“Say your name over two hundred times and discover you are no one.”
-The Running Man, Richard Bachman (Stephen King)
“What is life? A madness. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story. And the greatest good is little enough: for all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams.”
-La vida es sueño (Life Is But a Dream), Pedro Calderón de la Barca
"Life is like a bed of nails, it hurts no matter where you step.”
“We speak of stories ending, [...] when in truth it is we who end. The stories go on and on.” -Kushiel's Avatar, Jacqueline Carey
“Some days it feels impossible to breathe just one more breath. Some days it feels too possible to contemplate my death.”
“Walking across the thin ice of my dreams, Fearing the cold waters of reality beneath me. Yet onward I tred.”
“I was a bird, I was flying over stripped earth
Desperate to land desperate to perch - that's how I'd feel
Seldom we find the peace we deserve
Desperate to love, needing rebirth - that's how I'd feel.”
-Caroline, Angie Aparo
“If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again. Suicide will be for me only one means of violently reconquering myself, of brutally invading my being, of anticipating the unpredictable approaches of God. By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will.”
-On Suicide, Antonin Artaud
“I guess I live up in my head
I call you up but my phone is dead
And now it's too much
The doctor said I need a cure
But what I got he's not really sure
And I won't say much.”
-You Are The Dark, Joseph Arthur
“I'm up all night against my will
My medicine won't let me feel anything at all
The doctor gave me sleeping pills and I took one
Then I feel all alone, sleeping like a stone.”
-You Are The Dark, Joseph Arthur
“When everything is at its worst, your mind just throws it all into the wastebasket and goes to Florida for a little while. There is a sudden electric what-the-hell glow as you stand there looking back over your shoulder at the bridge you just burnt down.”
-Rage, Richard Bachman (Stephen King)
“He realized how miserable and unknown and vulnerable he was in the world. The universe seemed to shriek and clatter and roar around him like a huge and indifferent jalopy rushing down a hill and toward the lip of a bottomless chasm. ”
-The Running Man, Richard Bachman (Stephen King)
“Pinch me, pinch me because I'm still asleep
Please God, tell me that I'm still asleep.”
-Pinch Me, Barenaked Ladies
“My hands are locked up tight in fists
My mind is racing filled with lists
Of things to do and things I've done
Another sleepless night's begun.”
-Who Needs Sleep, Barenaked Ladies
“Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn't want them back.”
-Krapp's Last Tape, Samuel Beckett
“One day you'll be blind, like me. You'll be sitting there, a speck in the void, in the dark, for ever, like me. (Pause) One day you'll say to yourself, I'm tired, I'll sit down, and you'll go and sit down. Then you'll say, I'm hungry, I'll get up and get something to eat. But you won't get up. You'll say, I shouldn't have sat down, but since I have I'll sit on a little longer, then I'll get up and get something to eat. But you won't get up and you won't get anything to eat. (Pause) You'll look at the wall a while, then you'll say, I'll close my eyes, perhaps have a little sleep, after that I'll feel better, and you'll close them. And when you open them again there'll be no wall any more. (Pause) Infinite emptiness will be all around you, all the resurrected dead of all the ages wouldn't fill it, and there you'll be like a little bit of grit in the middle of the steppe. (Pause) Yes, one day you'll know what it is, you'll be like me, except that you won't have anyone with you, because you won't have had pity on anyone and because there won't be anyone left to have pity on.”
-Endgame, Samuel Beckett
“It's a bargain you make with yourself, okay? An escape hatch, maybe today I'll try drinking see if that makes me feel better. Then drugs. More drugs. Cutting yourself. You're scared, so you make a deal to make yourself feel safer. And if it doesn't stop next week, next month then you're going to do something to make it stop. And the next month comes and the thought of waking up another day and feeling as badly as you did the day before is worse than the unknown. So you decide to jump. Seems simple, clean, elegant.”
-The Bedford Diaries [television show]
“And in the first moment of her waking up
She knows she's losing it, yeah she's losing it
When the first cup of coffee tastes like washing up
She knows she's losing it, yeah she's losing it
She goes to the mirror to put on her stuff
She knows she's losing it, oh yeah she's losing it
When she doesn't speak to anyone till four o' clock
She knows she's losing it, yeah she's losing it.”
-She's Losing It, Belle & Sebastian
“Alice, the world is full of ugly things that you can't change
Pretend it's not that way
It's my idea of faith.”
-Alice Childress, Ben Folds Five
“...she was the kind who noted birthdays down in her little book with the vigor of someone who has often been forgotten.”
-An Invisible Sign Of My Own, Aimee Bender
“...there is something so awful, something so gross about watching someone who loves you struggle to believe what you both know, deep down, is partially a lie.”
-An Invisible Sign Of My Own, Aimee Bender
“While she cut the mushrooms, she cried more than she had at the grave, the most so far, because she found the saddest thing of all to be the simple truth of her capacity to move on.” -Willful Creatures, Aimee Bender
“On my own body are scars that prove I belong to Christ Jesus. So I don't want anyone to bother me anymore.” -Galatians 6:17, The Bible
“Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute.” -Josh Billings
“They are almost well. Some of them will be almost well always.”
-Evening in the Sanitarium, Elizabeth Bishop
“My heart is a teacup with hairline cracks. I feel like I have to walk real carefully so it won't get shaken and just all shatter and break.”
-Missing Angel Juan, Francesca Lia Block
“It requires more courage to suffer than to die.” -Napoléon Bonaparte
“Life is a burden to me, nothing gives me any pleasure. I only find sadness in everything around me. It is very difficult because the ways of those with whom I live, and probably always shall live, are as different from mine as moonlight is from sunlight.” -Napoleon Bonaparte
“Losing an illusion makes you wiser than finding a truth.” -Karl Ludwig Börne
“Let me alone! That's all very well, but how can I leave myself alone? We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?”
-Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
“He had been crying quietly all evening. It did not show, not a vestige of it, on his face. It was all hidden somewhere and it wouldn't stop.” -The October Game, Ray Bradbury
“The more sensitive you are, the more likely you are to be brutalised, develop scabs, never evolve. Never allow yourself to feel anything, because you always feel too much.” -Marlon Brando
"When you take your pill
it's like a mine disaster.
I think of all the people
lost inside of you."
-The Pill vs. The Springhill Mine Disaster, Richard Brautigan
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that the moment one area of your life starts going okay, another part of it falls spectacularly to pieces.” -Bridget Jones's Diary [movie]
“And prescription pills
Well, I take two a day
To make my brain behave
It never does, but who's to say?
At least my doctor gets paid.”
-Loose Leaves, Bright Eyes
“As I hide behind these books I read,
While scribbling my poetry,
Like art could save a wretch like me,
With some ideal ideology that no one can hope to achieve.
And I am never real; it is just a sketch of me.
And everything I made is trite and cheap
And a waste of paint, of tape, of time.”
-Waste of Paint, Bright Eyes
“I believe in whatever gets you through the night. Night is the hardest time to be alive. For me, anyway. It lasts so long, and four AM knows all my secrets. Four AM is when my dreams die.” -Lost Souls, Poppy Z. Brite
“I fear the line between myself and madness is as fine these days as a cobweb, and I have seen what it means when a soul crosses over into that dim and wretched place.”
-Year of Wonders, Geraldine Brooks
“They talk of short-lived pleasure - be it so -
pain dies as quickly: stern, hard-featured pain
Expires, and lets her weary prisoner go.
The fiercest agonies have shortest reign;
And after dreams of horror, comes again
The welcome morning with its rays of peace.”
-Mutation. A Sonne, William Cullen Bryant
“To my mind, the only possibly pet is a cow. Cows love you. They are harmless, they look nice, they don't need a box to crap in, they keep the grass down, and they are so trusting and stupid that you can't help but lose your heart to them. Where I live in Yorkshire, there's a herd of cows down the lane. You can stand by the wall at any hour of the day or night, and after a minute the cows will all waddle over and stand with you, much too stupid to know what to do next, but happy just to be with you. They will stand there all day, as far as I can tell, possibly till the end of time. They will listen to your problems and never ask a thing in return. They will be your friends forever. And when you get tired of them, you can kill them and eat them. Perfect.”
-Neither Here Nor There, Travels in Europe, Bill Bryson
“Bottom line is, even if you see them coming, you're not ready for the big moments. No one asks for their life to change, not really. But it does. So, what are we, helpless? Puppets? Nah. The big moments are gonna come, you can't help that. It's what you do afterwards that counts. That's when you find out who you are.” -Buffy the Vampire Slayer [television show]
“sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think,
I'm not going to make it, but you laugh inside
remembering all the times you've felt that way.”
-gamblers all, Charles Bukowski
“Pain is strange. A cat killing a bird, a car accident, a fire...Pain arrives, BANG, and there it is, it sits on you. It's real. And to anybody watching, you look foolish. Like you've suddenly become an idiot. There's no cure for it unless you know somebody who understands how you feel, and knows how to help.” -Women, Charles Bukowski
“Who the hell wants to be a healthy, organic whole when you can be a brilliant, injured, human fragment?” -Sex and Sensibility, Julie Burchill
“All of a sudden, I feel like an emotional paraplegic. I feel that all of my gains and insights are based on control and denial. I'm worried that I'm so profoundly sick as to appear healthy and together.” -Dry, Augusten Burroughs
“She looks at me with eyes that seem to belong to someone three times her age. It's something beyond wisdom, all the way to insanity and back. It's like her eyes are scarred from all the things she's seen.” -Dry, Augusten Burroughs
“Why am I so anxious? And then it hits me. I'm not anxious, I'm lonely. And I'm lonely in some horribly deep way and for a flash of an instant, I can see just how lonely, and how deep this feeling runs. And it scares the shit out of me to be so lonely because it seems catastrophic - seeing the car just as it hits you.” -Dry, Augusten Burroughs
“For exactly the same reason, it is sometimes satisfying to cut yourself and bleed. On those gray days where eight in the morning looks no different from noon and nothing has happened and nothing is going to happen and you are washing a glass in the sink and it breaks - accidentally - and punctures your skin. And then there is this shocking red, the brightest thing in the day, so vibrant it buzzes, this blood of yours. That is okay sometimes because at least you know you're alive.” -Running With Scissors, Augusten Burroughs
“A wonderful realization will be the day you realize that you are unique in all the world. There is nothing that is an accident. You are a special combination for a purpose-and don't let them tell you otherwise, even if they tell you that purpose is an illusion. (Live an illusion if you have to). You are that combination so that you can do what is essential for you to do. Don't ever believe that you have nothing to contribute. The world is an incredible unfulfilled tapestry. And only you can fulfill that tiny space that is yours.” -Leo Buscaglia
“The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain.”
-Lord George Gordon Byron
“I'll tell you a big secret, mon cher. Don't wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day.” -The Fall, Albert Camus
“Thus I progressed on the surface of life, in the realm of words as it were, never in reality. All those books barely read, those friends barely loved, those cities barely visited, those women barely possessed! I went through the gestures out of boredom or absent-mindedness. Then came the human beings, they wanted to cling, but there was nothing to cling to, and that was unfortunate - for them. As for me, I forgot. I never remembered anything but myself.” -The Fall, Albert Camus
“'But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.
'Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat. 'We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.'
'How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.
'You must be," said the Cat. 'or you wouldn't have come here.'”
-Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
“...it takes all the running you can do to stay in one place.”
-Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
“Be what you would seem to be -- or if you'd like it put more simply -- Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.” -Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
“Alice came to a fork in the road.
'Which road do I take?' she asked.
'Where do you want to go?' responded the Cheshire cat.
'I don't know,' Alice answered.
'Then,' said the cat, 'it doesn't matter.'”
-Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
“Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
-Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
“When you're a little kid, you never think that you'll die. I mean, death is just some obscure, esoteric thing that you see on TV or read about in a book. Then one day you realize what it really is. Then nothing is ever the same again. From that day on, you're fucked.” -Chance [movie]
“When your life is never what you wanted
Not even halfway normal
Just tarnished and soiled
When in your reach
A framed and frozen moment
So far from perfection
Not truth or transcendence
Will set you free
Still you don't believe.”
-Broken, Tracy Chapman
“I can't think again. Not ever again. I don't know if you've ever felt like that. That you wanted to sleep for a thousand years. Or just not exist. Or just not be aware that you do exist. Or something like that.” -The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky
“I know that I brought this all on myself. I know that I deserve this. I'd do anything not to be this way. I'd do anything to make it up to everyone. And to not have to see a psychiatrist, who explains to me about being 'passive aggressive.' And to not have to take the medicine he gives me, which is too expensive for my dad. And to not have to talk about bad memories with him. Or be nostalgic over bad things. I wish that God or my parents or Sam or my sister or someone would just tell me what's wrong with me. Just tell me how to be different in a way that makes sense. To make this all go away. And disappear. I know that's wrong because it's my responsibility, and I know that things get worse before they get better because that's what my psychiatrist says, but this is a worse that feels too big.” -The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky
“Too much awareness is a sickness; it keeps me awake all night.” -Yi Cho-nyon
“The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation. The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.” -The Awakening, Kate Chopin
“In the midst of movement and chaos, keep stillness inside of you.” -Deepak Chopra
“In the darkest hour the soul is replenished and given strength to continue and endure.” -Heart Warrior Chosa
“No matter what you do or say, there's nothing that you can do to make people understand you.” -Kurt Cobain
“Certain people, in their eagerness to construct a world which no external threat can penetrate, build exaggeratedly high defenses against the outside world, against new people, new places, different experiences, and leave their inner world stripped bare. It is there that Bitterness begins its irrevocable work.
The will was the main target of Bitterness (or Vitriol, as Dr. Igor preferred to call it). The people attacked by this malaise began to lose all desire, and within a few years, they became unable to leave their world, where they had spent enormous reserves of energy constructing high walls in order to make reality what they wanted it to be.
In order to avoid external attack, they had also deliberately limited internal growth, they continued going to work, watching television, having children, complaining about the traffic, but these things happened automatically, unaccompanied by any particular emotion, because, after all, everything was under control.
The great problem with poisoning by Bitterness was that the passions -- hatred, love, despair, enthusiasm, curiosity -- also ceased to manifest themselves. After a while, the embittered person felt no desire at all. They lacked the will either to live or to die, that was the problem.” -Veronika Decides To Die, Paulo Coelho
“Come on, oh my star is fading
And I see no chance of release
And I know I'm dead on the surface
But I am screaming underneath.”
-Amsterdam, Coldplay
“Suicide sometimes proceeds from cowardice, but not always; for cowardice sometimes prevents it; since as many live because they are afraid to die, as die because they are afraid to live.” -The Lacon, Charles Caleb Colton
“You know I hate, detest, can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies, - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do.” -Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
“...life is just an endless banquet of loss, and each time a new loss is doled out, you have to move your mental furniture around, throw things out, and by then there's more loss, and the cycle goes on and on.” -All Families Are Psychotic, Douglas Coupland
“One of my big problems is time sickness. When I feel lonely, I assume that the mood will never pass--that I'll feel lonely and bad for the rest of my life, which means that I've wrecked both the present and the future. And if I look back on my past, I wreck that too, by concentrating on all the things I did wrong. The brutal thing about time sickness is that naming it is no cure. I look at the philodendron on the kitchen windowsill, the only thing in my condo that ever changes. I found it at a bus stop twelve years ago and I've kept it going ever since. I like it because up close its leaves are pretty, and also because it makes me think of time in a way that doesn't totally depress me. ” -Eleanor Rigby, Douglas Coupland
“When you see such photos, you can't help but wonder at just how sweet and sad and innocent all moments of life are rendered by the tripping of a camera's shutter, for at that point the future is still unknown and has yet to hurt us, and also for that brief moment, our poses are accepted as honest.” -Generation X, Douglas Coupland
“Ask whatever challenges dead and thoughtless beliefs. Ask: When did we become human beings and stop being whatever it was we were before this? Ask: What was the specific change that made us human? Ask: Why do people not particularly care about their ancestors more than three generations back? Ask: Why are we unable to think of any real future beyond, say, a hundred years from now? Ask: How can we begin to think of the future as something enormous before us that also includes us? Ask: Having become human, what is it that we are now doing or creating that will transform us into whatever it is that we are slated to next become?” -Girlfriend in a Coma, Douglas Coupland
“At what point in our lives do we stop blurring? When do we become crisp individuals? What must we do in order to end these fuzzy identities - to clarify just who it is we really are?” -Girlfriend in a Coma, Douglas Coupland
“If you look at life as a whole, we have to admit life's good where we live. But in an evil Twilight Zone kind of way there's nothing else to choose. In the old days there was always a Bohemia or a creative under-world to join if the mainstream life wasn't your bag - or a life of crime, or even religion. And now there's only the system. All other options have evaporated. For most people it's the System or what... death? There's nothing. There's no way out now.” -Girlfriend in a Coma, Douglas Coupland
“Nobody believes the identities we've made for ourselves. I feel like everybody in the world is fake now - as though people had true cores once, but tucked them away and replaced them with something more attractive but also hollow.” -Girlfriend In A Coma, Douglas Coupland
“One of my own stray childhood fears had been to wonder what a whale might feel like had it been born and bred in captivity, then released into the wild—into its ancestral sea—its limited world instantly blowing up when cast into the unknowable depths, seeing strange fish and tasting new waters, not even having a concept of depth, not knowing the language of any whale pods it might meet. It was my fear of a world that would expand suddenly, violently, and without rules or laws: bubbles and seaweed and storms and frightening volumes of dark blue that never end.” -Girlfriend in a Coma, Douglas Coupland
“And then...and then I felt truly old for the first time—old in the sense that I was beyond the point of ever doing something radical or bold to change the course of my life...I was sick of wanting money. I was sick of being without a goal.” -Hey Nostradamus!, Douglas Coupland
“For what it's worth, I think God is how you deal with everything that's out of your own control. It's as good a definition as any.” -Hey Nostradamus!, Douglas Coupland
“.. how often is it we are rescued by a stranger, if ever at all? And how is it that our lives can become drained of the possibility of forgiveness and kindness - so drained that even one small act of mercy becomes a potent lifelong memory? How do our lives reach these points?” -Life After God, Douglas Coupland
“I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can't be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older, as you see the people in your life break one by one. You wonder when your turn is going to be, or if it's already happened.” -Life After God, Douglas Coupland
“I cry because the future has once again found its sparkle and has grown a million times larger. And I cry because I am ashamed of how badly I have treated the people I love—of how badly I behaved during my own personal Dark Ages—back before I had a future and someone who cared for me from above. It is like today the sky opened up and only now am I allowed to enter.” -Shampoo Planet, Douglas Coupland
“It can't rain all the time.”
-The Crow [movie]
“To be nobody - but - myself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make me everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting”
-A Poet's Advice, ee cummings
“Unbeing dead isn't being alive.”
-E.E. Cummings
“...then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis.”
-since feeling is first, ee cummings
“i do not know what it is about you that closes and opens;
only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses.”
-Somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond, ee cummings
I myself had had trouble deciding whether or not to wear a hat. In my twenties I'd suspected that if you peeled away my looks and habits and half-dozen strong ideas you'd have found an empty spot where the self ought to be. It had seemed like my worst secret.”
-A Home at the End of the World, Michael Cunningham
“She always surprises you this way, by knowing more than you think she does. Louis wonders if they're calculated, these little demonstrations of self-knowledge that pepper Clarissa's wise, hostessy performance. She seems, at times, to have read your thoughts. She disarms you by saying, essentially, I know what you're thinking and I agree, I'm ridiculous. I'm far less than I could have been and I'd like it to be otherwise but I can't seem to help myself. You find that you move, almost against your will, from being irritated with her to consoling her, helping her back into her performance so that she can be comfortable again and you can resume feeling irritated.”
-The Hours, Michael Cunningham
“Still, she loves the world for being rude and indestructible, and she knows other people must love it too, poor as well as rich, though no one speaks specifically of the reasons. Why else do we struggle to go on living, no matter how compromised, no matter how harmed?”
-The Hours, Michael Cunningham
“We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds & expectations, to burst open & give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning, we hope, more than anything for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so...There she is with another hour before her.”
-The Hours, Michael Cunningham
“Sometimes there's nothing to feel
Sometimes there's nothing to hold
Sometimes there's no time to run away
Sometimes you just feel so old
The times it hurts when you cry
The times it hurts just to breathe
And then it all seems like there's no-one left
And all you want is to sleep.”
-Fight, The Cure
“I'll try to make this perfectly clear
I'm so transparent I disappear.”
-Sink to the Beat, Cursive
“Conformists look around and follow closely; Nonconformists look around and do the opposite. Individualists don't look around a lot.”
-Eromon D'Alyzala
“Every decision you make is a mistake.”
-Edward Dahlberg
“Damaged people are dangerous, they know they can survive.”
-Damage [movie]
“'You'll be sick or feeling troubled or deeply in love or quietly uncertain or even content for the first time in your life. It won't matter. Out of the blue, beyond any cause you can trace, you'll suddenly realize things are not how you perceived them to be at all. For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You'll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you'll realize it's always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won't understand why or how. You'll have forgotten what granted you this awareness in the first place.
'Old shelters—television, magazines, movies—won't protect you anymore. You might try scribbling in a journal, on a napkin, maybe even in the margins of this book. That's when you'll discover you no longer trust the very walls you always took for granted. Even the hallways you've walked a hundred times will feel longer, much longer, and the shadows, any shadow at all, will suddenly seem deeper, much, much, deeper.
'You might try then, as I did, to find a sky so full of stars it will blind you again. Only no sky can blind you now. Even with all that iridescent magic up there, your eye will no longer linger on the light, it will no longer trace constellations. You'll care only about the darkness and you'll watch it for hours, for days, maybe even for years, trying in vain to believe you're some kind of indispensable, universe-appointed sentinel, as if just by looking you could actually keep it all at bay. It will get so bad you'll be afraid to look away, you'll be afraid to sleep.
'Then no matter where you are, in a crowded restaurant or on some desolate street or even in the comforts of your own home, you'll watch yourself dismantle every assurance you ever lived by. You'll stand aside as a great complexity intrudes, tearing apart, piece by piece, all of your carefully conceived denials, whether deliberate or unconscious. And then for better or worse you'll turn, unable to resist, though try to resist you still will, fighting with everything you've got not to face the thing you most dread, what is now, what will be, what has always come before, the creature you truly are, the creature we all are, buried in the nameless black of a name.
'And then the nightmares will begin.'”
-House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski
“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.”
-House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski
“Yet if you build your life on dreams
'Tis prudent to recall
The man with moonlight in his hand
Has nothing there at all.”
-Don Quixote: Man of La Mancha, Joe Darion
“One man scorned and covered with scars still strive with his last ounce of courage to reach the unreachable stars; and the world will be better for this.”
-The Impossible Dream (The Quest), Joe Darion
“Laced with brilliant smiles and shining eyes,
And perfect makeup,
But you're barely scraping by.”
-The Places You Have Come To Fear The Most, Dashboard Confessional
“And the fog rolls heavy on her
and she feels the weight of life
though it's red blood flowing from her heart
it feels like cold blue ice
and the colours mix together
to grey.”
-Grey Street, Dave Matthews Band
“She feels like kicking out all the windows
And setting fire to this life
She could change everything about her
Using colors bold and bright
But all the colors mix together to grey
And it breaks her heart.”
-Grey Street, Dave Matthews Band
“One sees that dead, vacant look steal sometimes over the rarest, finest of women's faces, - in the very midst, it may be, of their warmest summer's day; and then one can guess at the secret of intolerable solitude that lies hid beneath the delicate laces and brilliant smile.”
-Life in the Iron Mills, Rebecca Harding Davis
“This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous - indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.”
-River out of Eden, Richard Dawkins
“We are going to die and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they're never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place, but who will, in fact, never see the light of day, outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. ...In the face of these stupefying odds, it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. Here's another respect in which we are lucky. The universe is older than a hundred million centuries. Within a comparable time, the sun will swell to a red giant and engulf the earth. Every century of hundreds of millions has been in its time, or will be when its time comes, the present century. The present moves from the past to the future like a tiny spotlight inching its way along a gigantic ruler of time. Everything behind the spotlight is in darkness, the darkness of the dead past. Everything ahead of the spotlight is in the darkness of the unknown future. The odds of your century being the one in the spotlight are the same as the odds that a penny, tossed down at random, will land on a particular ant crawling somewhere on the road from New York to San Francisco. You are lucky to be alive and so am I.”
-Unweaving the Rainbow, Richard Dawkins
“Dreams aren't perfect. They come true, not free.”
-Dawson's Creek [television show]
“We don't read and write poetry because its cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is full of passion. Medicine, law, business, engineering: these are noble pursuits necessary to sustain life, but poetry, beauty, romance, love. These are what we stay alive for.”
-The Dead Poet's Society [movie]
“i think your bruise was understated
'cause you can't feel this anymore
it's getting bluer and you can't keep faking
that you can't feel this anymore.”
-Your Bruise, Death Cab For Cutie
“Self-revelation is a cruel process. The real picture, the real 'you' never emerges. Looking for it is as bewildering as trying to know how you really look. Ten different mirrors show you ten different faces.”
-The Long Silence, Shashi Deshpande
-The Running Man, Richard Bachman (Stephen King)
“What is life? A madness. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story. And the greatest good is little enough: for all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams.”
-La vida es sueño (Life Is But a Dream), Pedro Calderón de la Barca
"Life is like a bed of nails, it hurts no matter where you step.”
“We speak of stories ending, [...] when in truth it is we who end. The stories go on and on.” -Kushiel's Avatar, Jacqueline Carey
“Some days it feels impossible to breathe just one more breath. Some days it feels too possible to contemplate my death.”
“Walking across the thin ice of my dreams, Fearing the cold waters of reality beneath me. Yet onward I tred.”
“I was a bird, I was flying over stripped earth
Desperate to land desperate to perch - that's how I'd feel
Seldom we find the peace we deserve
Desperate to love, needing rebirth - that's how I'd feel.”
-Caroline, Angie Aparo
“If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again. Suicide will be for me only one means of violently reconquering myself, of brutally invading my being, of anticipating the unpredictable approaches of God. By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will.”
-On Suicide, Antonin Artaud
“I guess I live up in my head
I call you up but my phone is dead
And now it's too much
The doctor said I need a cure
But what I got he's not really sure
And I won't say much.”
-You Are The Dark, Joseph Arthur
“I'm up all night against my will
My medicine won't let me feel anything at all
The doctor gave me sleeping pills and I took one
Then I feel all alone, sleeping like a stone.”
-You Are The Dark, Joseph Arthur
“When everything is at its worst, your mind just throws it all into the wastebasket and goes to Florida for a little while. There is a sudden electric what-the-hell glow as you stand there looking back over your shoulder at the bridge you just burnt down.”
-Rage, Richard Bachman (Stephen King)
“He realized how miserable and unknown and vulnerable he was in the world. The universe seemed to shriek and clatter and roar around him like a huge and indifferent jalopy rushing down a hill and toward the lip of a bottomless chasm. ”
-The Running Man, Richard Bachman (Stephen King)
“Pinch me, pinch me because I'm still asleep
Please God, tell me that I'm still asleep.”
-Pinch Me, Barenaked Ladies
“My hands are locked up tight in fists
My mind is racing filled with lists
Of things to do and things I've done
Another sleepless night's begun.”
-Who Needs Sleep, Barenaked Ladies
“Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn't want them back.”
-Krapp's Last Tape, Samuel Beckett
“One day you'll be blind, like me. You'll be sitting there, a speck in the void, in the dark, for ever, like me. (Pause) One day you'll say to yourself, I'm tired, I'll sit down, and you'll go and sit down. Then you'll say, I'm hungry, I'll get up and get something to eat. But you won't get up. You'll say, I shouldn't have sat down, but since I have I'll sit on a little longer, then I'll get up and get something to eat. But you won't get up and you won't get anything to eat. (Pause) You'll look at the wall a while, then you'll say, I'll close my eyes, perhaps have a little sleep, after that I'll feel better, and you'll close them. And when you open them again there'll be no wall any more. (Pause) Infinite emptiness will be all around you, all the resurrected dead of all the ages wouldn't fill it, and there you'll be like a little bit of grit in the middle of the steppe. (Pause) Yes, one day you'll know what it is, you'll be like me, except that you won't have anyone with you, because you won't have had pity on anyone and because there won't be anyone left to have pity on.”
-Endgame, Samuel Beckett
“It's a bargain you make with yourself, okay? An escape hatch, maybe today I'll try drinking see if that makes me feel better. Then drugs. More drugs. Cutting yourself. You're scared, so you make a deal to make yourself feel safer. And if it doesn't stop next week, next month then you're going to do something to make it stop. And the next month comes and the thought of waking up another day and feeling as badly as you did the day before is worse than the unknown. So you decide to jump. Seems simple, clean, elegant.”
-The Bedford Diaries [television show]
“And in the first moment of her waking up
She knows she's losing it, yeah she's losing it
When the first cup of coffee tastes like washing up
She knows she's losing it, yeah she's losing it
She goes to the mirror to put on her stuff
She knows she's losing it, oh yeah she's losing it
When she doesn't speak to anyone till four o' clock
She knows she's losing it, yeah she's losing it.”
-She's Losing It, Belle & Sebastian
“Alice, the world is full of ugly things that you can't change
Pretend it's not that way
It's my idea of faith.”
-Alice Childress, Ben Folds Five
“...she was the kind who noted birthdays down in her little book with the vigor of someone who has often been forgotten.”
-An Invisible Sign Of My Own, Aimee Bender
“...there is something so awful, something so gross about watching someone who loves you struggle to believe what you both know, deep down, is partially a lie.”
-An Invisible Sign Of My Own, Aimee Bender
“While she cut the mushrooms, she cried more than she had at the grave, the most so far, because she found the saddest thing of all to be the simple truth of her capacity to move on.” -Willful Creatures, Aimee Bender
“On my own body are scars that prove I belong to Christ Jesus. So I don't want anyone to bother me anymore.” -Galatians 6:17, The Bible
“Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute.” -Josh Billings
“They are almost well. Some of them will be almost well always.”
-Evening in the Sanitarium, Elizabeth Bishop
“My heart is a teacup with hairline cracks. I feel like I have to walk real carefully so it won't get shaken and just all shatter and break.”
-Missing Angel Juan, Francesca Lia Block
“It requires more courage to suffer than to die.” -Napoléon Bonaparte
“Life is a burden to me, nothing gives me any pleasure. I only find sadness in everything around me. It is very difficult because the ways of those with whom I live, and probably always shall live, are as different from mine as moonlight is from sunlight.” -Napoleon Bonaparte
“Losing an illusion makes you wiser than finding a truth.” -Karl Ludwig Börne
“Let me alone! That's all very well, but how can I leave myself alone? We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?”
-Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
“He had been crying quietly all evening. It did not show, not a vestige of it, on his face. It was all hidden somewhere and it wouldn't stop.” -The October Game, Ray Bradbury
“The more sensitive you are, the more likely you are to be brutalised, develop scabs, never evolve. Never allow yourself to feel anything, because you always feel too much.” -Marlon Brando
"When you take your pill
it's like a mine disaster.
I think of all the people
lost inside of you."
-The Pill vs. The Springhill Mine Disaster, Richard Brautigan
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that the moment one area of your life starts going okay, another part of it falls spectacularly to pieces.” -Bridget Jones's Diary [movie]
“And prescription pills
Well, I take two a day
To make my brain behave
It never does, but who's to say?
At least my doctor gets paid.”
-Loose Leaves, Bright Eyes
“As I hide behind these books I read,
While scribbling my poetry,
Like art could save a wretch like me,
With some ideal ideology that no one can hope to achieve.
And I am never real; it is just a sketch of me.
And everything I made is trite and cheap
And a waste of paint, of tape, of time.”
-Waste of Paint, Bright Eyes
“I believe in whatever gets you through the night. Night is the hardest time to be alive. For me, anyway. It lasts so long, and four AM knows all my secrets. Four AM is when my dreams die.” -Lost Souls, Poppy Z. Brite
“I fear the line between myself and madness is as fine these days as a cobweb, and I have seen what it means when a soul crosses over into that dim and wretched place.”
-Year of Wonders, Geraldine Brooks
“They talk of short-lived pleasure - be it so -
pain dies as quickly: stern, hard-featured pain
Expires, and lets her weary prisoner go.
The fiercest agonies have shortest reign;
And after dreams of horror, comes again
The welcome morning with its rays of peace.”
-Mutation. A Sonne, William Cullen Bryant
“To my mind, the only possibly pet is a cow. Cows love you. They are harmless, they look nice, they don't need a box to crap in, they keep the grass down, and they are so trusting and stupid that you can't help but lose your heart to them. Where I live in Yorkshire, there's a herd of cows down the lane. You can stand by the wall at any hour of the day or night, and after a minute the cows will all waddle over and stand with you, much too stupid to know what to do next, but happy just to be with you. They will stand there all day, as far as I can tell, possibly till the end of time. They will listen to your problems and never ask a thing in return. They will be your friends forever. And when you get tired of them, you can kill them and eat them. Perfect.”
-Neither Here Nor There, Travels in Europe, Bill Bryson
“Bottom line is, even if you see them coming, you're not ready for the big moments. No one asks for their life to change, not really. But it does. So, what are we, helpless? Puppets? Nah. The big moments are gonna come, you can't help that. It's what you do afterwards that counts. That's when you find out who you are.” -Buffy the Vampire Slayer [television show]
“sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think,
I'm not going to make it, but you laugh inside
remembering all the times you've felt that way.”
-gamblers all, Charles Bukowski
“Pain is strange. A cat killing a bird, a car accident, a fire...Pain arrives, BANG, and there it is, it sits on you. It's real. And to anybody watching, you look foolish. Like you've suddenly become an idiot. There's no cure for it unless you know somebody who understands how you feel, and knows how to help.” -Women, Charles Bukowski
“Who the hell wants to be a healthy, organic whole when you can be a brilliant, injured, human fragment?” -Sex and Sensibility, Julie Burchill
“All of a sudden, I feel like an emotional paraplegic. I feel that all of my gains and insights are based on control and denial. I'm worried that I'm so profoundly sick as to appear healthy and together.” -Dry, Augusten Burroughs
“She looks at me with eyes that seem to belong to someone three times her age. It's something beyond wisdom, all the way to insanity and back. It's like her eyes are scarred from all the things she's seen.” -Dry, Augusten Burroughs
“Why am I so anxious? And then it hits me. I'm not anxious, I'm lonely. And I'm lonely in some horribly deep way and for a flash of an instant, I can see just how lonely, and how deep this feeling runs. And it scares the shit out of me to be so lonely because it seems catastrophic - seeing the car just as it hits you.” -Dry, Augusten Burroughs
“For exactly the same reason, it is sometimes satisfying to cut yourself and bleed. On those gray days where eight in the morning looks no different from noon and nothing has happened and nothing is going to happen and you are washing a glass in the sink and it breaks - accidentally - and punctures your skin. And then there is this shocking red, the brightest thing in the day, so vibrant it buzzes, this blood of yours. That is okay sometimes because at least you know you're alive.” -Running With Scissors, Augusten Burroughs
“A wonderful realization will be the day you realize that you are unique in all the world. There is nothing that is an accident. You are a special combination for a purpose-and don't let them tell you otherwise, even if they tell you that purpose is an illusion. (Live an illusion if you have to). You are that combination so that you can do what is essential for you to do. Don't ever believe that you have nothing to contribute. The world is an incredible unfulfilled tapestry. And only you can fulfill that tiny space that is yours.” -Leo Buscaglia
“The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain.”
-Lord George Gordon Byron
“I'll tell you a big secret, mon cher. Don't wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day.” -The Fall, Albert Camus
“Thus I progressed on the surface of life, in the realm of words as it were, never in reality. All those books barely read, those friends barely loved, those cities barely visited, those women barely possessed! I went through the gestures out of boredom or absent-mindedness. Then came the human beings, they wanted to cling, but there was nothing to cling to, and that was unfortunate - for them. As for me, I forgot. I never remembered anything but myself.” -The Fall, Albert Camus
“'But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.
'Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat. 'We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.'
'How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.
'You must be," said the Cat. 'or you wouldn't have come here.'”
-Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
“...it takes all the running you can do to stay in one place.”
-Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
“Be what you would seem to be -- or if you'd like it put more simply -- Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.” -Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
“Alice came to a fork in the road.
'Which road do I take?' she asked.
'Where do you want to go?' responded the Cheshire cat.
'I don't know,' Alice answered.
'Then,' said the cat, 'it doesn't matter.'”
-Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
“Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
-Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
“When you're a little kid, you never think that you'll die. I mean, death is just some obscure, esoteric thing that you see on TV or read about in a book. Then one day you realize what it really is. Then nothing is ever the same again. From that day on, you're fucked.” -Chance [movie]
“When your life is never what you wanted
Not even halfway normal
Just tarnished and soiled
When in your reach
A framed and frozen moment
So far from perfection
Not truth or transcendence
Will set you free
Still you don't believe.”
-Broken, Tracy Chapman
“I can't think again. Not ever again. I don't know if you've ever felt like that. That you wanted to sleep for a thousand years. Or just not exist. Or just not be aware that you do exist. Or something like that.” -The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky
“I know that I brought this all on myself. I know that I deserve this. I'd do anything not to be this way. I'd do anything to make it up to everyone. And to not have to see a psychiatrist, who explains to me about being 'passive aggressive.' And to not have to take the medicine he gives me, which is too expensive for my dad. And to not have to talk about bad memories with him. Or be nostalgic over bad things. I wish that God or my parents or Sam or my sister or someone would just tell me what's wrong with me. Just tell me how to be different in a way that makes sense. To make this all go away. And disappear. I know that's wrong because it's my responsibility, and I know that things get worse before they get better because that's what my psychiatrist says, but this is a worse that feels too big.” -The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky
“Too much awareness is a sickness; it keeps me awake all night.” -Yi Cho-nyon
“The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation. The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.” -The Awakening, Kate Chopin
“In the midst of movement and chaos, keep stillness inside of you.” -Deepak Chopra
“In the darkest hour the soul is replenished and given strength to continue and endure.” -Heart Warrior Chosa
“No matter what you do or say, there's nothing that you can do to make people understand you.” -Kurt Cobain
“Certain people, in their eagerness to construct a world which no external threat can penetrate, build exaggeratedly high defenses against the outside world, against new people, new places, different experiences, and leave their inner world stripped bare. It is there that Bitterness begins its irrevocable work.
The will was the main target of Bitterness (or Vitriol, as Dr. Igor preferred to call it). The people attacked by this malaise began to lose all desire, and within a few years, they became unable to leave their world, where they had spent enormous reserves of energy constructing high walls in order to make reality what they wanted it to be.
In order to avoid external attack, they had also deliberately limited internal growth, they continued going to work, watching television, having children, complaining about the traffic, but these things happened automatically, unaccompanied by any particular emotion, because, after all, everything was under control.
The great problem with poisoning by Bitterness was that the passions -- hatred, love, despair, enthusiasm, curiosity -- also ceased to manifest themselves. After a while, the embittered person felt no desire at all. They lacked the will either to live or to die, that was the problem.” -Veronika Decides To Die, Paulo Coelho
“Come on, oh my star is fading
And I see no chance of release
And I know I'm dead on the surface
But I am screaming underneath.”
-Amsterdam, Coldplay
“Suicide sometimes proceeds from cowardice, but not always; for cowardice sometimes prevents it; since as many live because they are afraid to die, as die because they are afraid to live.” -The Lacon, Charles Caleb Colton
“You know I hate, detest, can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies, - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do.” -Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
“...life is just an endless banquet of loss, and each time a new loss is doled out, you have to move your mental furniture around, throw things out, and by then there's more loss, and the cycle goes on and on.” -All Families Are Psychotic, Douglas Coupland
“One of my big problems is time sickness. When I feel lonely, I assume that the mood will never pass--that I'll feel lonely and bad for the rest of my life, which means that I've wrecked both the present and the future. And if I look back on my past, I wreck that too, by concentrating on all the things I did wrong. The brutal thing about time sickness is that naming it is no cure. I look at the philodendron on the kitchen windowsill, the only thing in my condo that ever changes. I found it at a bus stop twelve years ago and I've kept it going ever since. I like it because up close its leaves are pretty, and also because it makes me think of time in a way that doesn't totally depress me. ” -Eleanor Rigby, Douglas Coupland
“When you see such photos, you can't help but wonder at just how sweet and sad and innocent all moments of life are rendered by the tripping of a camera's shutter, for at that point the future is still unknown and has yet to hurt us, and also for that brief moment, our poses are accepted as honest.” -Generation X, Douglas Coupland
“Ask whatever challenges dead and thoughtless beliefs. Ask: When did we become human beings and stop being whatever it was we were before this? Ask: What was the specific change that made us human? Ask: Why do people not particularly care about their ancestors more than three generations back? Ask: Why are we unable to think of any real future beyond, say, a hundred years from now? Ask: How can we begin to think of the future as something enormous before us that also includes us? Ask: Having become human, what is it that we are now doing or creating that will transform us into whatever it is that we are slated to next become?” -Girlfriend in a Coma, Douglas Coupland
“At what point in our lives do we stop blurring? When do we become crisp individuals? What must we do in order to end these fuzzy identities - to clarify just who it is we really are?” -Girlfriend in a Coma, Douglas Coupland
“If you look at life as a whole, we have to admit life's good where we live. But in an evil Twilight Zone kind of way there's nothing else to choose. In the old days there was always a Bohemia or a creative under-world to join if the mainstream life wasn't your bag - or a life of crime, or even religion. And now there's only the system. All other options have evaporated. For most people it's the System or what... death? There's nothing. There's no way out now.” -Girlfriend in a Coma, Douglas Coupland
“Nobody believes the identities we've made for ourselves. I feel like everybody in the world is fake now - as though people had true cores once, but tucked them away and replaced them with something more attractive but also hollow.” -Girlfriend In A Coma, Douglas Coupland
“One of my own stray childhood fears had been to wonder what a whale might feel like had it been born and bred in captivity, then released into the wild—into its ancestral sea—its limited world instantly blowing up when cast into the unknowable depths, seeing strange fish and tasting new waters, not even having a concept of depth, not knowing the language of any whale pods it might meet. It was my fear of a world that would expand suddenly, violently, and without rules or laws: bubbles and seaweed and storms and frightening volumes of dark blue that never end.” -Girlfriend in a Coma, Douglas Coupland
“And then...and then I felt truly old for the first time—old in the sense that I was beyond the point of ever doing something radical or bold to change the course of my life...I was sick of wanting money. I was sick of being without a goal.” -Hey Nostradamus!, Douglas Coupland
“For what it's worth, I think God is how you deal with everything that's out of your own control. It's as good a definition as any.” -Hey Nostradamus!, Douglas Coupland
“.. how often is it we are rescued by a stranger, if ever at all? And how is it that our lives can become drained of the possibility of forgiveness and kindness - so drained that even one small act of mercy becomes a potent lifelong memory? How do our lives reach these points?” -Life After God, Douglas Coupland
“I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can't be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older, as you see the people in your life break one by one. You wonder when your turn is going to be, or if it's already happened.” -Life After God, Douglas Coupland
“I cry because the future has once again found its sparkle and has grown a million times larger. And I cry because I am ashamed of how badly I have treated the people I love—of how badly I behaved during my own personal Dark Ages—back before I had a future and someone who cared for me from above. It is like today the sky opened up and only now am I allowed to enter.” -Shampoo Planet, Douglas Coupland
“It can't rain all the time.”
-The Crow [movie]
“To be nobody - but - myself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make me everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting”
-A Poet's Advice, ee cummings
“Unbeing dead isn't being alive.”
-E.E. Cummings
“...then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis.”
-since feeling is first, ee cummings
“i do not know what it is about you that closes and opens;
only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses.”
-Somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond, ee cummings
I myself had had trouble deciding whether or not to wear a hat. In my twenties I'd suspected that if you peeled away my looks and habits and half-dozen strong ideas you'd have found an empty spot where the self ought to be. It had seemed like my worst secret.”
-A Home at the End of the World, Michael Cunningham
“She always surprises you this way, by knowing more than you think she does. Louis wonders if they're calculated, these little demonstrations of self-knowledge that pepper Clarissa's wise, hostessy performance. She seems, at times, to have read your thoughts. She disarms you by saying, essentially, I know what you're thinking and I agree, I'm ridiculous. I'm far less than I could have been and I'd like it to be otherwise but I can't seem to help myself. You find that you move, almost against your will, from being irritated with her to consoling her, helping her back into her performance so that she can be comfortable again and you can resume feeling irritated.”
-The Hours, Michael Cunningham
“Still, she loves the world for being rude and indestructible, and she knows other people must love it too, poor as well as rich, though no one speaks specifically of the reasons. Why else do we struggle to go on living, no matter how compromised, no matter how harmed?”
-The Hours, Michael Cunningham
“We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds & expectations, to burst open & give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning, we hope, more than anything for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so...There she is with another hour before her.”
-The Hours, Michael Cunningham
“Sometimes there's nothing to feel
Sometimes there's nothing to hold
Sometimes there's no time to run away
Sometimes you just feel so old
The times it hurts when you cry
The times it hurts just to breathe
And then it all seems like there's no-one left
And all you want is to sleep.”
-Fight, The Cure
“I'll try to make this perfectly clear
I'm so transparent I disappear.”
-Sink to the Beat, Cursive
“Conformists look around and follow closely; Nonconformists look around and do the opposite. Individualists don't look around a lot.”
-Eromon D'Alyzala
“Every decision you make is a mistake.”
-Edward Dahlberg
“Damaged people are dangerous, they know they can survive.”
-Damage [movie]
“'You'll be sick or feeling troubled or deeply in love or quietly uncertain or even content for the first time in your life. It won't matter. Out of the blue, beyond any cause you can trace, you'll suddenly realize things are not how you perceived them to be at all. For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You'll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you'll realize it's always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won't understand why or how. You'll have forgotten what granted you this awareness in the first place.
'Old shelters—television, magazines, movies—won't protect you anymore. You might try scribbling in a journal, on a napkin, maybe even in the margins of this book. That's when you'll discover you no longer trust the very walls you always took for granted. Even the hallways you've walked a hundred times will feel longer, much longer, and the shadows, any shadow at all, will suddenly seem deeper, much, much, deeper.
'You might try then, as I did, to find a sky so full of stars it will blind you again. Only no sky can blind you now. Even with all that iridescent magic up there, your eye will no longer linger on the light, it will no longer trace constellations. You'll care only about the darkness and you'll watch it for hours, for days, maybe even for years, trying in vain to believe you're some kind of indispensable, universe-appointed sentinel, as if just by looking you could actually keep it all at bay. It will get so bad you'll be afraid to look away, you'll be afraid to sleep.
'Then no matter where you are, in a crowded restaurant or on some desolate street or even in the comforts of your own home, you'll watch yourself dismantle every assurance you ever lived by. You'll stand aside as a great complexity intrudes, tearing apart, piece by piece, all of your carefully conceived denials, whether deliberate or unconscious. And then for better or worse you'll turn, unable to resist, though try to resist you still will, fighting with everything you've got not to face the thing you most dread, what is now, what will be, what has always come before, the creature you truly are, the creature we all are, buried in the nameless black of a name.
'And then the nightmares will begin.'”
-House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski
“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.”
-House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski
“Yet if you build your life on dreams
'Tis prudent to recall
The man with moonlight in his hand
Has nothing there at all.”
-Don Quixote: Man of La Mancha, Joe Darion
“One man scorned and covered with scars still strive with his last ounce of courage to reach the unreachable stars; and the world will be better for this.”
-The Impossible Dream (The Quest), Joe Darion
“Laced with brilliant smiles and shining eyes,
And perfect makeup,
But you're barely scraping by.”
-The Places You Have Come To Fear The Most, Dashboard Confessional
“And the fog rolls heavy on her
and she feels the weight of life
though it's red blood flowing from her heart
it feels like cold blue ice
and the colours mix together
to grey.”
-Grey Street, Dave Matthews Band
“She feels like kicking out all the windows
And setting fire to this life
She could change everything about her
Using colors bold and bright
But all the colors mix together to grey
And it breaks her heart.”
-Grey Street, Dave Matthews Band
“One sees that dead, vacant look steal sometimes over the rarest, finest of women's faces, - in the very midst, it may be, of their warmest summer's day; and then one can guess at the secret of intolerable solitude that lies hid beneath the delicate laces and brilliant smile.”
-Life in the Iron Mills, Rebecca Harding Davis
“This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous - indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.”
-River out of Eden, Richard Dawkins
“We are going to die and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they're never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place, but who will, in fact, never see the light of day, outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. ...In the face of these stupefying odds, it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. Here's another respect in which we are lucky. The universe is older than a hundred million centuries. Within a comparable time, the sun will swell to a red giant and engulf the earth. Every century of hundreds of millions has been in its time, or will be when its time comes, the present century. The present moves from the past to the future like a tiny spotlight inching its way along a gigantic ruler of time. Everything behind the spotlight is in darkness, the darkness of the dead past. Everything ahead of the spotlight is in the darkness of the unknown future. The odds of your century being the one in the spotlight are the same as the odds that a penny, tossed down at random, will land on a particular ant crawling somewhere on the road from New York to San Francisco. You are lucky to be alive and so am I.”
-Unweaving the Rainbow, Richard Dawkins
“Dreams aren't perfect. They come true, not free.”
-Dawson's Creek [television show]
“We don't read and write poetry because its cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is full of passion. Medicine, law, business, engineering: these are noble pursuits necessary to sustain life, but poetry, beauty, romance, love. These are what we stay alive for.”
-The Dead Poet's Society [movie]
“i think your bruise was understated
'cause you can't feel this anymore
it's getting bluer and you can't keep faking
that you can't feel this anymore.”
-Your Bruise, Death Cab For Cutie
“Self-revelation is a cruel process. The real picture, the real 'you' never emerges. Looking for it is as bewildering as trying to know how you really look. Ten different mirrors show you ten different faces.”
-The Long Silence, Shashi Deshpande