Daphne Merkin

It might pay to be resilient, if this was all being vulnerable and skinless got you. People didn’t stop and cluck over…

— Daphne Merkin

“Spring and Fall” …cannot be said to be about depression - but of course, to someone who is depressed, everything is about…

— Daphne Merkin

“It was one thing to be depressed in your twenties or thirties, when the aspect of youth gave it an undeniable poignancy,…

— Daphne Merkin

Much as I try to disguise myself, there is never a time when I'm not aware of being overweight.

— Daphne Merkin

I think the experience of depression that I most think remains true throughout the years is it's very isolating. That to me…

— Daphne Merkin

Then again, as those who suffer from it know, intractable depression creates a planet all its own, largely impermeable to influence from…

— Daphne Merkin

Naturally, our own irrational demands strike us as having the force of needs, while other people's needs strike us as capricious indulgences.

— Daphne Merkin

Everyone lies about sex, more or less, to themselves if not to others, to others if not to themselves, exaggerating its importance…

— Daphne Merkin

How much simpler it would be all around if you could put your mind in a cast, like a broken ankle, and…

— Daphne Merkin

There's something stubborn about families, unhappy ones in particular: they outlive themselves, and then they live on.

— Daphne Merkin

I always look to people and think whether they seem well-loved or not well-loved. That's one way I walk through life. Do…

— Daphne Merkin

No bill of sexual rights can hold its own against the lawless, untamable landscape of the erotic imagination.

— Daphne Merkin

I see depression as an exponentially developed version of a human condition. Meaning I always think in the end it's humanizing. People…

— Daphne Merkin

It was through reading that I discovered the crucial, even sacrosanct place the rituals of drinking held in the American imagination -…

— Daphne Merkin

My mother is the source of my unease in the world and thus the only person who can make me feel at…

— Daphne Merkin

Everything felt fragile and freshly come upon, but for now, at least, my depression had stepped back, giving me room to move…

— Daphne Merkin