depression
I would rather be excused from your banquet of happiness.
The Table Talk and Omniana of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London: Oxford University Press, 1917), 153.
The sun shines brighter after a shower.
1001 Yiddish Proverbs by Fred Kogos (Secaucus, NJ: Castle Books, 1970), 82.
I wish one could be sure the suffering had a loving side. The thought to look down some day, and see the crooked steps we came, from a safer place, must be a precious thing…
May 1862 letter to Louise and Frances Norcross, in Emily Dickinson Letters, Emily Fragos ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 194.
You know what a thorough sufferer I can be. I not only hit bottom, I walk for miles and miles on it.
letter to Pascal Covici, dated November 10, 1959, in Saul Bellow: Letters (New York: Viking, 2010), 184.
When did the Dark happen?
The Letters of Emily Dickinson vol 2, ed. by Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958), 390.
Perhaps it goes without saying that I believe in the geographic cure. Of course you can’t out-travel sadness. You will find it has smuggled itself along in your suitcase. It coats the camera lens, it flavors the local cuisine. In that different sunlight, it stands out, awkward, yours, honking in the brash vowels of your native tongue in otherwise quiet restaurants. You may even feel proud of its stubbornness as it follows you up the bell towers and monuments, as it pants in your ear while you take in the view. I travel not to get away from my troubles but to see how they look in front of famous buildings or on deserted beaches. I take them for walks. Sometimes I get them drunk. Back at home we generally understand each other better.
An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008), 132.
Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul?
1819 letter to George and Georgiana Keats, in Selected Letter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), reissued, 233.
Don’t pin your blues on me.
“Quiet Man,” John Prine (Atlantic, 1972).
I never knew despair could lie.
The Liars’ Club (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 10th anniversary edition, 320.