No one who had never been depressed like me could imagine that the pain could get so bad that death became a star to hitch up to, a fantasy of peace someday which seemed better than any life with all this noise in my head.

A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight!

if only my whole life could be words and music, if only everything else could slip away.

In a typical mental health catch-22, the alienating nature of depression tends to keep its sufferers from finding their way to the very support groups that might help them.

Love is rather impotent and pitiful: My father must have told me a million times how much he loved me, but that emotion - assuming it was even real - hardly had the strength to counter the many other acts of wrong he committed against me. Contrary to romance novels and the love-conquers-all mentality that even those of us who grow up in an era of divorce are - in response to some atavistic instinct - still raised to believe, love is always a product and a victim of circumstances. It is fragile and small.

In the meantime, I could withdraw to my room, could hide and sleep as if I were dead

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.