...occasionally I wished I could walk through a picture window and have the sharp, broken shards slash me to ribbons so I would finally look like I felt.

The most likely person to kill you is your wife, but that probably won't happen. What probably will happen is a million little betrayals of varying degrees of pain, brought on by people you love, the only ones who really can hurt you.

Rock bottom is an inability to cope with the commonplace that is so extreme it makes even the grandest and loveliest things unbearable...Rock bottom is everything out of focus. It's a failure of vision, a failure to see the world as it is, to see the good in what it is, and only to wonder why the hell things look the way they do and not some other way.

Depression is all about if you loved me you would. As in, if you loved me you would stop doing your schoolwork, stop going out drinking with your friends on a Saturday night, stop accepting starring roles in theater productions, and stop doing everything besides sitting here by my side and passing me Kleenex and aspirin while I lie and creak and cry and drown myself and you in my misery.

I wanted so much to forget the past, but it wouldn't go away, it hung around like an open wound that refused to scar over, an open window that no amount of muscle could shut.

I'd really like to write a book about Timothy McVeigh, but it would only work if he cooperated.

Years of depression have robbed me of that—well, that give, that elasticity that everyone else calls perspective.