52 Quotes by Sally Brampton

If we go on behaving in the same way, we will crash. If we pretend that those obstacles in our character don’t exist, or are something else entirely, we will still crash. But if we acknowledge them and behave in a different way, we will come to a better and safer place.

My creative powers have been reduced to a restless indolence. I cannot be idle, yet I cannot seem to do anything either. I have no imagination, no more feeling for nature, and reading has become repugnant to me. When we are robbed of ourselves, we are robbed of everything.

Severe depression, put simply, is an overwhelming and unmanageable onslaught of every normal, human fear and difficult emotion. It is a loss of and lack of perspective and proportion.

This is not really me. I am not like this. I am like you. I am not a patient from a mental hospital. I am just an ordinary woman whose mind has gone temporarily wrong.

I looked like me. I sounded like me. But I wasn’t me.

It’s all very well learning why I behave in the way that I do. That doesn’t stop me behaving in those ways. I am just more conscious of them.’ Consciousness is where therapy stops and we begin. Therapy can only give us knowledge. It is up to us to use it.

The Buddhists tell us that in order to find yourself, you first have to lose your mind.