Skip to main content

Creativity Quote by Amy Winehouse

"Since I was 16, I've felt a black cloud hangs over me. Since then, I have taken pills for depression"

About this Quote

There is no glamour in the way Amy Winehouse frames it: not a tortured-genius myth, not a tabloid-friendly spiral, just weather. A "black cloud" is deliberately nontechnical language, the kind you reach for when diagnosis feels too clinical and the feeling itself is too total to neatly name. It also does something quietly devastating: it makes depression sound ambient, not episodic. The cloud "hangs" over her, persistent, indifferent to success, talent, or youth. At 16, an age usually sold as possibility, she marks the start of an internal climate she doesn't control.

The second sentence lands like paperwork. "Since then, I have taken pills" is blunt, almost administrative, and that tonal shift matters. It signals a life managed, not cured. The subtext is that treatment exists but relief is partial, contingent, and maybe negotiated with shame. Winehouse isn't confessing for catharsis; she's normalizing the mundanity of medicated survival while exposing how early the fight began. That matters in a culture that prefers addiction narratives because they're dramatic and legible. Depression, by contrast, is boring to spectators: slow, invisible, chronic.

Context sharpens the sting. Winehouse lived in a media ecosystem that treated her pain as content, turning symptoms into spectacle. Read against that, this quote is a refusal to be reduced to scandal. It's a reminder that behind the eyeliner, the voice, the headlines, there was a teenager trying to outlast her own mind.

Quote Details

TopicMental Health
SourceHelp us find the source
CiteCite this Quote

Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Winehouse, Amy. (2026, January 17). Since I was 16, I've felt a black cloud hangs over me. Since then, I have taken pills for depression. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/since-i-was-16-ive-felt-a-black-cloud-hangs-over-26021/

Chicago Style
Winehouse, Amy. "Since I was 16, I've felt a black cloud hangs over me. Since then, I have taken pills for depression." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/since-i-was-16-ive-felt-a-black-cloud-hangs-over-26021/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Since I was 16, I've felt a black cloud hangs over me. Since then, I have taken pills for depression." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/since-i-was-16-ive-felt-a-black-cloud-hangs-over-26021/. Accessed 4 Feb. 2026.

More Quotes by Amy Add to List
Amy Winehouse: Quote on depression and resilience
Click to enlarge Portrait | Landscape

About the Author

Amy Winehouse

Amy Winehouse (September 13, 1984 - July 23, 2011) was a Musician from United Kingdom.

12 more quotes available

View Profile

Similar Quotes