Sadness is more or less like a head cold - with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
Barbara KingsolverRead
Insomnia’s different,” I said. It was hard to explain this to people. “You know the light that comes on when you open the refrigerator door? Just imagine it stays on all the time, even after you close the door. That’s what it’s like in my head. The light stays on.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Insomnia creates a constant state of mental alertness, akin to an unending light inside one's mind.
In this quote, Barbara Kingsolver poignantly describes the unique experience of insomnia, illustrating how it affects the mind by using the metaphor of a refrigerator light that never turns off. This constant illumination symbolizes the relentless stream of thoughts and anxiety that incapacitate restful sleep, allowing readers to empathize with the profound challenge of living with insomnia.
Themes
InsomniaSleepAnxietyMental HealthAlertness
In practice
Example use cases
In a mental health awareness campaign, this quote can be used to highlight the struggles faced by those suffering from insomnia.
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.
Barbara KingsolverRead
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.
Barbara KingsolverRead
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.
Barbara KingsolverRead
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
Similar quotes
Mental health is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs
M. Scott PeckRead
I have a feeling I shall go mad. I cannot go on longer in these terrible times. I shan't recover this time. I hear voices and cannot concentrate on my work. I have fought against it but cannot fight any longer.
Virginia WoolfRead
Years of depression have robbed me of that—well, that give, that elasticity that everyone else calls perspective.
Elizabeth WurtzelRead
Depression is a prison where you are both the suffering prisoner and the cruel jailer.
Dorothy RoweRead
When public figures remain silent about depression, there is a cost to the rest of society. Silence contributes to the misperception that successful people do not get depressed, and it keeps the public from seeing that treatment allows many individuals to return to competitive professional lives.
Kay Redfield JamisonRead
My mother struggled immensely with mental illness, and so did I. She grew up bipolar, but it was never diagnosed nor recognized. It was shrugged off like a 'symptom' of being female - of her being weak. I also experienced this growing up: I felt that the great pain I experienced was a dramatisation.
Petra CollinsRead