Breakdown Quotes

“It is better to lock up your heart with a merciless padlock, than to fall in love with someone who doesn't know what they mean to you.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, The Infinity Sign

“You are constantly told in depression that your judgment is compromised, but a part of depression is that it touches cognition. That you are having a breakdown does not mean that your life isn't a mess. If there are issues you have successfully skirted or avoided for years, they come cropping back up and stare you full in the face, and one aspect of depression is a deep knowledge that the comforting doctors who assure you that your judgment is bad are wrong. You are in touch with the real terribleness of your life. You can accept rationally that later, after the medication sets in, you will be better able to deal with the terribleness, but you will not be free of it. When you are depressed, the past and future are absorbed entirely by the present moment, as in the world of a three-year-old. You cannot remember a time when you felt better, at least not clearly; and you certainly cannot imagine a future time when you will feel better.”
― Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

“And I know, knew for sure, with an absolute certainty, that this is rock bottom, this what the worst possible thing feels like. It is not some grand, wretched emotional breakdown. It is, in fact, so very mundane:…Rock Bottom is an inability to cope with the commonplace that is so extreme it makes even the grandest and loveliest things unbearable…Rock bottom is feeling that the only thing that matters in all of life is the one bad moment…Rock bottom is everything out of focus. It’s a failure of vision, a failure to see the world how it is, to see the good in what it is, and only to wonder why the hell things look the way they do and not—and not some other way.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“Instead of heading for a big mental breakdown, I decided to have a small breakdown every Tuesday evening.”
― Graham Parke, No Hope for Gomez!

“I write about adversity, I praise adversity, not to be pessimistic, but rather to strengthen myself. The more familiar that you are with it, the less likely you are to have a breakdown when it occurs. You become more reflective of its purpose, you understand God's reason for it, and are then able to make the best of everything that you are handed. The darkness is only frightening after constant sunshine.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“If you need to talk about your childhood, you’re safe with me. If you need to break into a million pieces, I’m right here, Lev. I’ll find them all, I’m good at details, and I’ll put you back together. You’re safe here.”
― Christine Feehan, Water Bound

“All reality about me now appeared to be in tatters, taken down and reduced to the civil war of its particles. I held on very, very tight indeed. Because in addition to that feeling, that disintegration, there was rage. I wanted to break something.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

“That was one other time when my whole body reacted to the fear and went out of my own control. My nerves came apart completely, and I started vomiting and vomiting. I couldn't stop. It had been such a narrow escape. I kept telling myself that I could take all of the pressure; but there were those times that my body seemed almost to shut itself down, to scream that what was happening was just too much.”
― Diet Eman, Things We Couldn't Say

“Crumbling is not an instant's Act
A fundamental pause
Dilapidation's processes
Are organized Decays.

'Tis first a Cobweb on the Soul
A Cuticle of Dust
A Borer in the Axis
An Elemental Rust—

Ruin is formal—Devil's work
Consecutive and slow—
Fail in an instant, no man did
Slipping—is Crash's law.”
― Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

“I'm on the verge of a total breakdown. Sciatica. Taxes. Cars. Fleas, possibly. It's an absurd existence.”
― Jonathan Ames, The Extra Man

“First: breakdown, impossible to sleep, impossible to stay awake, impossible to endure life, or, more exactly, the course of life. The clocks are not in unison; the inner one runs crazily on at a devilish or demoniac or in any case inhuman pace, the outer one limps along at its usual speed. What else can happen but that the two worlds split apart, and they do split apart, or at least clash in a fearful manner. There are doubtless several reasons for the wild tempo of the inner process; the most obvious one is introspection, which will suffer no idea to sink tranquilly to rest but must pursue each one into consciousness, only itself to become an idea, in turn to be pursued by renewed introspection.

Secondly: this pursuit, originating in the midst of men, carries one in a direction away from them. The solitude that for the most part has been forced on me, in part voluntarily sought by me –but what was this if not compulsion too? –is now losing all its ambiguity and approaches its dénouement. Where is it leading? The strongest likelihood is, that it may lead to madness; there is nothing more to say, the pursuit goes right through me and rends me asunder. Or I can –can I? –manage to keep my feet somewhat and be carried along in the wild pursuit. Where, then, shall I be brought? ‘Pursuit,’ indeed, is only a metaphor. I can also say, ‘assault on the last earthly frontier’, an assault, moreover, launched from below, from mankind, and since this too is a metaphor, I can replace it by the metaphor of an assault from above, aimed at me from above.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923

“She grabbed all her clothes from her wardrobe and flung them across the room, screaming her head off until she finally felt sane again. Perhaps tomorrow she would buy those cats. (Holly)”
― Cecelia Ahern, P.S. I Love You

“For a second, I thought about the lifetime of that sand. I envisioned it from its rocky beginnings as a boulder somewhere far away and long ago, to its breakdown in cobbles, to its further breakdown into pebbles, then to its further breakdown into coarse sand, then to its further break”
― Sean Norris, Heaven and Hurricanes

“Grief breaks down all but the crazy; it's a secret of your profession, one people don't want to know.”
― Stewart O'Nan, A Prayer for the Dying

“Hard to describe what those next years felt like to live through. Except as a hollowing out, a loss beyond repair...even as it kept begging to be repaired. While the promise of what had been so very close haunted me. In so many ways.

"So much in motion, such energy, it disguised the decay of things, the incremental rot. How much was hollowed out."

Impossible to tell how fast society was collapsing because history had been riddled through with disinformation, and reality was composed of half-fictions and full-on paranoid conspiracy theories. You couldn't figure out if collapse was a cliff or a gentle slope because all the mental constructs obscured it. Multinationals kept their monopolies, shed jobs or even their identities, but most did not go under. Governments became more autocratic, on average.

Here was fine, there was a disaster. But here was just a different kind of disaster. A thick mist drenched in the smoke of flares that kept curling back on us. Why fight a mist if all that lay ahead was more of the same?

Those of us who survived the pandemic, and all the rest, passed through so many different worlds. Like time travelers. Some of us lived in the past. Some in the present, some in an unknowable future. If you lived in the past, you disbelieved the conflagration reflected in the eyes of those already looking back at you. You mistook the pity and anger, how they despised you. How, rightly, they despised you.

So we stitched our way through what remained of life. The wounds deeper. The disconnect higher.

The shock that shattered our bones yet left us standing.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Hummingbird Salamander

“you look your woman in the eye and kill her by telling her the truth or you turn away and let her see what she wants. i try not to shake too much when i turn the lights out and the sobbing begins”
― Scott C. Holstad, Big Head Press Broadside Poem Collection

“It's okay to fall apart - those who never fall apart, never fly afar.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Insan Himalayanoğlu: It's Time to Defect

“All moveables of wonder, from all parts,
Are here—Albinos, painted Indians, Dwarfs,
The Horse of knowledge, and the learned Pig,
The Stone-eater, the man that swallows fire,
Giants, Ventriloquists, the Invisible Girl,
The Bust that speaks and moves its goggling eyes,
The Wax-work, Clock-work, all the marvellous craft
Of modern Merlins, Wild Beasts, Puppet-shows,
All out-o'-the-way, far-fetched, perverted things,
All freaks of nature, all Promethean thoughts
Of man, his dullness, madness, and their feats
All jumbled up together, to compose
A Parliament of Monsters.”
― William Wordsworth, The Prelude

“Caro, I don’t understand,” I gasped. “Why do you love me?”

“Just because … because the sky is blue and the sea is green.”

And then I broke.

Everything she’d told me was true. She’d loved me ten years ago, and all the years in between, and she still loved me now. And I didn’t know why; I didn’t understand, but maybe that didn’t matter, because she loved me, and I loved her and I always had. It had only ever been her. My Caro.”
― Jane Harvey-Berrick, Semper Fi

“This sad, dust-blackened place can't part us.”
― Sarah Mussi, Breakdown

“And I know if I ever kiss him, I will be his. And I won't be able to ever make it on my own again.”
― Sarah Mussi, Breakdown

“And I tremble from head to toe. And I look up at him and the wild look in his eye.”
― Sarah Mussi, Breakdown

“A writer's breakthrough is a breakdown with a smile.”
― Adrienne Posey

“The schizoid repression of feeling, and retreat from emotional relationships, may, however, go much further and produce a serious breakdown of constructive effort. Then the unhappy sufferer from incapacitating conflicts will succumb to real futility: nothing seems worth doing, interest dies, the world seems unreal, the ego feels depersonalized. Suicide may be attempted in a cold, calculated way to the accompaniment of such thoughts as 'I am useless, bad for everybody, I'll be best out of the way.' One patient who had never reached that point, said: 'I feel I love people in an impersonal way; it seems a false position, hypocritical. Perhaps I don't do any loving. I'm terrified when I see young people go off and being successful and I'm at a dead bottom, absolute dereliction, excommunicate.”
― Harry Guntrip, Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and the Self

“These poems are echoes from the time of breakdown and breakthrough—scribbled in the gap between the lightning and the thunder as I counted the seconds . . . .”
― L.M. Browning, Drive Through the Night

“I was fawning
I think I thought you were fawning
There was life around everything we touched
Most of me was very alive
And I think I thought you wanted to be”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“I see several officers in riot gear holding shotguns, as though anticipating the second coming of Bonnie and Clyde.”
― L.R. Dorn, With a Kiss We Die

“I discovered that my girlfriend had been sending hundreds of dollars to her secret lover during the breakdown of our relationship. She had been complaining to me that she had no money and wanted me to contribute more to the household!”
― Steven Magee

“You're not strong until you don't breakdown for your loved ones.”
― P.S. Jagadeesh Kumar

“Like fueling muscles, from breakdown to synthesis to recovery, nourish mind.”
― Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma, Rep By Rep