Al Alvarez Quotes

Despair is a cavern beneath our feet and we teeter on its very brink.

People go through periods when things are dark and cloudy, and they talk dark and cloudy.

They always call depression the blues, but I would have been happy to waken to a periwinkle outlook. Depression to me is urine yellow, washed out, exhausted miles of weak piss.

Despair puts the last touch not only to our misery but also to our weakness.

I just felt as though I would never be happy again, and as if I had fallen into a big black hole.

There's only one great evil in the world today. Despair.

Despair is easy, or at least low cost.

They don’t need walls and water to keep the prisoners in, not when they’re trapped inside their own heads, incapable of a single cheerful thought. Most go mad within weeks - Lupin

It's one thing to be discouraged. It's another thing to have despair. Despair is when you think there's just no end to this [suffering]. There's no solution for this. Despair is when you think that your suffering has no purpose, and your suffering has no end.

Despair exaggerates not only our misery but also our weakness.

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?

When you're unhappy, I guess everything in the world - reading, eating, sleeping - has something buried somewhere inside it that just makes you unhappier.

Despair is the greatest of our errors.

I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.

I'm prone to a more depressed outlook on life.

No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.

Depression is so treacherous - it can be so alluring as well as punishing. After all, it's yours and yours alone - no one else can interfere with it.

It got to a point where I didn't care if I lived or I died.

'Melancholy' is prettier than 'depression'; it connotes a kind of nocturnal grace. Makes one feel more innocently beleaguered.

I thought I was dead inside.

I'm always sad.

When you're depressed, there's no calendar. There are no dates, there's no day, there's no night, there's no seconds, there's no minutes, there's nothing. You're just existing in this cold, murky, ever-heavy atmosphere, like they put you inside a vial of mercury.

I have nothing to make me miserable," she said, getting calmer; "but can you understand that everything has become hateful, loathsome, coarse to me, and I myself most of all? You can't imagine what loathsome thoughts I have about everything." "Why, whatever loathsome thoughts can you have?" asked Dolly, smiling. "The most utterly loathsome and coarse; I can't tell you. It's not unhappiness, or low spirits, but much worse. As though everything that was good in me was all hidden away, and nothing was left but the most loathsome.

Despair doth strike as deep a furrow in the brain as mischief or remorse.

Unhappiness was my god.