Instead of seeing depression as a dysfunction, it is a functioning phenomenon. It stops you cold, sets you down, makes you damn miserable.

Our life is psychological, and the purpose of life is to make psyche of it, to find connections between life and soul.

Yes, there's genetics. Yes, there are chromosomes. Yes, there's biology. Yes, there are environment, sociology, parenting, economics, class, and all of that. But there is something else, as well.

Character forms a life regardless of how obscurely that life is lived and how little light falls on it from the stars.

Why do we focus so intensely on our problems? What draws us to them? Why are they so attractive? They have the magnet power of love: somehow we desire our problems; we are in love with them much as we want to get rid of them . . . Problems sustain us -- maybe that's why they don't go away. What would a life be without them? Completely tranquilized and loveless . . . There is a secret love hiding in each problem

To hope for nothing, to expect nothing, to demand nothing. This is analytical despair.

We forget that the soul has its own ancestors.