is that they've come to be.

Andrew Solomon
The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and it was vitality that seemed to seep away from me in that moment.

Andrew Solomon
I believe that words are strong, that they can overwhelm what we fear when fear seems more awful than life is good.

Andrew Solomon
Then I repeated these words to my spirits: 'Leave me be; give me peace; and let me do the work of my life. I will never forget you.' Something about that incantation was particularly appealing to me. 'I will never forget you'— as though one had to address the pride of the spirits, as though one wanted them to feel good about being exorcised.

Andrew Solomon
Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance.

Andrew Solomon
Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don't believe it. Seek out the memories depression takes away and project them into the future. Be brave; be strong; take your pills. Exercise because it's good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds. Eat when food itself disgusts you. Reason with yourself when you have lost your reason.

Andrew Solomon
While people argue with one another about the specifics of Freud's work and blame him for the prejudices of his time, they overlook the fundamental truth of his writing, his grand humility: that we frequently do not know our own motivations in life and are prisoners to what we cannot understand. We can recognize only a small fragment of our own, and an even smaller fragment of anyone else's, impetus.

Andrew Solomon
I hated being depressed, but it was also in depression that I learned my own acreage, the full extent of my soul.

Andrew Solomon
That, in essence, is the catastrophe of suicide for those who survive: not only the loss of someone, but the loss of the chance to persuade that person to act differently, the loss of the chance to connect.

Andrew Solomon