Bad enough to be ill, but to feel compelled to deny the very thing that, in its worst and most active state, defines you is agony indeed.

Hope is only the love of life.

I find it easy to spot a depressive. The illness is scrawled across them like graffiti.

One thing I know is true. Try never to abandon hope for if you do, hope will surely try to abandon you.

There is one thing we know about meaning: that meaning consists in attachment to something bigger than you are.

As to whether the depression will come back, it is every depressive's fear.

Sometimes I think depression should be called the coping illness. So many of us struggle on, not daring or knowing how to ask for help. More of us, terribly, go undiagnosed.

I had carried on when all I wanted was to be dead. I had stayed alive for other people. I never stayed alive for myself. I cannot begin to describe the intensity of that effort.

A part of my depression lies, I think, in my unanswered question: Where is home? I feel a sense, always, of trying to find my way back to a place that doesn't exist.

Everyone else has a work party, 'Kate said. 'So why shouldn't we? We're working hard at not being mad.

If our minds can hold us back, then they can push us forwards too.

Is romantic yearning an appetite for [H]eaven, or is it the ultimate refinement of covetousness?

Writing and achieving your goals is not failure, not having a goal to write in the first place is the start of failure.

Don't set your goals to be a star. Set your goals to be the best that you can be and go from there.

A chess tournament disguised as a circus.

I don't feel a yearning or a sense of missed opportunities. I don't have many regrets. So that's a nice feeling. To have no regrets and still have enough sense of adventure to take on risk.

I owe everything to the army.

He shimmered out, and I sat up in bed with that rather unpleasant feeling you get sometimes that you're going to die in about five minutes.

Experience teaches us not to assume that the obvious is clearly understood

What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise [in the future. But only if we set out to make this true and anticipate it so we look for the blessings until we find them].

Be blissful and enjoy your life; do not let yourself become obsessed with anything. Determine to use the rest of your life to benefit others as much as possible.