There is so much pain in the world, and most of these people keep theirs secret, rolling through agonizing lives in invisible wheelchairs, dressed in invisible bodycasts.Īntonin Artaud wrote on one of his drawings, “Never real and always true, ” and that is how depression feels. If only I had been disposable like yesterday’s paper! I would have thrown myself away so quietly then and been glad of the absence, glad in the grave if that was the only place that could allow some gladness. I knew that the voice of reason (“For heaven’s sake, just go downstairs!”) was the voice of reason, but I also knew that by reason I would deny all the poison within me, and I felt already some strange despairing ecstasy at the thought of the end. Soon they would hold the fingers I would need to take the right pills or to pull the trigger, and when I had died, they would be the only motion left. I felt the fatal tentacles of this despair wrapping themselves around my arms and legs.

I did not want to sit on the roof, though I was also aware that if I didn’t allow myself the relief of considering suicide, I would soon explode from within and commit suicide. I believe that words are strong, that they can overwhelm what we fear when fear seems more awful than life is good. People who claim not to understand why anyone would get addicted to drugs are usually people who haven’t tried them or who are genetically fairly invulnerable to them. Most experts point out, strong motivations for avoiding drugs but there are also strong motivations for taking them.

Specialists spend a lot of time formulating exotic hypotheses to account for substance abuse. Alcohol will slightly raise the endorphin level of people without the genetic basis for alcoholism it will dramatically raise the endorphin level of people with that genetic basis. People with family histories of alcoholism tend to have lower levels of endorphins- the endogenous morphine that is responsible for many of our pleasure responses- than do people genetically disinclined to alcoholism. Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression I chose fat and functional over slender and miserable. Let these quotes inspire you! The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression Quotes We compiled a list of 15 quotes that best summarise the message of Andrew Solomon in The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression.

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The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon