52 Quotes by Sally Brampton

When you have spent long years in the dark, there is joy in seeing the light and pleasure, above all, in the ordinary.

One thing I know is true. Try never to abandon hope for if you do, hope will surely try to abandon you.

Hope is only the love of life.

Killing oneself is, anyway, a misnomer. We don’t kill ourselves. We are simply defeated by the long, hard struggle to stay alive. When somebody dies after a long illness, people are apt to say, with a note of approval, “He fought so hard.” And they are inclined to think, about a suicide, that no fight was involved, that somebody simply gave up. This is quite wrong.

The dirty little secret of biological psychiatry is that every single drug in the psychopharmacopoeia is palliative. That is, all of them are symptom suppressors, and when you stop taking them you’re back at square one.

You can keep difficult emotions at bay for a very long time, even for a lifetime but for most of us, at some point in our lives, they will demand to be heard.

Religion is for people who don’t want to go to hell. Spirituality is for people who’ve been there.

I thought therapy was a sort of magic, that you just kept talking and the very act of talking unlocked some forgotten key.

I am growing to hate the vague declarations of psychiatric treatment, the airy cross-your-fingers pronouncements. The treatment of mental health is an inexact science. But, as I am slowly coming to understand, depression is an inexact illness.