Quotes from Daphne Merkin

My mother is the source of my unease in the world and thus the only person who can make me feel at home in the world.

Much as I try to disguise myself, there is never a time when I'm not aware of being overweight.

Sometimes it seems to me that the private life no longer suffices for many of us, that if we are not observed by others doing glamorous things, we might as well not exist.

What would it be like as an adult to open my eyes with a feeling of even mild anticipation?

to someone who is depressed, everything is about depression.

Spring and Fall" …cannot be said to be about depression - but of course, to someone who is depressed, everything is about depression. …For some of us, the sadness running under the skin of things begins as a trickle and ends up a hemorrhage, staining everything.

I feel less and less up to the requirements of my life

to be awake is to be hauled back into a pained consciousness?

even on medication, there is nothing tempting enough to make me want to rise

I imagine a belief in God must come with a dazzling sense of purpose.

Should you chance to read it a second or third time, Wuthering Heights comes at you afresh, in part because the novel seems to vanish into its own delirious origins once you've finished it, leaving no footprints, and in part because it is a literary force of nature such as you've never encountered before.

I also recognize, however, that you can talk yourself blue in the face in a therapist's office about crucial failures of love or nurturance with little effect on the inner blackness you carry around with you.

Despair is always described as dull, when the truth is that despair has a light all its own, a lunar glow, the color of mottled silver.

You see, down here, where life hangs heavy like a suffocating cloak, I can't remember that I've ever felt any other way. I need to be reminded that there are reasons in the world to hold on, even if I have forgotten them; I tell myself if I can just hold on I will remember them, these reasons, they will come back to me.

It was one thing to be depressed in your twenties or thirties, when the aspect of youth gave it an undeniable poignancy, a certain tattered charm; it was another thing entirely to be depressed in middle age, when you were supposed to have come to terms with life's failings, as well as your own.