If you are still being hurt by an event that happened to you at twelve, it is the thought that is hurting you now.

You may not become a celebrity. You may even experience lots of illness or divorce, or unhappiness. But I think there is still a thread of individual character that determines how you live through those things.

It's important to ask yourself, How am I useful to others? What do people want from me? That may very well reveal what you are here for.

In the history of the treatment of depression, there was the dunking stool, purging of the bowels of black bile, hoses, attempts to shock the patient. All of these represent hatred or aggression towards what depression represents in the patient.

I'm cautious about a lot of words

Depression opens the door to beauty of some kind.

The Greek idea of fate is moira, which means "portion." Fate rules a portion of your life. But there is more to life than just fate. There is also genetics, environment, economics, and so on. So it's not all written in the book before you get here, such that you don't have to do anything. That's fatalism.