One of the strangest parts of being depressed is how it affects memory. When I was depressed, I couldn't remember anything particularly happy ever happening to me. Things I had previously assumed were happy seemed false and empty. The good past faded epically far away, and the good present, well, that was pretty much an oxymoron.

Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share.

"I think I've been shown how the presence--how the Unnamed--works. It looks for a door, a way into your heart. Sadness. Grief. Jealousy. Melancholy. It finds an opening and enters."

"Demons afflict the weak."

"Or the ones who ask for help without caring who's ready to give it."

"Then what?"

"It breaks down the wall between what you can imagine doing and what you would never do."