35 Hauntingly Poetic Descriptions Of Living With Depression

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1.

The sadness will last forever.
—Vincent van Gogh

2.

I bet if you cut open my stomach, the black slug of depression would slide out.
—Jasmine Warga

3.

It’s not so much that I want to die as that I’m tired of living.
—Rynosuke Akutagawa

4.

Everything was a broken line for me in those days. I was slipped into the empty spaces between words.
—Betsy Cornwell

5.

The sun stopped shining for me is all. The whole story is: I am sad. I am sad all the time and the sadness is so heavy that I can’t get away from it. Not ever.
—Nina LaCour

6.

Moonlight filtered in through the blinds illuminating their bedroom, but the bright glow couldn’t penetrate the darkness that surrounded her heart.
—J. E. B. Spredemann

7.

I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep.
—Ursula K. Le Guin

8.

He could only consider me as the living corpse of a would-be suicide, a person dead to shame, an idiot ghost.
—Osamu Dazai

9.

There is absolutely no worse death curse than the humdrum daily existence of the living dead.
—Anthon St. Maarten

10.

There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds.
—Laurell K. Hamilton

11.

It’s a strange moment when you realize that you don’t want to be alive anymore.
—Allie Brosh

12.

Sometimes I feel like I’m disappearing.
—Ainslie Hogarth

13.

I feel unspeakably lonely. And I feel—drained. It is a blank state of mind and soul I cannot describe to you as I think it would not make any difference.
—Anne Sexton

14.

The fatigue I’ve gathered year after year and stored inside now heaves a muted cry of helplessness. Nothing but fatigue, rounding my shoulders, heavier than ever on this late autumn day with a useless sun, a world of unforgiving disasters. So many struggles and tragedies, so much sorrow and egotism in this dark, in this rotting century of hate.
—Emil Dorian

15.

Depression/The assassin inside me
—HastyWords

16.

I’m sorry to say it, but it was hard on me to see life continue all around.
—Diet Eman

17.

I sat in the gradually chilling room, thinking of my whole past the way a drowning man is supposed to, and it seemed part of the present, part of the gray cold and the beggar woman without a face and the moulting birds frozen to their own filth in the Orangerie. I know now I was in the throes of some small glandular crisis, a sublimated bilious attack, a flick from the whip of melancholia, but then it was terrifying…nameless….
—M. F. K. Fisher

18.

Because that’s the thing about depression. When I feel it deeply, I don’t want to let it go. It becomes a comfort. I want to cloak myself under its heavy weight and breathe it into my lungs. I want to nurture it, grow it, cultivate it. It’s mine. I want to check out with it, drift asleep wrapped in its arms and not wake up for a long, long time.
—Stephanie Perkins

19.

…for a moment, she let herself be defeated, wished herself not exactly annihilation but into a temporary absence, into being nowhere and no one just for a little while.
—Sue Saliba

20.

And I felt like my heart had been so thoroughly and irreparably broken that there could be no real joy again, that at best there might eventually be a little contentment. Everyone wanted me to get help and rejoin life, pick up the pieces and move on, and I tried to, I wanted to, but I just had to lie in the mud with my arms wrapped around myself, eyes closed, grieving, until I didn’t have to anymore.
—Anne Lamott

21.

Slowly, my feelings started to shrivel up. The few that managed to survive the constant beatings staggered around like wounded baby deer, just biding their time until they could die and join all the other carcasses strewn across the wasteland of my soul.
—Allie Brosh

22.

When you’re lost in those woods, it sometimes takes you a while to realize that you are lost. For the longest time, you can convince yourself that you’ve just wandered a few feet off the path, that you’ll find your way back to the trailhead any moment now. Then night falls again and again, and you still have no idea where you are, and it’s time to admit that you have bewildered yourself so far off the path that you don’t even know from which direction the sun rises anymore.
—Elizabeth Gilbert

23.

Anyone who has actually been that sad can tell you that there’s nothing beautiful or literary or mysterious about depression….Depression is like a heaviness that you can’t ever escape. It crushes down on you, making even the smallest things like tying your shoes or chewing on toast seem like a twenty-mile hike uphill. Depression is a part of you; it’s in your bones and your blood.
—Jasmine Warga

24.

God knows I often retire to my bed wishing (at times even hoping) that I might never wake up; and in the morning I open my eyes, see the sun once again, and am miserable.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

25.

And with that, I’m going to crawl into bed and try to erase all that has happened today.
—Amber Silvia

26.

My pillow is as good as any ocean
to drown in the nightmare of myself.
I swam all the way here from the moon.
—Casey Renee Kiser

27.

Some might say that suicide is for cowards. I dare them to hold a razor to their wrists and say it as they slice into their own flesh.
—Aubrey Dark

28.

I just wanna have fun and breathe, but I can’t do either one of them when I suffocate myself with depression.
—Lisa M. Cronkhite

29.

still, what could i say? that i didn’t just feel depressed – instead, it was like the depression was the core of me, of every part of me, from my mind to my bones? that if he got blue, i got black? that i hated those pills so much, because i knew how much i relied on them to live?
—David Levithan

30.

You would like to read, but somehow the rain gets into the book, too; not literally, and yet it really does, the letters are meaningless, and all you hear is the rain.
—Sándor Márai

31.

The authority of depression is horrifying. I felt like my brain was busted and that I could never feel good again. I really thought that I was never gonna heal.
—Dick Cavett

32.

When she enters the room she immediately shuts the window and draws the shade with a quick, hard pull. Then she throws herself down on the bed, and the sobbing starts all over again. It’s as if she can’t sob when she’s not in a lying position—either that or she has to start sobbing the moment she lies down.
—Stig Dagerman

33.

I pull my lower lip all the way in between my teeth. If I try hard enough, maybe I can gobble my whole self this way…. I didn’t try hard enough to swallow myself.
—Laurie Halse Anderson

34.

I’ve been clinging to this world like a discarded shell of an insect stuck to a branch, about to be blown off forever by a gust of wind.
—Haruki Murakami

35.

The tapestry of my life was a ruin of unraveling threads. The brightest parts were a nonsensical madman’s weaving. And now every day was a grey stitch, laid down with an outpatient’s patience, one following the next following the next, a story in lines, like a railway track to nowhere, telling absolutely nothing.
—Alexis Hall