55+ Depression Quotes To Read When You Need To Feel Like 'Someone Gets It'

When you live with depression, it can feel overwhelming trying to help others understand what that means. They can’t see the lens you see life through, which can make it harder for them to show compassion or offer the kind of support you need. Honestly, sometimes even just feeling like “someone gets it” can make a big difference. Need a bit of guidance? Sharing depression quotes could be a great way to clue others in to how depression colors your world. And reading words from people who relate to you on such a deep, personal level can also make you feel a lot less alone.

To that last point, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), depression is common — an estimated five percent of adults globally live with it. So, know this: You aren’t alone. You aren’t, friend.

The next time you have trouble expressing the way you feel, we hope we can take at least one thing off your plate by offering the following quotes about living with depression.

Insightful Quotes About Depression

1. “Depression is being colorblind and constantly told how colorful the world is.” — Atticus
2. “I found that with depression, one of the most important things you could realize is that you’re not alone.” — Dwayne Johnson
3. “The hardest thing about depression is that it is addictive. It begins to feel uncomfortable not to be depressed. You feel guilty for being happy.” — Pete Wentz
4. “You say you’re ‘depressed’ — all I see is resilience. You are allowed to feel messed up and inside out. It doesn’t mean you’re defective; it just means you’re human.” — David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
5. “Depression weighs you down like a rock in a river. You don’t stand a chance. You can fight and pray and hope you have the strength to swim, but sometimes, you have to let yourself sink. Because you’ll never know true happiness until someone or something pulls you back out of that river — and you’ll never believe it until you realize it was you, yourself who saved you.” — Alysha Speer
6. “Almost everyone is overconfident — except the people who are depressed, and they tend to be realists.” — Joseph T. Hallinan
7. “Try to understand the blackness, lethargy, hopelessness, and loneliness they’re going through. Be there for them when they come through the other side. It’s hard to be a friend to someone who’s depressed, but it is one of the kindest, noblest, and best things you will ever do.” — Stephen Fry
8. “People who have never dealt with depression think it’s just being sad or being in a bad mood. That’s not what depression is for me; it’s falling into a state of grayness and numbness.” — Dan Reynolds
9. “Depression is your body saying, ‘I don’t want to be this character anymore. I don’t want to hold up this avatar that you’ve created in the world. It’s too much for me. You should think of the word ‘depressed’ as ‘deep rest.’ Your body needs to be depressed. It needs deep rest from the character that you’ve been trying to play.” — Jim Carrey
10. “I go through a lot of depression, and I know other people do, too, but I have an outlet that many people don’t. If you have that inside of you and can’t get it out, what do you do?” — Billie Eilish
11. “A big part of depression is feeling really lonely, even if you’re in a room full of a million people.” — Lilly Singh
12. “When you’re surrounded by all these people, it can be lonelier than when you’re by yourself. You can be in a huge crowd, but if you don’t feel like you can trust anyone or talk to anybody, you feel like you’re really alone.” — Fiona Apple
13. “Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: It is easier to say, ‘My tooth is aching’ than to say, ‘My heart is broken.'” — C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
14. “Depression, for me, has been a couple of different things — but the first time I felt it, I felt helpless, hopeless, and things I had never felt before. I lost myself and my will to live.” — Ginger Zee
15. “My brain and my heart are really important to me. I don’t know why I wouldn’t seek help to have those things be as healthy as my teeth. I go to the dentist. So, why wouldn’t I go to a shrink?” — Kerry Washington
16. “That’s the thing about depression: A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight. But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it’s impossible to ever see the end.” — Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
17. “I am bent, but not broken. I am scarred, but not disfigured. I am sad, but not hopeless. I am tired, but not powerless. I am angry, but not bitter. I am depressed, but not giving up.” — Anonymous
18. “I’ll never forget how the depression and loneliness felt good and bad at the same time. Still does.” — Henry Rollins, The Portable Henry Rollins
19. “I have depression. But I prefer to say, ‘I battle’ depression instead of ‘I suffer’ with it. Because depression hits, but I hit back. Battle on.” — Anonymous
20. “Depression doesn’t take away your talents; it just makes them harder to find.” — Lady Gaga
21. “It is very hard to explain to people who have never known serious depression or anxiety the sheer continuous intensity of it. There is no off switch.” — Matt Haig
22. “There is no point treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, ‘There now, hang on, you’ll get over it.’ Sadness is more or less like a head cold — with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.” — Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees
23. “Mental illness is so much more complicated than any pill that any mortal could invent.” — Elizabeth Wintzel
24. “Depression, suffering, and anger are all part of being human.” — Janet Fitch
25. “Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.” — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
26. “There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds.” — Laurell K. Hamilton, Mistral’s Kiss
27. “You are the one thing in this world, above all other things, that you must never give up on. When I was in middle school, I was struggling with severe anxiety and depression, and the help and support I received from my family and a therapist saved my life. Asking for help is the first step. You are more precious to this world than you’ll ever know.” — Lili Reinhart
28. “I didn’t want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn’t know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I’d cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.” — Sylvia Plath
29. “Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression’s actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity. The more persuaded you are of your unique access to the rottenness, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, the more perfidiously happy-faced the rest of humanity seems for continuing to engage with it.” — Jonathan Franzen, How to Be Alone
30. “When people don’t know exactly what depression is, they can be judgmental.” — Marion Cotillard
31. “Depression on my left. Loneliness on my right. They don’t need to show me their badges. I know these guys very well.” — Elizabeth Gibert
32. “Maybe we all have darkness inside of us and some of us are better at dealing with it than others.” — Jasmine Warga, My Heart and Other Black Holes
33. “If you have been brutally broken but still have the courage to be gentle to other living beings, then you’re a badass with a heart of an angel.” — Keanu Reeves
34. “Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don’t believe it. Seek out the memories depression takes away and project them into the future. Be brave; be strong; take your pills. Exercise because it’s good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds. Eat when food itself disgusts you. Reason with yourself when you have lost your reason.” — Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
35. “Depression is feeling like you’ve lost something but having no clue when or where you last had it. Then one day you realize what you lost is yourself.” — Anonymous
36. “It’s not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame, and self-loathing — they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them, I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter, and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.” — Stephen Fry, Moab Is My Washpot
37. “When you’re depressed, you don’t control your thoughts; your thoughts control you. I wish people understood that.” — Anonymous
38. “If you know someone who’s depressed, please resolve never to ask them why. Depression isn’t a straightforward response to a bad situation; depression just is, like the weather.” — Stephen Fry
39. “People talk about physical fitness, but mental health is equally important. I see people suffering, and their families feel a sense of shame about it, which doesn’t help. One needs support and understanding. I am now working on an initiative to create awareness about anxiety and depression and help people.” — Deepika Padukone
40. “Having anxiety and depression is like being scared and tired at the same time. It’s the fear of failure, but an urge to be productive. It’s wanting friends, but hate socializing. It’s wanting to be alone, but not wanting to be lonely. It’s feeling everything at once then feeling paralyzingly numb.” — Anonymous
41. “The worst type of crying wasn’t the kid everyone could see — the wailing on street corners, the tearing at clothes. No, the worst kind happened when your soul wept and no matter what you did, there was no way to comfort it. A section withered and became a scar on the part of your soul that survived. For people like me and Echo, our souls contained more scar tissue than life.” — Katie McGarry, Pushing the Limits
42. “Some friends don’t understand this. They don’t understand how desperate I am to have someone say, ‘I love you and I support you just the way you are because you’re wonderful just the way you are.’ They don’t understand that I can’t remember anyone ever saying that to me. I am so demanding and difficult for my friends because I want to crumble and fall apart before them so that they will love me even though I am no fun, lying in bed, crying all the time, not moving. Depression is all about if you loved me you would.” — Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
43. “When you’re lost in the woods, it sometimes takes you a while to realize that you are lost. For the longest time, you can convince yourself that you’ve just wandered off the path, that you’ll find your way back to the trailhead any moment now. The right falls again and again, and you still have no idea where you are, and it’s time to admit that you have bewildered yourself so far off the path that you don’t even know from which direction the sun rises anymore.” — Elizabeth Gilbert
44. “It’s my experience that people are a lot more sympathetic if they can see you hurting, and for the millionth time in my life, I wish for measles or smallpox or some other easily understood disease just to make it easier on me and also on them.” — Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places
45. “In addition to my other numerous acquaintances, I have one more intimate confidante… My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known. No wonder, then, that I return the love.” — Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
46. “You’re like a grey sky. You’re beautiful, even though you don’t want to be.” — Jasmine Warga, My Heart and Other Black Holes
47. “Depression is melancholy minus its charms.” — Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor
48. “Depression isn’t a war you win. It’s a battle you fight every day. You never stop, never get to rest. It’s one bloody fray after another.” — Shaun David Hutchinson, We Are the Ants
49. “I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, it’s malignity.” — Sylvia Plath, Ariel
50. “Depression is like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch it where it hurts. It’s always there, though.” — Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot
51. “Take a shower, wash off the day. Drink a glass of water. Make the room dark. Lie down and close your eyes. Notice the silence. Notice your heart. Still beating. Still fighting. You made it, after all. You made it, another day. And you can make it one more. You’re doing just fine.” — Charlotte Eriksson
52. “Rain makes me feel less alone. All rain is, is a cloud — falling apart, and pouring its shattered pieces down on top of you. It makes me feel good to know I’m not the only thing that falls apart. It makes me feel better to know other things in nature can shatter.” — Lone Alaskan Gypsy
53. “They always call depression the blues, but I would have been happy to waken to a periwinkle outlook. Depression to me is urine yellow, washed out, exhausted miles of weak piss.” — Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects
54. “The sun stopped shining for me is all. The whole story is: I am sad. I am sad all the time and the sadness is so heavy that I can’t get away from it. Not ever.” — Nina LaCour, Hold Still
55. “Because that’s the thing about depression. When I feel it deeply, I don’t want to let it go. It becomes a comfort. I want to cloak myself under its heavy weight and breathe it into my lungs. I want to nurture it, grow it, cultivate it. It’s mine. I want to check out with it, drift asleep wrapped in its arms, and not wake up for a long, long time.” — Stephanie Perkins, Lola and the Boy Next Door
56. “I couldn’t be with people, and I didn’t want to be alone. Suddenly my perspective whooshed, and I was far out in space, watching the world. I could see millions and millions of people, all slotted into their lives; then I could see me — I’d lost my place in the universe. It had closed up, and there was nowhere for me to be. I was more lost than I had known it was possible for any human being to be.” — Marian Keyes, Anybody Out There?
57. “Behind my smile is a hurting heart, behind my laugh, I’m falling apart. Look closely at me and you will see, the girl I am, it isn’t me.” — Unknown
58. “The only thing more exhausting than being depressed is pretending that you’re not.” — Unknown
59. “Any fool can be happy. It takes a man with a real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.” — Clive Barker
60. “It is important not to suppress your feelings altogether when you are depressed. It is equally important to avoid terrible arguments or expressions of outrage. You should steer clear of emotionally damaging behavior. People forgive, but it is best not to stir things up to the point at which forgiveness is required. When you are depressed, you need the love of other people, and yet depression fosters actions that destroy that love. Depressed people often stick pins into their own life rafts. The conscious mind can intervene. One is not helpless.” — Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression