Best 14 quotes of Daphne Merkin on MyQuotes

Everyone lies about sex, more or less, to themselves if not to others, to others if not to themselves, exaggerating its importance or minimizing its pull.

Everything felt fragile and freshly come upon, but for now, at least, my depression had stepped back, giving me room to move forward. I had forgotten what it was like to be without it, and for a moment I floundered, wondering how I would recognize myself. I knew for certain it would return, sneaking up on me when I wasn’t looking, but meanwhile there were bound to be glimpses of light if only I stayed around and held fast to the long perspective. It was a chance that seemed worth taking.

How much simpler it would be all around if you could put your mind in a cast, like a broken ankle, and elicit murmurings of sympathy from other people instead of skepticism (“You can’t really be feeling as bad as all that”) and in some cases outright hostility (“Maybe if you stopped thinking about yourself so much ”).

I see depression as an exponentially developed version of a human condition. Meaning I always think in the end it's humanizing. People who never suffer from depression I find suspect. I assume Donald Trump is not a sufferer from depression.

I think the experience of depression that I most think remains true throughout the years is it's very isolating. That to me is its strongest quality. That you're alone in a room, that you're cut off, you're just sort of stuck with it. It puts up a wall.

It was through reading that I discovered the crucial, even sacrosanct place the rituals of drinking held in the American imagination - the ingenious way alcohol seemed to lubricate everything from onerous chitchat to self-conscious sexual advances.

Much as I try to disguise myself, there is never a time when I'm not aware of being overweight.

My mother is the source of my unease in the world and thus the only person who can make me feel at home in the world.

Naturally, our own irrational demands strike us as having the force of needs, while other people's needs strike us as capricious indulgences.

No bill of sexual rights can hold its own against the lawless, untamable landscape of the erotic imagination.

Then again, as those who suffer from it know, intractable depression creates a planet all its own, largely impermeable to influence from others except as shadow presences, urging you to come out and rejoin the world, take in a movie, go out for a bite, cheer up.

There's something stubborn about families, unhappy ones in particular: they outlive themselves, and then they live on.

It was one thing to be depressed in your twenties or thirties, when the aspect of youth gave it an undeniable poignancy, a certain tattered charm; it was another thing entirely to be depressed in middle age, when you were supposed to have come to terms with life’s failings, as well as your own.

Spring and Fall” …cannot be said to be about depression - but of course, to someone who is depressed, everything is about depression. …For some of us, the sadness running under the skin of things begins as a trickle and ends up a hemorrhage, staining everything.