quotes and coffee

"Since I am writing a book about depression, I am often asked in social situations to describe my own experiences, and I usually end by saying that I am on medication.
“Still?” people ask. “But you seem fine!” To which I invariably reply that I seem fine because I am fine, and that I am fine in part because of medication.
“So how long do you expect to go on taking this stuff?” people ask. When I say that I will be on medication indefinitely, people who have dealt calmly and sympathetically with the news of suicide attempts, catatonia, missed years of work, significant loss of body weight, and so on stare at me with alarm.
“But it’s really bad to be on medicine that way,” they say. “Surely now you are strong enough to be able to phase out some of these drugs!” If you say to them that this is like phasing the carburetor out of your car or the buttresses out of Notre Dame, they laugh.
“So maybe you’ll stay on a really low maintenance dose?” They ask. You explain that the level of medication you take was chosen because it normalizes the systems that can go haywire, and that a low dose of medication would be like removing half of your carburetor. You add that you have experienced almost no side effects from the medication you are taking, and that there is no evidence of negative effects of long-term medication. You say that you really don’t want to get sick again. But wellness is still, in this area, associated not with achieving control of your problem, but with discontinuation of medication.
“Well, I sure hope you get off it sometime soon,” they say."

-Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

2 notes - 22 May, 2013

"Everyone who terrifies you is sixty-five percent water. And everyone you love is made of stardust, and I know sometimes you cannot even breathe deeply, and the night sky is no home, and you have cried yourself to sleep enough times that you are down to your last two percent, but nothing is infinite, not even loss.
You are made of the sea and the stars, and one day you are going to find yourself again."

-Finn Butler

(Source: oofpoetry)

4,997 notes - 22 May, 2013

"Some people are terrible and broken, but humanity is good. I believe that."

-Hank Green

7 notes - 21 May, 2013

"Things do not happen. Things are made to happen."

-John. F. Kennedy

1 note - 18 May, 2013

"The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity."

-Ellen Parr

7 notes - 17 May, 2013

"We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for, I don’t know"

-W H Auden

1 note - 15 May, 2013

"There are all kinds of love in this world but never the same love twice"

-F Scott Fitzgerald

4 notes - 14 May, 2013

"The truth, as always, will be far stranger."

-Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey

7 notes - 13 May, 2013

The Commencement Address

fishingboatproceeds:

Some people have asked to read the commencement address I delivered this morning to the 2013 graduates of Butler University. So here it is.

My own commencement speaker, who shall remain nameless, began with a lame joke about how these speeches only come in two varieties: Short and bad. This raised my expectations, and then he went onto speak for 26 minutes, so I’m just going to tell you now: 12 minutes flat, 11:45 if you don’t laugh.

Congratulations to all of you here today, and I do mean all of you—parents, families, friends, professors, coaches. Every single person in Hinkle today has given something to make this moment possible for the class of 2013—well, except for me. I really just showed up and put on the robe.

16,796 notes - 12 May, 2013

"Crying does not indicate that you are weak. Since birth, it has always been a sign that you are alive."

-Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

27 notes - 12 May, 2013

"Maybe memories are like karaoke-where you realize up on the stage, with all those lyrics scrawling across the screen’s bottom, and with everybody clapping at you, that you didn’t know even half the lyrics to your all-time favourite song. Only afterwards, when someone else is up on stage humiliating themselves amid the clapping and laughing, do you realize that what you liiked most about your favourite song was precisely your ignorance of its full meaning- and you read more into it than maybe existed in the first place. I think it’s better to not know the lyrics to your life."

-Douglas Coupland, The Gum Thief

2 notes - 11 May, 2013

"Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life’s cruelest irony."

-Douglas Coupland, Shampoo Planet

6 notes - 10 May, 2013