Sadness is more or less like a head cold - with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
Barbara KingsolverRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
It emphasizes the difference between sadness and depression, advocating for a deeper understanding and empathy towards those struggling with mental health issues.
In this quote, Barbara Kingsolver urges us to recognize the severity of depression compared to ordinary sadness. While sadness can be transient and may pass with time, depression is a profound and often debilitating condition that requires compassion and support. By likening depression to cancer, she highlights that it is a serious illness that cannot simply be wished away, underscoring the need for understanding and proper treatment.
Themes
DepressionSadnessMental HealthEmpathyUnderstanding
In practice
Example use cases
In a mental health awareness event, you can use this quote to highlight the importance of recognizing the seriousness of depression.
More from Barbara Kingsolver
All quotes →Children can be your heartache. But that doesn't matter, you have to go on and have them . . . it works out.
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I'm of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved.
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I did it to win love, and to prove myself capable. Not to move mountains. In my opinions, mountains don't move. They only look changed when you look down on them from great height.
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Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
Barbara KingsolverRead
Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.
Barbara KingsolverRead
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No one who had never been depressed like me could imagine that the pain could get so bad that death became a star to hitch up to, a fantasy of peace someday which seemed better than any life with all this noise in my head.
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