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

That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful.

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

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

How can you hide from what never goes away?

If you are chronically down, it is a lifelong fight to keep from sinking

One of the terrible fallacies of contemporary psychotherapy is that if people would just say how they felt, a lot of problems could be solved.

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.

I don't think it matters how many parents you've got, as long as those who are around make their presence a good one.

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

It's nonverbal: I need love. I need the thing that happens when your brain shuts off and your heart turns on. And I know it's around me somewhere, but I just can't feel it.

Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.

The value of trust is very much like the value of dignity.

We don't realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme self who is eternally at peace.

It may be in the cultural particularities of people — in their oddities — that some of the most instructive revelations of what it is to be generically human are to be found.

Continue to share your heart with people even if it's been broken.

So who's the big red menace nowadays? Cuba. That's it? I'm sorry, but it's hard to whip up any us against them nationalist fervor about a country whose principal export is citizens who can swim.

I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.

I would never repudiate the fact that I am an Irishman

I’ve been all three. And now I’m undecided.

There is so much wonderful stuff and so many amazing people in this world.