Andrei Platonov Quotes

I was exhausted and going through a terrible depression.

That's the whole trouble. When you're feeling very depressed, you can't even think.

My whole life has been merely a succession of miserable and unsuccessful denials of feelings or reason.

Doubt is thought's despair; despair is personality's doubt. . . . Doubt and despair . . . belong to completely different spheres; different sides of the soul are set in motion. . . . Despair is an expression of the total personality, doubt only of thought.

The want of a thing is perplexing enough, but the possession of it, is intolerable.

How my achievements mock me!

Oh, that's just great. I come all the way back here, risking major brain cell burnout, and you don't even believe me? I'm basically guaranteeing myself a lifetime of heartbreak, and all you have to say is that you think I'm not right in the head?

I drag myself out of nightmares each morning and find there's no relief in waking.

They must take me for a fool, or even worse, a lunatic. And no wonder ,for I am so intensely conscious of my misfortune and my misery is so overwhelming that I am powerless to resist it and am being turned into stone, devoid of all knowledge or feeling.

She fell into the moody, miserable state of mind which often comes when strong wills have to yield to the inevitable.

I couldn't allow myself to think about her very long; if I had I would have jumped off the bridge. It's strange. I had become so reconciled to this life without her, and yet if I thought about her only for a minute it was enough to pierce the bone and marrow of my contentment and shove me back again into the agonizing gutter of my wretched past.

But day after day of depression, the kind that doesn’t seem to merit carting me off to a hospital but allows me to sit here on this stoop in summer camp as if I were normal, day after day wearing down everybody who gets near me. My behavior seems, somehow, not acute enough for them to know what to do with me, though I’m just enough of a mess to be driving everyone around me crazy.

Here's the difficulty about suicide: it is an act of ambition that can be committed only when one has passed beyond ambition.

I haven't had a very good day. I think I might still be hung over and everyone's dead and my root beer's gone.

There came a time in every prolonged effort when he had a moment of near panic, or 'terror in a lonely place', the original semantic content of the word. The lonely place was his own mind.

I walked into my own book, seeking peace. It was night, and I made a careless movement inside the dream; I turned too brusquely the corner and I bruised myself against my madness.

Fredrika Bimm, what do you think you're doing?" "Freaking out. Losing my mind. Thinking about snapping your husband's spine. Squashing the urge to vomit. Wishing I had died at childbirth." "Oh, you say that when you don't get a prize in your Lucky Charms.

It wasn't like I was clinically depressed, but I was so down. I think I was probably depressed. Nothing went my way since college, and I put my head down and kind of pitied myself. That wasn't the right way to go.

It makes you not believe in anything, when you do every single thing you can do right, and then there's still some way to mess it up.

I was banned when I feel I was at my peak, and anyone in my shoes would feel the same way I did and would also have gone through the whole range of emotions that I did.

I remember playing games and having tears roll down my face because it felt like it was never going to be good enough.

I hit my head against the wall because I don't want to know all the terrible things that I know about. I don't want to feel all these wretched things, but they're in me already. If I don't get rid of them, I'm not ever going to feel anything else.

In Paris on a chilling evening late in October of 1985 I first became fully aware that the struggle with the disorder in my mind - a struggle which had engaged me for several months - might have a fatal outcome.

Fear and Guilt are the only enemies of man.

To have lost is less disturbing than to wonder if we may possibly have won; and Eustacia could now, like other people at such a stage, take a standing-point outside herself, observe herself as a disinterested spectator, and think what a sport for Heaven this woman Eustacia was.