_“All that stuff you try to do and nothing ever works. Makes me think of the story of the little mermaid. It's like you said yes to an enormous sacrifice so you could have legs and mix with others. And every step is excruciatingly painful. What everybody else does with mind-blowing ease demands unbelievable effort from you. ”
-Baise-Moi, Virginie Despentes
“Those who have suffered will understand that pain is welcome when it's all you have left, come and die with me.”
-Come With Me, Deviates
“Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape. ”
-Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
“It struck me -- every Day --
The Lightning was as new
As if the Cloud that instant slit
And let the Fire through --
It burned Me -- in the Night --
It Blistered to My Dream --
It sickened fresh upon my sight --
With every Morn that came --
I though that Storm -- was brief --
The Maddest -- quickest by --
But Nature lost the Date of This --
And left it in the Sky -- ”
-It struck me every Day --, Emily Dickinson
“Pain -- has an Element of Blank --
It cannot recollect
When it begun -- or if there were
A time when it was not --
It has no Future -- but itself --
Its Infinite contain
Its Past -- enlightened to perceive
New Periods -- of Pain.”
-Pain -- has an Element of Blank --, Emily Dickinson
“The sky is grey, the sand is grey, and the ocean is grey
And I feel right at home in this stunning monochrome, alone in my way.”
-Grey, Ani DiFranco
“Everything I do is judged, and they mostly get it wrong, but oh well
'Cause the bathroom mirror has not budged and the woman who lives there can
tell
The truth from the stuff that they say, and she looks me in the eye
And says 'Would you prefer the easy way? No? Well, okay then, don't cry.'”
-Joyful Girl, Ani DiFranco
“i am not an angry girl
but it seems like
i've got everyone fooled
every time i say something
they find hard to hear
they chalk it up to my anger
never to their own fear
imagine you're a girl
just trying to finally come clean
knowing full well they'd prefer
you were dirty
and smiling.”
-not a pretty girl, Ani DiFranco
“some people wear their smile
like a disguise
those people who smile a lot
watch the eyes
i know it 'cause i'm like that a lot
you think everything's okay
and it is
'til it's not.”
-outta me, onto you, Ani DiFranco
“little flashing zero
on my answering machine
rats scratching at my brain
brain shuffling its feet
yes i have my father's heart
it may or may not keep on trying
can't really tell you what it is
keeps me this side of that dark line.”
-Recoil, Ani DiFranco
“And you're trying hard to figure out
Just exactly how you feel
Before you end up parked and sobbing
Forehead on the steering wheel.”
-So What, Ani DiFranco
“I am out here studying stones, trying to learn to be less alive
Using all of my will to keep very still, still even on the inside.”
-Studying Stones, Ani DiFranco
“I know that sometimes all I can see is how I feel
Like the whole world is on the other side of a dirty windshield
And I am trying to see through the glare
Yeah I'm struggling just to see what is there.”
-Virtue, Ani DiFranco
“Do you ever have that dream when you open your mouth and you try to scream
but you cant make a sound?
That's everyday starting now - don't tell me it's gonna be alright, you cant
sell me on your optimism tonight.”
-Wish I May, Ani DiFranco
“I don't think I am strong enough to do this much longer - God I wish I was
stronger
This song can never be long enough to express every longing - God I wish it
was longer.”
-Wish I May, Ani DiFranco
“I'm losing my love of adventure, I'm losing all respect for me and myself
tonight
I wonder what happens if I get to the end of this tunnel and there isn't a
light
I've worn down the treads on all of my tires, i've worn through the elbows
and the knees of my clothing
And I'm staring down the gravel driveway of desire trying not to wake up my
sleeping self loathing.”
-Wish I May, Ani DiFranco
“Whenever any affliction assails me, I have the keys of my prison in mine own hand, and no remedy presents it selfe so soone to my heart, as mine own sword. Often meditation of this hath wonne me to a charitable interpretation of their action, who dy so: and provoked me a little to watch and exagitate their reasons, which pronounce so peremptory judgments upon them.”
-John Donne
“I thought that madness isn't like they tell it in books. It isn't Miss Havisham sitting in the ruins of her mansion, all vicious and majestic. And it isn't like in Jane Eyre, either, with Rochester's wife banging around in the attic, shrieking and carrying on and frightening the help. When your mind goes, it's not castles and cobwebs and silver candelabra. It's dirty sheets and sour milk and dog shit on the floor. It's Emmie cowering under her bed, crying and singing while her kids try to make soup from seed potatoes.”
-A Northern Light, Jennifer Donnelly
“Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering, and that is a fact.”
“If you take someone's thoughts and feelings away, bit by bit, consistently, they then have nothing left except some gritty, gnawing, shitty little instinct, down there, somewhere, worming around in the gut, but so far down, so hidden, it's impossible to find.”
-Martha Barnes, David Edgar
“Gets to a point where you really can't operate any more as a human being - you can't get out of bed, you can't... make yourself a cup of coffee without something going badly wrong or your body's too weak to walk. ”
-Richey James Edwards
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”
-What I Believe, Albert Einstein
“What is hell? Hell is oneself.
Hell is alone, the other figures in it
Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from
And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.”
-The Cocktail Party, T.S. Eliot
“This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”
-The Hollow Men, T.S. Eliot
“I'm having a sort of hard time paying attention because my automated teller has started speaking to me, sometimes actually leaving weird messages on the screen, in green lettering, like 'Cause a Terrible Scene at Sotheby's' or 'Kill the President' or 'Feed Me a Stray Cat,' and I was freaked out by the park bench that followed me for six blocks last Monday evening and it too spoke to me.”
-American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis
“People only see what they are prepared to see.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Far or forgot to me is near,
Shadow and sunlight are the same,
The vanished gods to me appear,
And one to me are shame and fame.”
-Brahma, Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.”
-Journals, Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy.”
-Nora Ephron
“Being strong and silent only gets you so far... it's the things you don't say you regret the most.”
-Ericsson
“Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in 'sadness,' 'joy,' or 'regret.' Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feelings. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster.' Or: 'the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy.' I'd like to show how 'intimations of morality brought on by aging family members' connects with 'the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.' I'd like to have a word for 'the sadness inspired by failing restaurants' as well as for 'the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.'”
-Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides
“This is how it went with the Obscure Object. A cigarette in bed was the tombstone marking each day's end and the reed through which she breathed herself back to life each morning. You've heard of installation artists? Well, the Object was an exhalation artist. She had a whole repertoire. There was the Sidewinder, where she politely funneled smoke away from the person she was talking to out the corner of her mouth. There was the Geyser when she was angry. There was the Dragon Lady, featuring a plume from each nostril. There was the French Recycle, where she let smoke out her mouth only to inhale it back through her nose. And there was the Swallow. The Swallow was reserved for crisis situations.”
-Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides
“It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the treehouse, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.”
-The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides
“We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm.”
-The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides
“She is perfect in that fucked up way
That all the magazines seem to want to glorify these days.”
-Amphetamine, Everclear
“I think you are blind to the fact
That the hand you hold is the hand that holds you down.”
-Everything to Everyone, Everclear
“You put yourself in stupid places
Yes I think you know it's true
Situations where it's easy to look down on you
Think you like to be the victim
Think you like to be in pain
I think you make yourself a victim
Almost every single day.”
-Everything to Everyone, Everclear
“Yeah, you ought to take your medication every day
Be a good dog, live life in a wonderful way.”
-Normal Like You, Everclear
“You walk around oblivious to everything
You wear that party dress and black mascara
Like you're queen for the day.”
-Normal Like You, Everclear
“There is a prayer that is simply seeing through yourself, seeing your own nothingness, the emptiness impervious to self-assertion. A prayer that is the end of the rope. A helplessness, fathomless and terrifying. Now matter how holy or well meaning you were when you started out, no matter how many fine experiences you had along the way, by the time you reach the point of this prayer, you want only to get out of it.
And God? God is that which will not let you out of it.”
-The Monk Downstairs, Tim Farrington
“It seemed I would not or could not catch up with her. As she walked, her shadow caught on a tree, fell to the ground and stretched, as if made of rubber bands, no china doll about to break, capable of stretching into any form I imagined, a cicada cry in her mouth.”
-Her, Lawrence Ferlinghetti
“There was no reality to pain when it left
one, though while it held one fast all other realities failed.”
-Rachel Field
“Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life; define yourself.”
-Harvey Fierstein
“Please don't be fooled by me. Don't be fooled by the face I wear, for I wear a mask. I wear a thousand masks, masks that I'm afraid to take off and none of them are me. Pretending is an art that is second nature to me, but don't be fooled, for God's sake don't be fooled.
I give you the impression I'm secure and that all is sunny and unruffled with me, within as well as without, that confidence is my name, coolness my game, that water is calm and I'm in command and that I need no one, but don't believe me, please don't believe me.
My surface may be smooth, but my surface is a mask--my every varying and ever concealing mask. Beneath it dwells the real confusion, fear and aloneness. Beneath lies my smugness, my complacently, but I hide this--I don't want anyone to know it.
I panic at the thought of my weakness and fear being exposed. That's why I frantically created a mask to hide behind-- nonchalant sophisticated facades to help me pretend-- to shield me from the glance that knows-- but such a glance is precisely my salvation, my only salvation and I know it. That is if it's followed by acceptance. If it's followed by love, it's the only thing that can liberate me from myself, from my own self built prison walls and from the barriers that I so painstakingly erect. It's the only thing that will assure me of what I cannot assure myself, that I'm really worth while, but I don't tell you this, I don't dare--I'm afraid to.
I'm afraid that your glance will not be followed by acceptance and love. I'm afraid you'll think less of me and you'll laugh and your laugh will kill me. I'm afraid that deep down, I'm nothing and that I'm just no good and that you'll see this and reject me.”
-Don't Be Fooled by Me, Charles C. Finn
“Beauty was deceptive. I would rather wear my pain, my ugliness. I was torn and stitched. I was a strip mine, and they would just have to look. I hoped I made them sick. I hoped they saw me in their dreams.”
-White Oleander, Janet Fitch
“How vast was a human being's capacity for suffering. The only thing you could do was stand in awe of it. It wasn't a question of survival at all. It was the fullness of it, how much you could hold, how much you could care. ”
-White Oleander, Janet Fitch
“In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.”
-The Crack-Up, F. Scott Fitzgerald
“But with every word she was drawing further and further into herself, so he gave that up and only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice across the room.”
-The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
“'Long ago,' he said, 'long ago, there was something in me, but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come back no more.'”
-Winter Dreams, F. Scott Fitzgerald
“...exaggerated turns of speech conceal mediocre affections: as if the fullness of the soul might not sometimes overflow in the emptiest of metaphors, since no one, ever, can give the exact measurements of his needs, nor of his conceptions, nor of his sufferings, and the human word is like a cracked cauldron upon which we beat out melodies fit for making bears dance when we are trying to move the stars to pity.”
-Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
“No matter! She was not happy, had never been so. Where did it come from, this feeling of deprivation, this instantaneous decay of things in which she put her trust? ... But, if there were somewhere a strong and beautiful creature, a valiant nature full of passion and delicacy in equal measure, the heart of a poet in the figure of an angel, a lyre with strings of steel, sounding to the skies elegiac epithalamia, why should she not, fortuitously, find such a one? What an impossibility! Nothing, anyway, was worth that great quest; it was all lies! Every smile concealed the yawn of boredom, every joy a malediction, every satisfaction brought its nausea, and even the most perfect kisses only leave upon the lips a fantastical craving for supreme pleasure.”
-Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
“...There are only so many times that you can utter 'It does not hurt' before it begins to hurt even more than the hurt. You become enlightened of the feeling of feeling hurt, which is worse, I am certain, than the existent hurt.”
-Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer
“Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of, I never thought of myself as quiet, much less silent, I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn't the world, it wasn't the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, the cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don't know, but it's so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.”
-Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer
“When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from a chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table. I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?”
-Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer
“...the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands.”
-The Diary of Anne Frank, Anne Frank
“I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.”
-The Diary of Anne Frank, Anne Frank
“Beauty disguises what it's holding back
Some days when her eyes shine, her thoughts are black.”
-Melancholy Baby, Gavin Friday
“I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.”
-Robert Frost
“Two roads diverged into a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
-The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost
“Didn't Woody Allen say that all literature was a footnote to Faust? Perhaps all adolescence is a dialogue between Faust and Christ. We tremble on the brink of selling that part of ourselves that is real, unique, angry, defiant and whole for the rewards of attainment, achievement, success and the golden prizes of integration and acceptance; but we also, in our great creating imagination, rehearse the sacrifice we will make: the pain and terror we will take from others' shoulders; our penetration into the lives and souls of our fellows; our submission and willingness to be rejected and despised for the sake of truth and love and, in the wilderness, our angry rebuttals of the hypocrisy, deception and compromise of a world which we see to be so false.
There is nothing so self-righteous nor so right as an adolescent imagination.”
-Moab is My Washpot, Stephen Fry
“It can come a bit hard sometimes to see one's own unique, heroic life pinned so pitilessly to a wall. At other times it can endorse, affirm and save, but as I go clowning my sentimental way into eternity, wrestling with all my problems of estrangement and communion, sincerity and simulation, ambition and acquiescence, I shuttle between worrying whether I matter at all and whether anything matters at all but me.”
-Moab is My Washpot, Stephen Fry
“Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, "casualties may rise to a million." With individual stories, the statistics become people - but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. Look, see the child's swollen, swollen belly, and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, his skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing heat beside him, a distorted, distended caricature of a human child? And there, if we feel for them, are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies' own myriad squirming children?”
-American Gods, Neil Gaiman
“You're walking on gallows ground, and there's a rope around your neck and a raven-bird on each shoulder waiting for your eyes, and the gallows tree has deep roots, for it stretches from heaven to hell, and our world is only the branch from which the rope is swinging.”
-American Gods, Neil Gaiman
“He imagined he could see the very faces of the stars; pale, they were, and smiling gently, as if they had spent so much time above the world, watching the scrambling and the joy and the pain of the people below them, that they could not help being amused every time another little human believed itself the center of its world, as each of us does.”
-Stardust, Neil Gaiman
“I only have two kinds of dreams: the bad and the terrible.
Bad dreams I can cope with. They're just nightmares, and they end eventually. I wake up.
The terrible dreams are the good dreams. In my terrible dreams, everything's fine. I'm still with the company. I still look like me. None of the last five years ever happened. Sometimes I'm married. Once I even had kids. I even knew their names. Everything's wonderful and normal and fine.
And then I wake up. And I'm still me. And I'm still here. And that is truly terrible.”
-The Sandman - Dream Country, Neil Gaiman
“I want to kuh-kill myself. And -- and I can't. It's not that I'm too scared to kill myself. I -- I'm scared of lots of things. I'm scared of noises in the night-time, scared of telephones and closed doors, scared of people... scared of everything. Not of death. I want to die. It's just that I don't know how.”
-The Sandman - Dream Country, Neil Gaiman
“Her eyes are grey.
Her hair is straggly and wet.
Her fingers are stubby.
The nails are chewed and broken.
Her teeth are crooked, jagged things.
Her sigil is the hooked ring.
One day her hook will catch your heart.
Describing her, we articulate what she is and why she is: when hope is past, she is there.
She is in a thousand thousand waiting rooms and empty streets, in grey comcrete buildings and anonymous hotels.
She is on the other side of every mirror.
When the eyes that look back at you know you too well, and no longer care for what they see, they are her eyes.
She stands and waits, and in her posture the pain no longer tells you to live, and in her presence joy is unimaginable.”
-The Sandman - Endless Nights, Neil Gaiman
“...and sometimes I have really bad days...when, you know, I just want to hide or scream or bleed or something...”
-The Sandman#42, Neil Gaiman
“A 'No' uttered from deepest conviction is better and greater than a 'Yes' merely uttered to please, or what is worse, to avoid trouble.”
-Mahatma Gandhi
“Live as if your were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
-Mahatma Gandhi
“Somebody get me out of here
I'm tearing at myself
Nobody gives a damn about me
Or anybody else.”
-Medication, Garbage
“Oh doctor
We're dying
There's no use in crying
So live for tomorrow
And do what you have to.”
-Parade, Garbage
“Sleeping with ghosts
It's such a lonely experience
The stars are out tonight
Only they can hear you breathing.”
-So Like A Rose, Garbage
“She's pretty, but in her face you can see all the things she's given up on in life.”
-I Wish Someone Were Waiting For Me Somewhere, Anna Gavalda
“I make little distinction between those who commit evil and those who stand by and do nothing.”
-White Wolf, David Gemmell
“You know what my number one fantasy used to be? I used to think about one day... just not telling anyone and going off to some random place. And I'd disappear... and they'd never see me again...”
-Ghost World [movie]
“I am immune from sanity or insanity – I am an empty present box all unwrapped for someone else's disposal. I am a throw away egg-shell with no life inside me - for I am not touchable but a slave to nothingness.”
-Jennifer and June Gibbons
“The deeper sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”
-Kahlil Gibran
“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.”
-Kahlil Gibran
“Death is the only inescapable, unavoidable, sure thing. We are sentenced to die the day we're born.”
-Gary Mark Gilmore
“Suicide is the ultimate fuck you.”
-Ginger Snaps [movie]
“So much of what we live goes on inside-
The diaries of grief, the tongue-tied aches
Of unacknowledged love are no less real
For having passed unsaid. What we conceal
Is always more than what we dare confide.
Think of the letters that we write our dead.”
-Unsaid, Dana Gioia
“We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.”
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Who am I? Who are you? That is to say, 'Who are you really?' Do you know? Does anyone know? The restraints of this society make us put up so many walls of bullshit and facades to hide who we are that it is almost impossible to tell who anyone really is. We dig ourselves into a comfortable hole to hide away from the eyes of our peers, and it's in this hole that we bury ourselves. Dig yourselves out. Claw your way back into the light of day. Let your true self breathe, and in doing that, live.”
-Half Life, Patrick Goins
“Life, like some grand mosaic slowly loses hold over time, and the fragile strands that connect the many different parts unravels. The universe is a mirror, fragile and reflective, and we all stand in awe of our own human vanity. Fools see the universe as linear, absolute, all knowing. The wise see the universe as chaotic, unknown, fragile. Only on the verge of infinity can one see the fall apart universe. Sadness is knowing that we all stand upon a universe with a cracked glass bottom, and in an instant we may all sink into oblivion. Everything falls apart. Empires rise and crumble as tin soldiers hold plastic banners of righteous intent, all soaked with the blood of innocents. Hands raise and fall to the deafening sound of a million questions all unanswered. Love is just another unfelt emotion, talked about but never seen in full bloom. Love is only rumor and hearsay in the fall apart universe. Eventually we all must stand upon the jagged glass of the broken boundaries and broken promises. We must all suffer the soul bleeding that follows as the tattered splinters dig deep.”
-The Fall Apart Universe, Patrick Goins
“Life is pain. Anyone who tells you something different is selling something.”
-The Princess Bride, William Goldman
“Stranger than your sympathy
I take these things so I don't feel
I'm killing myself from the inside out
Now my head's been filled with doubt.”
-Sympathy, Goo Goo Dolls
“I tell people it's like being dead. It feels like being a ghost, maybe. You float through your days feeling insubstantial, cut off from warmth, light and all feeling. Sometimes it feels like you're in a coffin buried alive. You're screaming inside your head, but no one can hear you.”
-Deborah Gray
“Everybody is so afraid of getting blood on the living room floor. 'I can't stand to see suffering,' they say, 'so go die outside!'”
-I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, Joanne Greenberg
“I start to see that I surround myself with broken people; more broken than me. Ah, yes, let me count your cracks. Let's see, one hundred, two... yes, you'll do nicely. A cracked companion makes me look more whole, gives me something outside myself to care for. When I'm with whole, healed people I feel my own cracks, the shatters, the insanities of dislocation in myself. ”
-Sickened, Julie Gregory
“In reality, loneliness was more like a slow and constant drowning. I simply disappeared. The hall and classroom swallowed me up, and I became invisible, my quiet flailing unnoticed. ”
-Amandine, Adele Griffin
“And it is in the realm of the imagination that the greatest agonies are suffered; if I imagine myself guilty, even though I am not, I suffer as if I were. ”
-Susan Griffin
“I read that many trees, not only by the side of the road but deep in forests, evidence a new fragility. It is in the air. And the rain, or what is in it. Everything alive begins to seem frail, everything. ”
-Susan Griffin
“It's all a joke to them. Oh he's just sad, he's just overweight, he's just lazy. No, he wants to die. He wants to burn. He wants to never wake up again. Turn the ignore back on.”
-grouphug.us
“Geez, if I could get through to you, kiddo, that depression is not sobbing and crying and giving vent, it is plain and simple reduction of feeling. Reduction, see? Of all feeling. People who keep stiff upper lips find that it's damn hard to smile.”
-Ordinary People, Judith Guest
“The world has started spinning backwards.
Only the acceleration has increased.
When you noticed, it was dark before your feet.
You were standing at the edge of a cliff.
You can't pull back.
Even if you turn pale nothing will happen.
With the light you've sharpened to the utmost,
you continue persistently even if the end of this path is
the end of the world.
There's more to life
than money or honor.
You will forever pretend not to understand.
It's frightening to notice and get hurt.
Your dream at that time, your wishes,
They were all granted, but...
Faster than everyone, you even pass the wind.
Higher than everyone, you even pierce the clouds.
Even if you live too quickly.”
-Too Late, Ayumi Hamasaki
“Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.”
-Strictly Personal, Sydney J. Harris
“Scars are stories, history written on the body.”
-Kathryn Harrison
“When I am right, no one remembers. When I am wrong, no one forgets.”
-Doug Harvey
“Every individual has a place to fill in the world, and is important, in some respect, whether he chooses to be so or not.”
-Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Because a mind is a wonderful thing to twist.”
-Peversions of Science, HBO promotion
“Sleep is good, death is better; but of course, the best thing would to have never been born at all.”
-Morphine, Heinrich Heine
“'When you talk to the man upstairs,' he said, 'I want you to tell Him something for me. Tell him it ain't right for people to die when they’re young. I mean it. Tell Him if they got to die at all, they got to die when they're old. I want you to tell Him that. I don't think He knows it ain't right, because He’s supposed to be good and it's been going on for a long, long time. Okay?'”
-Catch 22, Joseph Heller
“Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.”
-Catch-22, Joseph Heller
“Perhaps passing through the gates of death is like passing quietly through the gate in a pasture fence. On the other side, you keep walking, without the need to look back. No shock, no drama, just the lifting of a plank or two in a simple wooden gate in a clearing. Neither pain, nor floods of light, nor great voices, but just the silent crossing of a meadow. ”
-A Soldier of the Great War, Mark Helprin
“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?”
-Ernest Hemingway
“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”
-Ernest Hemingway
“If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”
-A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
“His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred.”
-A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway
“They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for ones country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.”
-Notes on the Next War: A Serious Topical Letter, Ernest Hemingway
“And here it must be said that to call suicides only those who actually destroy themselves is false. Among these, indeed, there are many who in a sense are suicides only by accident and in whose being suicide has no necessary place. Among the common run of men there are many of little personality and stamped with no deep impress of fate, who find their end in suicide without belonging on that account to the type of the suicide by inclination; while, on the other hand, of those who are to be counted as suicides by the very nature of their beings are many, perhaps a majority, who never in fact lay hands upon themselves. [...]
But just as there are those who at the least indisposition develop a fever, so do those whom we call suicides, and who are always very emotional and sensitive, develop at the least shock the notion of suicide. [...]
All suicides are familiar with the struggle against the temptation of suicide. Every one of them knows very well in some corner of his soul that suicide, though a way out, is rather a mean and shabby one, and that it is nobler and finer to be felled by life than by one's own hand.”
-Steppenwolf: A Novel, Hermann Hesse
“I saw no other way of escape from this dreadful spectre. Suppose that today cowardice won a victory over despair, tomorrow and each succeeding day I would again face despair heightened by self-contempt. It was merely taking up and throwing down the knife till at last it was done. Better today then I reasoned with myself as though with a frightened child. But the child would not listen. It ran away. It wanted to live. ”
-Steppenwolf: A Novel, Herman Hesse
-Baise-Moi, Virginie Despentes
“Those who have suffered will understand that pain is welcome when it's all you have left, come and die with me.”
-Come With Me, Deviates
“Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape. ”
-Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
“It struck me -- every Day --
The Lightning was as new
As if the Cloud that instant slit
And let the Fire through --
It burned Me -- in the Night --
It Blistered to My Dream --
It sickened fresh upon my sight --
With every Morn that came --
I though that Storm -- was brief --
The Maddest -- quickest by --
But Nature lost the Date of This --
And left it in the Sky -- ”
-It struck me every Day --, Emily Dickinson
“Pain -- has an Element of Blank --
It cannot recollect
When it begun -- or if there were
A time when it was not --
It has no Future -- but itself --
Its Infinite contain
Its Past -- enlightened to perceive
New Periods -- of Pain.”
-Pain -- has an Element of Blank --, Emily Dickinson
“The sky is grey, the sand is grey, and the ocean is grey
And I feel right at home in this stunning monochrome, alone in my way.”
-Grey, Ani DiFranco
“Everything I do is judged, and they mostly get it wrong, but oh well
'Cause the bathroom mirror has not budged and the woman who lives there can
tell
The truth from the stuff that they say, and she looks me in the eye
And says 'Would you prefer the easy way? No? Well, okay then, don't cry.'”
-Joyful Girl, Ani DiFranco
“i am not an angry girl
but it seems like
i've got everyone fooled
every time i say something
they find hard to hear
they chalk it up to my anger
never to their own fear
imagine you're a girl
just trying to finally come clean
knowing full well they'd prefer
you were dirty
and smiling.”
-not a pretty girl, Ani DiFranco
“some people wear their smile
like a disguise
those people who smile a lot
watch the eyes
i know it 'cause i'm like that a lot
you think everything's okay
and it is
'til it's not.”
-outta me, onto you, Ani DiFranco
“little flashing zero
on my answering machine
rats scratching at my brain
brain shuffling its feet
yes i have my father's heart
it may or may not keep on trying
can't really tell you what it is
keeps me this side of that dark line.”
-Recoil, Ani DiFranco
“And you're trying hard to figure out
Just exactly how you feel
Before you end up parked and sobbing
Forehead on the steering wheel.”
-So What, Ani DiFranco
“I am out here studying stones, trying to learn to be less alive
Using all of my will to keep very still, still even on the inside.”
-Studying Stones, Ani DiFranco
“I know that sometimes all I can see is how I feel
Like the whole world is on the other side of a dirty windshield
And I am trying to see through the glare
Yeah I'm struggling just to see what is there.”
-Virtue, Ani DiFranco
“Do you ever have that dream when you open your mouth and you try to scream
but you cant make a sound?
That's everyday starting now - don't tell me it's gonna be alright, you cant
sell me on your optimism tonight.”
-Wish I May, Ani DiFranco
“I don't think I am strong enough to do this much longer - God I wish I was
stronger
This song can never be long enough to express every longing - God I wish it
was longer.”
-Wish I May, Ani DiFranco
“I'm losing my love of adventure, I'm losing all respect for me and myself
tonight
I wonder what happens if I get to the end of this tunnel and there isn't a
light
I've worn down the treads on all of my tires, i've worn through the elbows
and the knees of my clothing
And I'm staring down the gravel driveway of desire trying not to wake up my
sleeping self loathing.”
-Wish I May, Ani DiFranco
“Whenever any affliction assails me, I have the keys of my prison in mine own hand, and no remedy presents it selfe so soone to my heart, as mine own sword. Often meditation of this hath wonne me to a charitable interpretation of their action, who dy so: and provoked me a little to watch and exagitate their reasons, which pronounce so peremptory judgments upon them.”
-John Donne
“I thought that madness isn't like they tell it in books. It isn't Miss Havisham sitting in the ruins of her mansion, all vicious and majestic. And it isn't like in Jane Eyre, either, with Rochester's wife banging around in the attic, shrieking and carrying on and frightening the help. When your mind goes, it's not castles and cobwebs and silver candelabra. It's dirty sheets and sour milk and dog shit on the floor. It's Emmie cowering under her bed, crying and singing while her kids try to make soup from seed potatoes.”
-A Northern Light, Jennifer Donnelly
“Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering, and that is a fact.”
“If you take someone's thoughts and feelings away, bit by bit, consistently, they then have nothing left except some gritty, gnawing, shitty little instinct, down there, somewhere, worming around in the gut, but so far down, so hidden, it's impossible to find.”
-Martha Barnes, David Edgar
“Gets to a point where you really can't operate any more as a human being - you can't get out of bed, you can't... make yourself a cup of coffee without something going badly wrong or your body's too weak to walk. ”
-Richey James Edwards
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”
-What I Believe, Albert Einstein
“What is hell? Hell is oneself.
Hell is alone, the other figures in it
Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from
And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.”
-The Cocktail Party, T.S. Eliot
“This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”
-The Hollow Men, T.S. Eliot
“I'm having a sort of hard time paying attention because my automated teller has started speaking to me, sometimes actually leaving weird messages on the screen, in green lettering, like 'Cause a Terrible Scene at Sotheby's' or 'Kill the President' or 'Feed Me a Stray Cat,' and I was freaked out by the park bench that followed me for six blocks last Monday evening and it too spoke to me.”
-American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis
“People only see what they are prepared to see.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Far or forgot to me is near,
Shadow and sunlight are the same,
The vanished gods to me appear,
And one to me are shame and fame.”
-Brahma, Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.”
-Journals, Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy.”
-Nora Ephron
“Being strong and silent only gets you so far... it's the things you don't say you regret the most.”
-Ericsson
“Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in 'sadness,' 'joy,' or 'regret.' Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feelings. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster.' Or: 'the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy.' I'd like to show how 'intimations of morality brought on by aging family members' connects with 'the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.' I'd like to have a word for 'the sadness inspired by failing restaurants' as well as for 'the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.'”
-Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides
“This is how it went with the Obscure Object. A cigarette in bed was the tombstone marking each day's end and the reed through which she breathed herself back to life each morning. You've heard of installation artists? Well, the Object was an exhalation artist. She had a whole repertoire. There was the Sidewinder, where she politely funneled smoke away from the person she was talking to out the corner of her mouth. There was the Geyser when she was angry. There was the Dragon Lady, featuring a plume from each nostril. There was the French Recycle, where she let smoke out her mouth only to inhale it back through her nose. And there was the Swallow. The Swallow was reserved for crisis situations.”
-Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides
“It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the treehouse, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.”
-The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides
“We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm.”
-The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides
“She is perfect in that fucked up way
That all the magazines seem to want to glorify these days.”
-Amphetamine, Everclear
“I think you are blind to the fact
That the hand you hold is the hand that holds you down.”
-Everything to Everyone, Everclear
“You put yourself in stupid places
Yes I think you know it's true
Situations where it's easy to look down on you
Think you like to be the victim
Think you like to be in pain
I think you make yourself a victim
Almost every single day.”
-Everything to Everyone, Everclear
“Yeah, you ought to take your medication every day
Be a good dog, live life in a wonderful way.”
-Normal Like You, Everclear
“You walk around oblivious to everything
You wear that party dress and black mascara
Like you're queen for the day.”
-Normal Like You, Everclear
“There is a prayer that is simply seeing through yourself, seeing your own nothingness, the emptiness impervious to self-assertion. A prayer that is the end of the rope. A helplessness, fathomless and terrifying. Now matter how holy or well meaning you were when you started out, no matter how many fine experiences you had along the way, by the time you reach the point of this prayer, you want only to get out of it.
And God? God is that which will not let you out of it.”
-The Monk Downstairs, Tim Farrington
“It seemed I would not or could not catch up with her. As she walked, her shadow caught on a tree, fell to the ground and stretched, as if made of rubber bands, no china doll about to break, capable of stretching into any form I imagined, a cicada cry in her mouth.”
-Her, Lawrence Ferlinghetti
“There was no reality to pain when it left
one, though while it held one fast all other realities failed.”
-Rachel Field
“Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life; define yourself.”
-Harvey Fierstein
“Please don't be fooled by me. Don't be fooled by the face I wear, for I wear a mask. I wear a thousand masks, masks that I'm afraid to take off and none of them are me. Pretending is an art that is second nature to me, but don't be fooled, for God's sake don't be fooled.
I give you the impression I'm secure and that all is sunny and unruffled with me, within as well as without, that confidence is my name, coolness my game, that water is calm and I'm in command and that I need no one, but don't believe me, please don't believe me.
My surface may be smooth, but my surface is a mask--my every varying and ever concealing mask. Beneath it dwells the real confusion, fear and aloneness. Beneath lies my smugness, my complacently, but I hide this--I don't want anyone to know it.
I panic at the thought of my weakness and fear being exposed. That's why I frantically created a mask to hide behind-- nonchalant sophisticated facades to help me pretend-- to shield me from the glance that knows-- but such a glance is precisely my salvation, my only salvation and I know it. That is if it's followed by acceptance. If it's followed by love, it's the only thing that can liberate me from myself, from my own self built prison walls and from the barriers that I so painstakingly erect. It's the only thing that will assure me of what I cannot assure myself, that I'm really worth while, but I don't tell you this, I don't dare--I'm afraid to.
I'm afraid that your glance will not be followed by acceptance and love. I'm afraid you'll think less of me and you'll laugh and your laugh will kill me. I'm afraid that deep down, I'm nothing and that I'm just no good and that you'll see this and reject me.”
-Don't Be Fooled by Me, Charles C. Finn
“Beauty was deceptive. I would rather wear my pain, my ugliness. I was torn and stitched. I was a strip mine, and they would just have to look. I hoped I made them sick. I hoped they saw me in their dreams.”
-White Oleander, Janet Fitch
“How vast was a human being's capacity for suffering. The only thing you could do was stand in awe of it. It wasn't a question of survival at all. It was the fullness of it, how much you could hold, how much you could care. ”
-White Oleander, Janet Fitch
“In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.”
-The Crack-Up, F. Scott Fitzgerald
“But with every word she was drawing further and further into herself, so he gave that up and only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice across the room.”
-The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
“'Long ago,' he said, 'long ago, there was something in me, but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come back no more.'”
-Winter Dreams, F. Scott Fitzgerald
“...exaggerated turns of speech conceal mediocre affections: as if the fullness of the soul might not sometimes overflow in the emptiest of metaphors, since no one, ever, can give the exact measurements of his needs, nor of his conceptions, nor of his sufferings, and the human word is like a cracked cauldron upon which we beat out melodies fit for making bears dance when we are trying to move the stars to pity.”
-Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
“No matter! She was not happy, had never been so. Where did it come from, this feeling of deprivation, this instantaneous decay of things in which she put her trust? ... But, if there were somewhere a strong and beautiful creature, a valiant nature full of passion and delicacy in equal measure, the heart of a poet in the figure of an angel, a lyre with strings of steel, sounding to the skies elegiac epithalamia, why should she not, fortuitously, find such a one? What an impossibility! Nothing, anyway, was worth that great quest; it was all lies! Every smile concealed the yawn of boredom, every joy a malediction, every satisfaction brought its nausea, and even the most perfect kisses only leave upon the lips a fantastical craving for supreme pleasure.”
-Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
“...There are only so many times that you can utter 'It does not hurt' before it begins to hurt even more than the hurt. You become enlightened of the feeling of feeling hurt, which is worse, I am certain, than the existent hurt.”
-Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer
“Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of, I never thought of myself as quiet, much less silent, I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn't the world, it wasn't the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, the cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don't know, but it's so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.”
-Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer
“When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from a chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table. I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?”
-Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer
“...the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands.”
-The Diary of Anne Frank, Anne Frank
“I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.”
-The Diary of Anne Frank, Anne Frank
“Beauty disguises what it's holding back
Some days when her eyes shine, her thoughts are black.”
-Melancholy Baby, Gavin Friday
“I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.”
-Robert Frost
“Two roads diverged into a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
-The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost
“Didn't Woody Allen say that all literature was a footnote to Faust? Perhaps all adolescence is a dialogue between Faust and Christ. We tremble on the brink of selling that part of ourselves that is real, unique, angry, defiant and whole for the rewards of attainment, achievement, success and the golden prizes of integration and acceptance; but we also, in our great creating imagination, rehearse the sacrifice we will make: the pain and terror we will take from others' shoulders; our penetration into the lives and souls of our fellows; our submission and willingness to be rejected and despised for the sake of truth and love and, in the wilderness, our angry rebuttals of the hypocrisy, deception and compromise of a world which we see to be so false.
There is nothing so self-righteous nor so right as an adolescent imagination.”
-Moab is My Washpot, Stephen Fry
“It can come a bit hard sometimes to see one's own unique, heroic life pinned so pitilessly to a wall. At other times it can endorse, affirm and save, but as I go clowning my sentimental way into eternity, wrestling with all my problems of estrangement and communion, sincerity and simulation, ambition and acquiescence, I shuttle between worrying whether I matter at all and whether anything matters at all but me.”
-Moab is My Washpot, Stephen Fry
“Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, "casualties may rise to a million." With individual stories, the statistics become people - but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. Look, see the child's swollen, swollen belly, and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, his skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing heat beside him, a distorted, distended caricature of a human child? And there, if we feel for them, are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies' own myriad squirming children?”
-American Gods, Neil Gaiman
“You're walking on gallows ground, and there's a rope around your neck and a raven-bird on each shoulder waiting for your eyes, and the gallows tree has deep roots, for it stretches from heaven to hell, and our world is only the branch from which the rope is swinging.”
-American Gods, Neil Gaiman
“He imagined he could see the very faces of the stars; pale, they were, and smiling gently, as if they had spent so much time above the world, watching the scrambling and the joy and the pain of the people below them, that they could not help being amused every time another little human believed itself the center of its world, as each of us does.”
-Stardust, Neil Gaiman
“I only have two kinds of dreams: the bad and the terrible.
Bad dreams I can cope with. They're just nightmares, and they end eventually. I wake up.
The terrible dreams are the good dreams. In my terrible dreams, everything's fine. I'm still with the company. I still look like me. None of the last five years ever happened. Sometimes I'm married. Once I even had kids. I even knew their names. Everything's wonderful and normal and fine.
And then I wake up. And I'm still me. And I'm still here. And that is truly terrible.”
-The Sandman - Dream Country, Neil Gaiman
“I want to kuh-kill myself. And -- and I can't. It's not that I'm too scared to kill myself. I -- I'm scared of lots of things. I'm scared of noises in the night-time, scared of telephones and closed doors, scared of people... scared of everything. Not of death. I want to die. It's just that I don't know how.”
-The Sandman - Dream Country, Neil Gaiman
“Her eyes are grey.
Her hair is straggly and wet.
Her fingers are stubby.
The nails are chewed and broken.
Her teeth are crooked, jagged things.
Her sigil is the hooked ring.
One day her hook will catch your heart.
Describing her, we articulate what she is and why she is: when hope is past, she is there.
She is in a thousand thousand waiting rooms and empty streets, in grey comcrete buildings and anonymous hotels.
She is on the other side of every mirror.
When the eyes that look back at you know you too well, and no longer care for what they see, they are her eyes.
She stands and waits, and in her posture the pain no longer tells you to live, and in her presence joy is unimaginable.”
-The Sandman - Endless Nights, Neil Gaiman
“...and sometimes I have really bad days...when, you know, I just want to hide or scream or bleed or something...”
-The Sandman#42, Neil Gaiman
“A 'No' uttered from deepest conviction is better and greater than a 'Yes' merely uttered to please, or what is worse, to avoid trouble.”
-Mahatma Gandhi
“Live as if your were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
-Mahatma Gandhi
“Somebody get me out of here
I'm tearing at myself
Nobody gives a damn about me
Or anybody else.”
-Medication, Garbage
“Oh doctor
We're dying
There's no use in crying
So live for tomorrow
And do what you have to.”
-Parade, Garbage
“Sleeping with ghosts
It's such a lonely experience
The stars are out tonight
Only they can hear you breathing.”
-So Like A Rose, Garbage
“She's pretty, but in her face you can see all the things she's given up on in life.”
-I Wish Someone Were Waiting For Me Somewhere, Anna Gavalda
“I make little distinction between those who commit evil and those who stand by and do nothing.”
-White Wolf, David Gemmell
“You know what my number one fantasy used to be? I used to think about one day... just not telling anyone and going off to some random place. And I'd disappear... and they'd never see me again...”
-Ghost World [movie]
“I am immune from sanity or insanity – I am an empty present box all unwrapped for someone else's disposal. I am a throw away egg-shell with no life inside me - for I am not touchable but a slave to nothingness.”
-Jennifer and June Gibbons
“The deeper sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”
-Kahlil Gibran
“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.”
-Kahlil Gibran
“Death is the only inescapable, unavoidable, sure thing. We are sentenced to die the day we're born.”
-Gary Mark Gilmore
“Suicide is the ultimate fuck you.”
-Ginger Snaps [movie]
“So much of what we live goes on inside-
The diaries of grief, the tongue-tied aches
Of unacknowledged love are no less real
For having passed unsaid. What we conceal
Is always more than what we dare confide.
Think of the letters that we write our dead.”
-Unsaid, Dana Gioia
“We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.”
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Who am I? Who are you? That is to say, 'Who are you really?' Do you know? Does anyone know? The restraints of this society make us put up so many walls of bullshit and facades to hide who we are that it is almost impossible to tell who anyone really is. We dig ourselves into a comfortable hole to hide away from the eyes of our peers, and it's in this hole that we bury ourselves. Dig yourselves out. Claw your way back into the light of day. Let your true self breathe, and in doing that, live.”
-Half Life, Patrick Goins
“Life, like some grand mosaic slowly loses hold over time, and the fragile strands that connect the many different parts unravels. The universe is a mirror, fragile and reflective, and we all stand in awe of our own human vanity. Fools see the universe as linear, absolute, all knowing. The wise see the universe as chaotic, unknown, fragile. Only on the verge of infinity can one see the fall apart universe. Sadness is knowing that we all stand upon a universe with a cracked glass bottom, and in an instant we may all sink into oblivion. Everything falls apart. Empires rise and crumble as tin soldiers hold plastic banners of righteous intent, all soaked with the blood of innocents. Hands raise and fall to the deafening sound of a million questions all unanswered. Love is just another unfelt emotion, talked about but never seen in full bloom. Love is only rumor and hearsay in the fall apart universe. Eventually we all must stand upon the jagged glass of the broken boundaries and broken promises. We must all suffer the soul bleeding that follows as the tattered splinters dig deep.”
-The Fall Apart Universe, Patrick Goins
“Life is pain. Anyone who tells you something different is selling something.”
-The Princess Bride, William Goldman
“Stranger than your sympathy
I take these things so I don't feel
I'm killing myself from the inside out
Now my head's been filled with doubt.”
-Sympathy, Goo Goo Dolls
“I tell people it's like being dead. It feels like being a ghost, maybe. You float through your days feeling insubstantial, cut off from warmth, light and all feeling. Sometimes it feels like you're in a coffin buried alive. You're screaming inside your head, but no one can hear you.”
-Deborah Gray
“Everybody is so afraid of getting blood on the living room floor. 'I can't stand to see suffering,' they say, 'so go die outside!'”
-I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, Joanne Greenberg
“I start to see that I surround myself with broken people; more broken than me. Ah, yes, let me count your cracks. Let's see, one hundred, two... yes, you'll do nicely. A cracked companion makes me look more whole, gives me something outside myself to care for. When I'm with whole, healed people I feel my own cracks, the shatters, the insanities of dislocation in myself. ”
-Sickened, Julie Gregory
“In reality, loneliness was more like a slow and constant drowning. I simply disappeared. The hall and classroom swallowed me up, and I became invisible, my quiet flailing unnoticed. ”
-Amandine, Adele Griffin
“And it is in the realm of the imagination that the greatest agonies are suffered; if I imagine myself guilty, even though I am not, I suffer as if I were. ”
-Susan Griffin
“I read that many trees, not only by the side of the road but deep in forests, evidence a new fragility. It is in the air. And the rain, or what is in it. Everything alive begins to seem frail, everything. ”
-Susan Griffin
“It's all a joke to them. Oh he's just sad, he's just overweight, he's just lazy. No, he wants to die. He wants to burn. He wants to never wake up again. Turn the ignore back on.”
-grouphug.us
“Geez, if I could get through to you, kiddo, that depression is not sobbing and crying and giving vent, it is plain and simple reduction of feeling. Reduction, see? Of all feeling. People who keep stiff upper lips find that it's damn hard to smile.”
-Ordinary People, Judith Guest
“The world has started spinning backwards.
Only the acceleration has increased.
When you noticed, it was dark before your feet.
You were standing at the edge of a cliff.
You can't pull back.
Even if you turn pale nothing will happen.
With the light you've sharpened to the utmost,
you continue persistently even if the end of this path is
the end of the world.
There's more to life
than money or honor.
You will forever pretend not to understand.
It's frightening to notice and get hurt.
Your dream at that time, your wishes,
They were all granted, but...
Faster than everyone, you even pass the wind.
Higher than everyone, you even pierce the clouds.
Even if you live too quickly.”
-Too Late, Ayumi Hamasaki
“Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.”
-Strictly Personal, Sydney J. Harris
“Scars are stories, history written on the body.”
-Kathryn Harrison
“When I am right, no one remembers. When I am wrong, no one forgets.”
-Doug Harvey
“Every individual has a place to fill in the world, and is important, in some respect, whether he chooses to be so or not.”
-Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Because a mind is a wonderful thing to twist.”
-Peversions of Science, HBO promotion
“Sleep is good, death is better; but of course, the best thing would to have never been born at all.”
-Morphine, Heinrich Heine
“'When you talk to the man upstairs,' he said, 'I want you to tell Him something for me. Tell him it ain't right for people to die when they’re young. I mean it. Tell Him if they got to die at all, they got to die when they're old. I want you to tell Him that. I don't think He knows it ain't right, because He’s supposed to be good and it's been going on for a long, long time. Okay?'”
-Catch 22, Joseph Heller
“Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.”
-Catch-22, Joseph Heller
“Perhaps passing through the gates of death is like passing quietly through the gate in a pasture fence. On the other side, you keep walking, without the need to look back. No shock, no drama, just the lifting of a plank or two in a simple wooden gate in a clearing. Neither pain, nor floods of light, nor great voices, but just the silent crossing of a meadow. ”
-A Soldier of the Great War, Mark Helprin
“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?”
-Ernest Hemingway
“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”
-Ernest Hemingway
“If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”
-A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
“His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred.”
-A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway
“They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for ones country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.”
-Notes on the Next War: A Serious Topical Letter, Ernest Hemingway
“And here it must be said that to call suicides only those who actually destroy themselves is false. Among these, indeed, there are many who in a sense are suicides only by accident and in whose being suicide has no necessary place. Among the common run of men there are many of little personality and stamped with no deep impress of fate, who find their end in suicide without belonging on that account to the type of the suicide by inclination; while, on the other hand, of those who are to be counted as suicides by the very nature of their beings are many, perhaps a majority, who never in fact lay hands upon themselves. [...]
But just as there are those who at the least indisposition develop a fever, so do those whom we call suicides, and who are always very emotional and sensitive, develop at the least shock the notion of suicide. [...]
All suicides are familiar with the struggle against the temptation of suicide. Every one of them knows very well in some corner of his soul that suicide, though a way out, is rather a mean and shabby one, and that it is nobler and finer to be felled by life than by one's own hand.”
-Steppenwolf: A Novel, Hermann Hesse
“I saw no other way of escape from this dreadful spectre. Suppose that today cowardice won a victory over despair, tomorrow and each succeeding day I would again face despair heightened by self-contempt. It was merely taking up and throwing down the knife till at last it was done. Better today then I reasoned with myself as though with a frightened child. But the child would not listen. It ran away. It wanted to live. ”
-Steppenwolf: A Novel, Herman Hesse