Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
— Albert Camus
For at the height of pleasure he had experienced a revelation that he could not believe, that he even refused to admit, which was that his illusory love for Fermina Daza could be replaced by an earthly passion.
— Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera (via fortuneandglory)
There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.
— The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (via whimsofmen)
That’s the thing about depression: A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight. But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it’s impossible to ever see the end.
— Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation.
Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reserved that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale.
So please try not to hate me. I am a flawed human being - a far more flawed human being than you realize. Which is precisely why I do not want you to hate me. Because if you were to do that, I would really go to pieces. I can’t do what you do: I can’t slip inside my shell and wait for things to pass.
— Murakami, Norwegian Wood.
Insanity comes in two basic varieties: slow and fast.
I’m not talking about onset or duration. I mean the quality of the insanity, the day-to-day business of being nuts.
There are a lot of names: depression, catatonia, mania, anxiety, agitation. They don’t tell you much.
The predominant quality of the slow form is viscosity.
Experience is thick. Perceptions are thickened and dulled. Time is slow, dripping slowly through the clogged filter of thickened perception. The body temperature is low. The pulse is sluggish. The immune system is half-asleep. The organism is torpid and brackish. Even the reflexes are diminished, as if the lower leg couldn’t be bothered to jerk itself out of its stupor when the knee is tapped.
Viscosity occurs on a cellular level. And so does velocity.
— Susana Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted.
Love almost replaces thought. Love is a burning forgetfulness of everything else.
— Victor Hugo, Les Miserables.
“Promise to give me a kiss on my brow when I am dead.—I shall feel it.”
She dropped her head again on Marius’ knees, and her eyelids closed. He thought the poor soul had departed. Eponine remained motionless. All at once, at the very moment when Marius fancied her asleep forever, she slowly opened her eyes in which appeared the sombre profundity of death, and said to him in a tone whose sweetness seemed already to proceed from another world:—
“And by the way, Monsieur Marius, I believe that I was a little bit in love with you.”
— Victor Hugo, Les Miserables.
A certain amount of reverie is good, like a narcotic in discreet doses. It soothes the fever, occasionally high, of the brain at work, and produces in the mind a soft, fresh vapor that corrects the all too angular contours of pure thought, fills up the gaps and intervals here and there, binds them together, and dulls the sharp corners of ideas. But too much reverie submerges and drowns.
— Victor Hugo, Les Miserables.
