One of the terrible fallacies of contemporary psychotherapy is that if people would just say how they felt, a lot of problems could be solved.

Somehow, like so many people who get depressed, we felt our depressions were more complicated and existentially based than they actually were.

There are always those to whom all self-revelation is contemptible, unless it ends with a noble thanks to the gods for the Unconquerable Soul.

I wonder if that's how darkness wins, by convincing us to trap it inside ourselves, instead of emptying it out.I don't want it to win.

Something I learned when overcoming anxiety and depression was that I was not searching for happiness but for satisfaction with and in my life.

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.

...even my work, the largest of the pots and pans I'd placed under my life's leaking ceiling, had become to small to contain my misery.

That’s why; he’s worried about how his life is turning out, and he’s lonely, and lonely people are the bitterest of them all.

The day had begun to feel tinny: a pretend day, a dream day, that for some unaccountable reason she had to go on and on with as if it were real.

mia knew the weight that said nothing will ever be different from what it is now, that the world has lost all dimension and has turned to stone.

...for if we try to go on protecting them we prevent them from growing up to be ordinary, confident adults, capable of looking after themselves.

You have a history of starving yourself," he says gently.I lift my head. I meet his gaze. "I have a history that I don't like to talk about.

Unhappiness in a child accumulates because he sees no end to the dark tunnel. The thirteen weeks of a term might just as well be thirteen years.

I moved in front of the medicine cabinet. If I looked in the mirror while I did it, it would be like watching somebody else, in a book or a play.

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.