Quotes from book

Prozac Nation

“I don't want any more of this try, try again stuff. I just want out. I’ve had it. I am so tired. I am twenty and I am already exhausted.”

“That's what it's like in my head all the time, constant snow, constant weather patterns of all sorts - blizzards, cyclones.”

“Hemingway has his classic moment in "The Sun Also Rises" when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt. All he can say is, "Gradually, then suddenly." That's how depression hits. You wake up one morning, afraid that you're gonna live.”

“Just as our parents quieted us when we were noisy by putting us in front of the television set, maybe we're now learning to quiet our own adult noise with Prozac.”

“Everything's plastic, we're all going to die sooner or later, so what does it matter.”

“The measure of mindfulness, the touchstone for sanity in this society, is our level of productivity, our attention to responsibility, our ability to plain and simple hold down a job.”

“How can you hide from what never goes away? --Heraclitus”

“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.”

“Into every sunny life a little rain must fall.”

“I start to think there really is no cure for depression, that happiness is an ongoing battle, and I wonder if it isn't one I'll have to fight for as long as I live. I wonder if it's worth it.”

“Sometimes it feels like we're all living in a Prozac nation. The United States of Depression.”

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

“I need the thing that happens when your brain shuts off and your heart turns on.”

“I start to get the feeling that something is really wrong.”

“As soon as I was out in the street, I realized I didn't want to be alone after all, I realized I didn't want to be anything at all.”

“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.”

“… if you feel everything intensely, ultimately you feel nothing at all.”

“Mental illness is so much more complicated than any pill that any mortal could invent”

“Depression is about as close as you get to somewhere between dead and alive, and it's the worst.”