When I felt as though I had reached land, it was like I was on a deserted sandy beach, feeling isolated and afraid to share with anyone the memories that haunted me.

You would like to read, but somehow the rain gets into the book, too; not literally, and yet it really does, the letters are meaningless, and all you hear is the rain.

Great griefs exhaust. They discourage us with life. The man into whom they enter feels something taken from him. In youth, their visit is sad; later on, it is ominous.

for a moment, she let herself be defeated, wished herself not exactly annihilation but into a temporary absense, into being nowhere and no one just for a little while.

He knows bad days. Bad days take him completely by surprise. They make him not trust the good days because it's likely something is lurking twenty-four hours away.

It weren’t too loo long before I seen something in me, had changed. A bitter seed was planted inside of me. And I just didn’t feel so, accepting, anymore.

I pull my lower lip all the way in between my teeth. If I try hard enough, maybe I can gobble my whole self this way.... I didn't try hard enough to swallow myself.

A part of my depression lies, I think, in my unanswered question: Where is home? I feel a sense, always, of trying to find my way back to a place that doesn't exist.

The horror of the Pit lay in the emergence from it, with the return of her will, her caring, and her feeling of the need for meaning before the return of meaning itself.

Of course I began to see Nikki, which was strange because I was staring into Danny's eyes, and Danny is a six-foot-three black man who looks nothing like my ex-wife.

God knows I often retire to my bed wishing (at times even hoping) that I might never wake up; and in the morning I open my eyes, see the sun once again, and am miserable.

I'm currently in the middle of a depression. I couldn't really tell you what set it off, but I think it stems from my cowardice, which confronts me at every turn.

There are edges around the black and every now and then a flash of color streaks out of the gray. But I can never really grasp any of the slivers of memories that emerge.

I have sometimes thought that I have been burdened with a pack of ten misfortunes, any one of which if borne by my neighbor would be enough to make a murderer out of him.

There is so much pain in the world, and most of these people keep theirs secret, rolling through agonizing lives in invisible wheelchairs, dressed in invisible bodycasts.