_“Things were rough all over, but it was better that way. That way you could tell the other guy was human, too.”
-The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton
“People hide their truest natures. I understood that; I even applauded it. What sort of world would it be if people bled all over the sidewalks, if they wept under trees, smacked whomever they despised, kissed strangers, revealed themselves? Keep a cloak, that was fine, the thing to do; present a disguise, the outside you, the one you want people to believe.”
-The Ice Queen, Alice Hoffman
“This is what I know, the one and only thing. The best way to die is while you're living. Even for someone like me. You'd laugh to know how long it's taken for me to figure that out, when all I had to do was cross over the mountains. When I walk to my car in the parking lot on winter nights, I have often noticed bats, a black cloud in the darkening sky. They bring me comfort. They make me feel you're not so far away. To think, I used to be afraid. I used to run and hide. Now I stand and look upward. I don't mind what the weather is; the cold has never bothered me. I hope what I'm seeing is the ever after. I hope it's you.”
-The Ice Queen, Alice Hoffman
“Think of all the women you know who will not allow themselves to be seen without makeup. I often wonder how they feel about themselves at night when they are climbing into bed with intimate partners. Are they overwhelmed with secret shame that someone sees them as they really are? Or do they sleep with rage that who they really are can be celebrated or cared for only in secret?”
-Communion, bell hooks
“I didn't particularly want to live much longer than [twenty]. Life seemed rather daunting. It seems so to me even now. Life seemed like too long a time to have to stick around, a huge span of years through which one would be required to tap-dance and smile and be Great! and be Happy! and be Amazing! and be Precocious! I was tired of my life by the time I was sixteen. I was tired of being too much, too intense, too manic. I was tired of people, and I was incredibly tired of myself. I wanted to do whatever Amazing Thing I was expected to do -- it might be pointed out that these were my expectations, mine alone -- and be done with it. Go to sleep. Go to a heaven where there was nothing but bathtubs and books.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
“In truth, you like the pain...Your ability to withstand pain is your claim to fame. It is ascetic, holy. It is self-control. It is masochism, and masochism pleasurable to many, but we don't like to think about that. We don't like to think that a person could have a twisted autoerotic life going on...experience both at once: the pleasure of beating the hell out of a body shackled at the wrists, and the pleasure of being the body and knowing we deserve each blow.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
“There is a self-perpetuating belief that one simply cannot help it, and this is very dangerous. It becomes an identity in and of itself. It becomes its own religion, and you wait for salvation, and you wait, and wait, and wait, and do not save yourself. If you saved yourself, and did not wait for salvation, you'd be self-sufficient. How dull.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
“There is never a sudden revelation, a complete and tidy explanation for why it happened, or why it ends, or why or who you are. You want one and I want one, but there isn't one. It comes in bits and pieces, and you stitch them together wherever they fit, and when you are done you hold yourself up, and still there are holes and you are a rag doll, invented, imperfect. And yet you are all that you have, so you must be enough. There is no other way.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
“You never come back, not all the way. Always there is an odd distance between you and the people you love and the people you meet, a barrier thin as the glass of a mirror, you never come all the way out of the mirror; you stand, for the rest of your life, with one foot in this world and no one in another, where everything is upside down and backward and sad.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
“You know that things aren't going well for you when you can't even tell people the simplest fact about your life, just because they'll presume you're asking them to feel sorry for you. I suppose it's why you feel so far away from everyone, in the end; anything you can think of to tell them just ends up making them feel terrible.”
-A Long Way Down, Nick Hornby
“You need as much ballast as possible to stop you from floating away; you need people around you, things going on, otherwise life is like some film where the money ran out, and there are not sets, or locations, or supporting actors, and it's just one bloke on his own staring into the camera with nothing to do and nobody to speak to, and who'd believe in this character then?”
-High Fidelity, Nick Hornby
“You see those pictures of people in Pompeii and you think, how weird: one quick game of dice after your tea and you're frozen, and that's how people remember you for the next few thousand years. Suppose it was the first game of dice you've ever played? Suppose you were only doing it to keep your friend Augustus company? Suppose you'd at just that moment finished a brilliant poem or something? Wouldn't it be annoying to be commemorated as a dice player?”
-High Fidelity, Nick Hornby
“If I were thinking clearly, I would tell you that I wrestle alone in the dark, in the deep dark. And that only I can know, only I can understand my own condition. You live with the threat, you tell me you live with the threat of my extinction. I live with it too. This is my right; it is the right of every human being. I choose not the suffocating anesthetic of the suburbs but the violent jolt of the Capital. That is my choice. The meanest patient, yes, even the very lowest is allowed some say in the matter of her own prescription. Thereby she defines her humanity.”
-The Hours [movie]
“Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken winged bird
That cannot fly.”
-Dreams, Langston Hughes
“The greatest happiness of life it the conviction that we are loved -- loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.”
-Victor Hugo
“She was melancholy with an obscure sadness of which she did not herself know the secret. There breathed from her whole person the stupor of a life that was finished, and which had never had a beginning.”
-Les Misérables, Victor Hugo
“Maybe this world is another planet's hell.”
-Aldous Huxley
“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.”
-Aldous Huxley
“Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.”
-Aldous Huxley
“The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.”
-Aldous Huxley
“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And of course stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.”
-Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
“She's not like that. It's like she doesn't need other people to define who she is. She knows.”
-If These Walls Could Talk 2 [television movie]
“A part of adolescence is feeling that there's no one else around who's enough like yourself to understand you.”
-The World According to Garp, John Irving
“In this dirty-minded world, you are either somebody's wife or somebody's whore- or fast on your way to becoming one or the other.”
-The World According to Garp, John Irving
“We are all candy covered on the outside
Peel away the shell and we're rotten from the inside.”
-Lollirot, Jack Off Jill
“I can change
I'll correct the defect
Repair the injury called you and me
I can change
I'll surrender to it
I can suffer with the best of them.”
-Surgery, Jack Off Jill
“Suicide was naturally the consistent course dictated by the logical intellect.”
-Varieties of Religious Experience, William James
“To this latter way, the morbid-minded way, as we might call it, healthy-mindedness pure and simple seems unspeakably blind and shallow.”
-Varieties of Religious Experience, William James
“Which of my feelings are real? Which of the me's is me? The wild, impulsive, chaotic, energetic, and crazy one? Or the shy, withdrawn, desperate, suicidal, doomed, and tired one? Probably a bit of both, hopefully much that is neither.”
-An Unquiet Mind, Kay Redfield Jamison
“Do not fear your enemies. The worst they can do is kill you. Do not fear friends. At worst, they may betray you. Fear those who do not care; they neither kill nor betray, but betrayal and murder exists because of their silent consent.”
-Bruno Jasienski (Yasensky)
“I'm half alive but I feel mostly dead
I try and tell myself it'll be all right
I just shouldn't think anymore tonight.”
-You Were Meant For Me, Jewel
“I'm not crazy cause I take the right pills everyday.”
-Bleed American, Jimmy Eat World
“Some of us fall by the wayside
And some of us soar to the stars
And some of us sail through our troubles
And some have to live with the scars.”
-Circle of Life, Elton John
“'Are you hearing unusual sounds or voices?' the doctor asked.
'Help us, oh God, it hurts,' the boxes of cotton screamed.
'Not exactly,' I said.”
-Car Crash While Hitchhiking, Denis Johnson
“To rid ourselves of our shadows - who we are - we must step into either total light or total darkness.”
-Jeremy Preston Johnson
“Pain is less subject than pleasure to careless expression.”
-Samuel Johnson
“'Cutting myself was something beyond despair, something very extreme,' Johnstone says, speaking in quiet tones. 'It's about trying to get to something. The physical act is a metaphor of trying to access something that is frozen. Something between who you were and since the depression who you've moved to and there's this thick layer of ice and you can't get to yourself. You're really excavating to try and find yourself again. It's a positive act even though people around you find it horrible, self-destructive, terrifying and think that you have literally gone crazy.'”
-A Head Full of Blue, Nick Johnstone
“Without pain, there would be no suffering, without suffering we would never learn from our mistakes. To make it right, pain and suffering is the key to all windows, without it, there is no way of life.”
-Angelina Jolie
“these are the screams within
these these are the life streams bleeding from skin.”
-The Eloquence in the Screaming, Patrick Jones
“It was easy enough to kill yourself in a fit of despair. It was easy enough to play the martyr. It was harder to do nothing. To endure your life. To wait.”
-Fear Of Flying, Erica Jong
“If I should find a way to escape my fate, do I deserve to?”
-The Wheel of Time, Robert Jordan
“He would fall. He had not yet fallen but he would fall silently, in an instant. Not to fall was too hard, too hard: and he felt the silent lapse of his soul, as it would be at some instant to come, falling, falling but not yet fallen, still unfallen but about to fall.”
-Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
“Nobody can fall so low unless he has a great depth. If such a thing can happen to a man, it challenges his best and highest on the other side; that is to say, this depth corresponds to a potential height, and the blackest darkness to a hidden light. ”
-Carl Jung
“A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has not overcome them.”
-Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Carl Jung
“We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.”
-Psychological Reflection, Carl Jung
“Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.”
-Franz Kafka
“It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.”
-The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
“Happiness? Is this what it feels like, this surge of warmth and physical euphoria? Oh Christine, if there were a loving God in heaven it would be my arm you take now, my shoulder upon which you lean in your utter exhaustion. ...Beneath the mask my face is wet with tears. Happiness is like the first blissful intoxication of morphine. It doesn't last very long.”
-Phantom, Susan Kay
“My mind has touched the farthest horizons of mortal imagination and reaches ever outward to embrace infinity. There is no knowledge beyond my comprehension, no art or skill upon this entire planet that lies beyond the mastery of my hand. And yet, like Faust, I look in vain, I learn in vain... For as long as I live, no woman will ever look on me in love.”
-Phantom, Susan Kay
“A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind.”
-Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen
“My ambition was to negate. The world, whether dense or hollow, provoked only my negations. When I was supposed to be awake, I was asleep; when I was supposed to speak, I was silent; when a pleasure offered itself to me, I avoided it. My hunger, my thirst, my loneliness and boredom and fear were all weapons aimed at my enemy, the world. They didn't matter a whit to the world, of course, and they tormented me, but I got a gruesome satisfaction from my sufferings. They proved my existence. All my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.”
-Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen
“People ask, How did you get in there? What they really want to know is if they are likely to end up there as well. I can't answer the real question. All I can say is, it's easy.”
-Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen
“Scar tissue has no character. It's not like skin. It doesn't show age or illness or pallor or tan. It has no pores, no hair, no wrinkles. It's like a slip cover. It shields and disguises what's beneath. That's why we grow it; we have something to hide.”
-Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen
“Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming it.”
-Helen Keller
“Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.”
-Helen Keller
“Self-pity is our worst enemy and if we yield to it, we can never do anything wise in this world.”
-Helen Keller
“My fault, my failure, is not the passions I have but in my lack of control of them.”
-On The Road, Jack Kerouac
“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars...”
-On The Road, Jack Kerouac
“What is the feeling when you're driving away from people, and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? It's the too huge world vaulting us, and it's goodbye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”
-On The Road, Jack Kerouac
“A loving person lives in a loving world. A hostile person lives in a hostile world. Everyone you meet is your mirror.”
-Ken Keys
“People, in general, would rather die than forgive. It's that hard. If God said in plain language, 'I'm giving you a choice, forgive or die,' a lot of people would go ahead and order their coffin.”
-The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd
“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”
-Soren Kierkegaard
“And no Grand Inquisitor has in readiness such terrible tortures as has anxiety, and so spy knows how to attack more artfully the man he suspects, choosing the instant he is weakest, nor knows how to lay traps where he will be caught and ensnared, as anxiety knows how, and no sharp-witted judge knows how to interrogate, to examine the accused as anxiety does, which never lets him escape, neither by diversion nor by noise, neither by work nor at play, neither by day nor by night.”
-The Concept of Dread, Soren Kierkegaard
“Nowadays not even a suicide kills himself in desperation. Before taking the step he deliberates so long and so carefully that he literally chokes with thought. It is even questionable whether he ought to be called a suicide, since it is really thought which takes his life. He does not die with deliberation, but from deliberation.”
-The Present Age, Soren Kierkegaard
“The greatest hazard of all, losing one's self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss - an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. - is sure to be noticed.”
-The Sickness unto Death, Soren Kierkegaard
“I wish I could remember. I wish memory were a more steady, more physical artifact. It's just a breeze, or a scent barely detected and fading.”
-The Solace Of Leaving Early, Haven Kimmel
“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
-Stephen King
“Everything's a lot tougher when it's for real. That's when you choke. When it's for real.”
-It, Stephen King
“He saw the shape behind the shape: saw lights, saw an endless crawling hairy thing which was made of light and nothing else, orange light, dead light that mocked life.”
-It, Stephen King
“Madness is a kind of mental suicide.”
-The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet, Stephen King
“There’s something in us that is very much attracted to madness. Everyone who looks off the edge of a tall building has felt at least a faint, morbid urge to jump. And anyone who has ever put a loaded pistol up to his head…All right, my point is this: even the most well-adjusted person is holding onto his or her sanity by a greased rope. I really believe that. The rationality circuits are shoddily built into the human animal.”
-The Ballad Of The Flexible Bullet, Stephen King
“The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them - words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller, but for want of an understanding ear.”
-The Body, Stephen King
“Show me a man or a woman alone and I'll show you a saint. Give me two and they'll fall in love. Give me three and they'll invent the charming thing we call 'society'. Give me four and they'll build a pyramid. Give me five and they'll make one an outcast. Give me six and they'll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they'll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.”
-The Stand, Stephen King
“In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”
-Rudyard Kipling
“To cry is to cleanse. To release the burdens of the day. To let them flow from your body. To collapse inside of yourself. To break down the walls built up so long. Oh I long to sob. A deep loneliness fills my being as I scramble around trying to find the tears to cry. But none come, and instead hate and anger fill the queue. But hate and anger are hardly cleansing. Mistakes gone unpunished are engraved into my mind, and there is no other way to get them out but to emboss them upon myself. It is an art. Finding just the right place and amount of pressure needed to impress the image upon something tangible. Recently it has been more accidental and instinctual rather than purposeful, though occasionally I have had to force myself to take it out on a white piece of paper with an angry red pen. It used to scare me, the things I could create as a result of my mistakes and shame. My creations seemed more destructive since they were the product of pain, rather than beauty. But then I realised how beautiful pain is. To create something means to feel emotions, and feeling emotions is the definition of human pain. And so even though the water does not run from my eyes, the liquid drips from the wounds in my heart. And though in the end, tears are wiped away easily, and it is almost effortless to excuse them, my imprints are the essence of what I feel, and on my body they shall stay.”
-Ray Kislem
“If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and make it the object of our game; to turn it into a toy. Avenarius is playing a game, and for him the game is the only thing of importance in a world without importance. But he knows that his game will not make anyone laugh. When he outlined his proposal to the ecologists, he had no intention of amusing anyone. He only wished to amuse himself. I said, 'You play with the world like a melancholy child who has no little brother.'”
-Immortality, Milan Kundera
“Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect some vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? Then why do we feel it even when the observation tower comes equipped with a sturdy handrail? No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”
-The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
“In this world, there's a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that's so. ”
-Angels in America, Tony Kushner
“It's the price of rootlessness. Motion sickness. The only cure: to keep moving.”
-Angels In America, Tony Kushner
“Love; that's a trap. Responsibility; that's a trap too. Like a father to a son I tell you this: Life is full of horror; nobody escapes, nobody; save yourself. Whatever pulls on you, whatever needs from you, threatens you. Don't be afraid; people are so afraid; don't be afraid to live in the raw wind, naked, alone... Learn at least this: What you are capable of. Let nothing stand in your way.”
-Angels In America, Tony Kushner
“Night flight to San Francisco. Chase the moon across America.... God! It's been years since I was on a plane! When we hit 35,000 feet, we'll have hit the tropopause. The great belt of calm air. As close as I'll ever get to the ozone. I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening... But I saw something only I could see, because of my astonishing ability to see such things: Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules, of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them, and was repaired. Nothing's lost forever. In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that's so.”
-Angels In America, Tony Kushner
“When I came out into society I was 15. I already knew then that the role I was condemned to, namely to keep quiet and do what I was told, gave me the perfect opportunity to listen and observe. Not to what people told me, which naturally was of no interest to me, but to whatever it was they were trying to hide. I practiced detachment. I learn how to look cheerful while under the table I stuck a fork onto the back of my hand. I became a virtuoso of deceit. I consulted the strictest moralists to learn how to appear, philosophers to find out what to think, and novelists to see what I could get away with, and in the end it all came down to one wonderfully simple principle: win or die.”
-Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
“When one woman strikes at the heart of another she seldom misses, and the wound is invariably fatal.”
-Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
“Insanity -- a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.”
-R.D. Lang
“Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.”
-Lady Chatterley's Lover, D.H. Lawrence
“I'm sorry to say this but those who are most worthy of love are never made happy by it. Do you still think men love the way we do? No... men enjoy the happiness they feel. We can only enjoy the happiness we give. They are not capable of devoting themselves exclusively to one person. So to hope to be made happy by love is a certain cause of grief.”
-Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
“I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.”
-Self-Pity, D. H. Lawrence
“We've all fallen, but at the same time we're not broken. There is the hint that we are going to get up again.”
-Amy Lee
“It is not wonderful. It is an ugly world. Not like this one. Annarres is all dusty and dry hills. All meager, all dry. And the people aren't beautiful. They have big hands and feet, like me...But not big bellies. They get very dirty, and take baths together, nobody here does that. The towns are very small and dull, and they are dreary. No palaces. Life is dull, and hard work. You can't always have what you want, or even what you need, because there isn't enough. You Urrasti have enough. Enough air, enough rain, grass, oceans, food, music, buildings, factories, machines, books, clothes, history. You are rich, you own. We are poor, we lack. You have, we do not have. Everything is beautiful here. Only not the faces. On Annares, nothing is beautiful, nothing but the faces. The other faces, the men and women. We have nothing but that, nothing but each other. Here you see the jewels, there you see the eyes. And in the eyes you see the splendor, the splendor of the human spirit. Because our men and women are free--possessing nothing, they are free. And you, the possessors, are the possessed. You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes--the wall, the wall!”
-The Dispossessed, Ursula K. LeGuin
“I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now? Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.”
-John Lennon
“Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans.”
-Beautiful Boy, John Lennon
“i was swallowing my pain, i was swallowing my pain.”
-Jealous Guy, John Lennon
“Dying is easy, it's living that scares me to death.”
-Cold, Annie Lennox
“I'm living in an empty room
With all the windows smashed
And I've got so little left to lose
That it feels just like I'm walking on broken glass.”
-Walking on Broken Glass, Annie Lennox
“Let me be the only one
To keep you from the cold.
Now the floor of heav'n is laid,
Its stars of brightest glow.
They shine for you.
They shine for you.
They burn for all to see.
Come into these arms again
And set this spirit free.”
-Love Song For A Vampire, Annie Lennox
“I had a dream my life would be
So different from this hell I'm living
So different now from what it seemed
Now life has killed the dream I dreamed.”
-I Dreamed a Dream, Les Miserables
“...we escape the struggles and responsibilities of actual life by residing in one that doesn't yet exist.”
-The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis
“It is funny how mortals always picture us [devils] as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.”
-The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis
“But one day, the things that make you free start to keep you down.”
-Here Kitty Kitty, Jardine Libaire
“I am the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be a cheerful face on earth. Whether I shall ever be better I cannot tell; I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible. I must die or be better.”
-Abraham Lincoln
“I don't care about happiness if it makes you feel alright
Close your eyes and bite your tongue
And you'll get through the night.”
-Not Inside My Head, Liveonrelease
“Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.”
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“There are two kinds of weakness; that which breaks, and that which bends.”
-James Russell Lowell
“And all the drugs in the world
Can't save us from ourselves.”
-There by the Grace of God, Manic Street Preachers
“So here I'm sitting in my car at the same old stop light
I keep waiting for a change but I don't know what
So red turns into green turning into yellow
But I'm just frozen here in the same old spot
And all I have to do is to press the pedal, but I'm not.”
-It's Not, Aimee Mann
“All their 'helpful' comments imply that if I'd only do_______, my problems would be solved. Like it's all within my grasp, able to be managed and mastered, if only I would try harder, longer, better. As I nod my head in polite and pathetic appreciation for their input, I scream inside, 'Shut up. Shut up. Unless you've been lost in this particular section of hell yourself, don't you dare try to give me directions.'”
-Undercurrents, Martha Manning
“Depression is such a cruel punishment. There are no fevers, no rashes, no blood tests to send people scurrying in concern. Just the slow erosion of the self, as insidious as any cancer. And, like cancer, it is essentially a solitary experience. A room in hell with only your name on the door.”
-Undercurrents, Martha Manning
“There's something cold and blank behind her smile
She's standing on an overpass
In her miracle mile
'You were from a perfect world
A world that threw me away today
Today to run away'.”
-Coma White, Marilyn Manson
“Theres not much left to love
Too tired today to hate
I feel the empty
I feel the minute of decay.”
-Minute of Decay, Marilyn Manson
“They'll just cut our wrists like
Cheap coupons and say that death
Was on sale today.”
-The Fight Song, Marilyn Manson
“Fall on real life
is anybody left there sane?”
-Black & White People, Matchbox 20
“She felt so old, so worn out, so far away from the best moments of her life that she even yearned for those that she remembered as the worst, and only then did she discover how much she missed the whiff of oregano on the porch and the smell of the roses at dusk. Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia. The need to feel sad was becoming a vice as the years eroded her. She became human in her solitude.”
-One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
-The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton
“People hide their truest natures. I understood that; I even applauded it. What sort of world would it be if people bled all over the sidewalks, if they wept under trees, smacked whomever they despised, kissed strangers, revealed themselves? Keep a cloak, that was fine, the thing to do; present a disguise, the outside you, the one you want people to believe.”
-The Ice Queen, Alice Hoffman
“This is what I know, the one and only thing. The best way to die is while you're living. Even for someone like me. You'd laugh to know how long it's taken for me to figure that out, when all I had to do was cross over the mountains. When I walk to my car in the parking lot on winter nights, I have often noticed bats, a black cloud in the darkening sky. They bring me comfort. They make me feel you're not so far away. To think, I used to be afraid. I used to run and hide. Now I stand and look upward. I don't mind what the weather is; the cold has never bothered me. I hope what I'm seeing is the ever after. I hope it's you.”
-The Ice Queen, Alice Hoffman
“Think of all the women you know who will not allow themselves to be seen without makeup. I often wonder how they feel about themselves at night when they are climbing into bed with intimate partners. Are they overwhelmed with secret shame that someone sees them as they really are? Or do they sleep with rage that who they really are can be celebrated or cared for only in secret?”
-Communion, bell hooks
“I didn't particularly want to live much longer than [twenty]. Life seemed rather daunting. It seems so to me even now. Life seemed like too long a time to have to stick around, a huge span of years through which one would be required to tap-dance and smile and be Great! and be Happy! and be Amazing! and be Precocious! I was tired of my life by the time I was sixteen. I was tired of being too much, too intense, too manic. I was tired of people, and I was incredibly tired of myself. I wanted to do whatever Amazing Thing I was expected to do -- it might be pointed out that these were my expectations, mine alone -- and be done with it. Go to sleep. Go to a heaven where there was nothing but bathtubs and books.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
“In truth, you like the pain...Your ability to withstand pain is your claim to fame. It is ascetic, holy. It is self-control. It is masochism, and masochism pleasurable to many, but we don't like to think about that. We don't like to think that a person could have a twisted autoerotic life going on...experience both at once: the pleasure of beating the hell out of a body shackled at the wrists, and the pleasure of being the body and knowing we deserve each blow.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
“There is a self-perpetuating belief that one simply cannot help it, and this is very dangerous. It becomes an identity in and of itself. It becomes its own religion, and you wait for salvation, and you wait, and wait, and wait, and do not save yourself. If you saved yourself, and did not wait for salvation, you'd be self-sufficient. How dull.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
“There is never a sudden revelation, a complete and tidy explanation for why it happened, or why it ends, or why or who you are. You want one and I want one, but there isn't one. It comes in bits and pieces, and you stitch them together wherever they fit, and when you are done you hold yourself up, and still there are holes and you are a rag doll, invented, imperfect. And yet you are all that you have, so you must be enough. There is no other way.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
“You never come back, not all the way. Always there is an odd distance between you and the people you love and the people you meet, a barrier thin as the glass of a mirror, you never come all the way out of the mirror; you stand, for the rest of your life, with one foot in this world and no one in another, where everything is upside down and backward and sad.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
“You know that things aren't going well for you when you can't even tell people the simplest fact about your life, just because they'll presume you're asking them to feel sorry for you. I suppose it's why you feel so far away from everyone, in the end; anything you can think of to tell them just ends up making them feel terrible.”
-A Long Way Down, Nick Hornby
“You need as much ballast as possible to stop you from floating away; you need people around you, things going on, otherwise life is like some film where the money ran out, and there are not sets, or locations, or supporting actors, and it's just one bloke on his own staring into the camera with nothing to do and nobody to speak to, and who'd believe in this character then?”
-High Fidelity, Nick Hornby
“You see those pictures of people in Pompeii and you think, how weird: one quick game of dice after your tea and you're frozen, and that's how people remember you for the next few thousand years. Suppose it was the first game of dice you've ever played? Suppose you were only doing it to keep your friend Augustus company? Suppose you'd at just that moment finished a brilliant poem or something? Wouldn't it be annoying to be commemorated as a dice player?”
-High Fidelity, Nick Hornby
“If I were thinking clearly, I would tell you that I wrestle alone in the dark, in the deep dark. And that only I can know, only I can understand my own condition. You live with the threat, you tell me you live with the threat of my extinction. I live with it too. This is my right; it is the right of every human being. I choose not the suffocating anesthetic of the suburbs but the violent jolt of the Capital. That is my choice. The meanest patient, yes, even the very lowest is allowed some say in the matter of her own prescription. Thereby she defines her humanity.”
-The Hours [movie]
“Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken winged bird
That cannot fly.”
-Dreams, Langston Hughes
“The greatest happiness of life it the conviction that we are loved -- loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.”
-Victor Hugo
“She was melancholy with an obscure sadness of which she did not herself know the secret. There breathed from her whole person the stupor of a life that was finished, and which had never had a beginning.”
-Les Misérables, Victor Hugo
“Maybe this world is another planet's hell.”
-Aldous Huxley
“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.”
-Aldous Huxley
“Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.”
-Aldous Huxley
“The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.”
-Aldous Huxley
“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And of course stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.”
-Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
“She's not like that. It's like she doesn't need other people to define who she is. She knows.”
-If These Walls Could Talk 2 [television movie]
“A part of adolescence is feeling that there's no one else around who's enough like yourself to understand you.”
-The World According to Garp, John Irving
“In this dirty-minded world, you are either somebody's wife or somebody's whore- or fast on your way to becoming one or the other.”
-The World According to Garp, John Irving
“We are all candy covered on the outside
Peel away the shell and we're rotten from the inside.”
-Lollirot, Jack Off Jill
“I can change
I'll correct the defect
Repair the injury called you and me
I can change
I'll surrender to it
I can suffer with the best of them.”
-Surgery, Jack Off Jill
“Suicide was naturally the consistent course dictated by the logical intellect.”
-Varieties of Religious Experience, William James
“To this latter way, the morbid-minded way, as we might call it, healthy-mindedness pure and simple seems unspeakably blind and shallow.”
-Varieties of Religious Experience, William James
“Which of my feelings are real? Which of the me's is me? The wild, impulsive, chaotic, energetic, and crazy one? Or the shy, withdrawn, desperate, suicidal, doomed, and tired one? Probably a bit of both, hopefully much that is neither.”
-An Unquiet Mind, Kay Redfield Jamison
“Do not fear your enemies. The worst they can do is kill you. Do not fear friends. At worst, they may betray you. Fear those who do not care; they neither kill nor betray, but betrayal and murder exists because of their silent consent.”
-Bruno Jasienski (Yasensky)
“I'm half alive but I feel mostly dead
I try and tell myself it'll be all right
I just shouldn't think anymore tonight.”
-You Were Meant For Me, Jewel
“I'm not crazy cause I take the right pills everyday.”
-Bleed American, Jimmy Eat World
“Some of us fall by the wayside
And some of us soar to the stars
And some of us sail through our troubles
And some have to live with the scars.”
-Circle of Life, Elton John
“'Are you hearing unusual sounds or voices?' the doctor asked.
'Help us, oh God, it hurts,' the boxes of cotton screamed.
'Not exactly,' I said.”
-Car Crash While Hitchhiking, Denis Johnson
“To rid ourselves of our shadows - who we are - we must step into either total light or total darkness.”
-Jeremy Preston Johnson
“Pain is less subject than pleasure to careless expression.”
-Samuel Johnson
“'Cutting myself was something beyond despair, something very extreme,' Johnstone says, speaking in quiet tones. 'It's about trying to get to something. The physical act is a metaphor of trying to access something that is frozen. Something between who you were and since the depression who you've moved to and there's this thick layer of ice and you can't get to yourself. You're really excavating to try and find yourself again. It's a positive act even though people around you find it horrible, self-destructive, terrifying and think that you have literally gone crazy.'”
-A Head Full of Blue, Nick Johnstone
“Without pain, there would be no suffering, without suffering we would never learn from our mistakes. To make it right, pain and suffering is the key to all windows, without it, there is no way of life.”
-Angelina Jolie
“these are the screams within
these these are the life streams bleeding from skin.”
-The Eloquence in the Screaming, Patrick Jones
“It was easy enough to kill yourself in a fit of despair. It was easy enough to play the martyr. It was harder to do nothing. To endure your life. To wait.”
-Fear Of Flying, Erica Jong
“If I should find a way to escape my fate, do I deserve to?”
-The Wheel of Time, Robert Jordan
“He would fall. He had not yet fallen but he would fall silently, in an instant. Not to fall was too hard, too hard: and he felt the silent lapse of his soul, as it would be at some instant to come, falling, falling but not yet fallen, still unfallen but about to fall.”
-Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
“Nobody can fall so low unless he has a great depth. If such a thing can happen to a man, it challenges his best and highest on the other side; that is to say, this depth corresponds to a potential height, and the blackest darkness to a hidden light. ”
-Carl Jung
“A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has not overcome them.”
-Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Carl Jung
“We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.”
-Psychological Reflection, Carl Jung
“Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.”
-Franz Kafka
“It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.”
-The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
“Happiness? Is this what it feels like, this surge of warmth and physical euphoria? Oh Christine, if there were a loving God in heaven it would be my arm you take now, my shoulder upon which you lean in your utter exhaustion. ...Beneath the mask my face is wet with tears. Happiness is like the first blissful intoxication of morphine. It doesn't last very long.”
-Phantom, Susan Kay
“My mind has touched the farthest horizons of mortal imagination and reaches ever outward to embrace infinity. There is no knowledge beyond my comprehension, no art or skill upon this entire planet that lies beyond the mastery of my hand. And yet, like Faust, I look in vain, I learn in vain... For as long as I live, no woman will ever look on me in love.”
-Phantom, Susan Kay
“A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind.”
-Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen
“My ambition was to negate. The world, whether dense or hollow, provoked only my negations. When I was supposed to be awake, I was asleep; when I was supposed to speak, I was silent; when a pleasure offered itself to me, I avoided it. My hunger, my thirst, my loneliness and boredom and fear were all weapons aimed at my enemy, the world. They didn't matter a whit to the world, of course, and they tormented me, but I got a gruesome satisfaction from my sufferings. They proved my existence. All my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.”
-Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen
“People ask, How did you get in there? What they really want to know is if they are likely to end up there as well. I can't answer the real question. All I can say is, it's easy.”
-Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen
“Scar tissue has no character. It's not like skin. It doesn't show age or illness or pallor or tan. It has no pores, no hair, no wrinkles. It's like a slip cover. It shields and disguises what's beneath. That's why we grow it; we have something to hide.”
-Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen
“Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming it.”
-Helen Keller
“Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.”
-Helen Keller
“Self-pity is our worst enemy and if we yield to it, we can never do anything wise in this world.”
-Helen Keller
“My fault, my failure, is not the passions I have but in my lack of control of them.”
-On The Road, Jack Kerouac
“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars...”
-On The Road, Jack Kerouac
“What is the feeling when you're driving away from people, and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? It's the too huge world vaulting us, and it's goodbye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”
-On The Road, Jack Kerouac
“A loving person lives in a loving world. A hostile person lives in a hostile world. Everyone you meet is your mirror.”
-Ken Keys
“People, in general, would rather die than forgive. It's that hard. If God said in plain language, 'I'm giving you a choice, forgive or die,' a lot of people would go ahead and order their coffin.”
-The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd
“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”
-Soren Kierkegaard
“And no Grand Inquisitor has in readiness such terrible tortures as has anxiety, and so spy knows how to attack more artfully the man he suspects, choosing the instant he is weakest, nor knows how to lay traps where he will be caught and ensnared, as anxiety knows how, and no sharp-witted judge knows how to interrogate, to examine the accused as anxiety does, which never lets him escape, neither by diversion nor by noise, neither by work nor at play, neither by day nor by night.”
-The Concept of Dread, Soren Kierkegaard
“Nowadays not even a suicide kills himself in desperation. Before taking the step he deliberates so long and so carefully that he literally chokes with thought. It is even questionable whether he ought to be called a suicide, since it is really thought which takes his life. He does not die with deliberation, but from deliberation.”
-The Present Age, Soren Kierkegaard
“The greatest hazard of all, losing one's self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss - an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. - is sure to be noticed.”
-The Sickness unto Death, Soren Kierkegaard
“I wish I could remember. I wish memory were a more steady, more physical artifact. It's just a breeze, or a scent barely detected and fading.”
-The Solace Of Leaving Early, Haven Kimmel
“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
-Stephen King
“Everything's a lot tougher when it's for real. That's when you choke. When it's for real.”
-It, Stephen King
“He saw the shape behind the shape: saw lights, saw an endless crawling hairy thing which was made of light and nothing else, orange light, dead light that mocked life.”
-It, Stephen King
“Madness is a kind of mental suicide.”
-The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet, Stephen King
“There’s something in us that is very much attracted to madness. Everyone who looks off the edge of a tall building has felt at least a faint, morbid urge to jump. And anyone who has ever put a loaded pistol up to his head…All right, my point is this: even the most well-adjusted person is holding onto his or her sanity by a greased rope. I really believe that. The rationality circuits are shoddily built into the human animal.”
-The Ballad Of The Flexible Bullet, Stephen King
“The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them - words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller, but for want of an understanding ear.”
-The Body, Stephen King
“Show me a man or a woman alone and I'll show you a saint. Give me two and they'll fall in love. Give me three and they'll invent the charming thing we call 'society'. Give me four and they'll build a pyramid. Give me five and they'll make one an outcast. Give me six and they'll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they'll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.”
-The Stand, Stephen King
“In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”
-Rudyard Kipling
“To cry is to cleanse. To release the burdens of the day. To let them flow from your body. To collapse inside of yourself. To break down the walls built up so long. Oh I long to sob. A deep loneliness fills my being as I scramble around trying to find the tears to cry. But none come, and instead hate and anger fill the queue. But hate and anger are hardly cleansing. Mistakes gone unpunished are engraved into my mind, and there is no other way to get them out but to emboss them upon myself. It is an art. Finding just the right place and amount of pressure needed to impress the image upon something tangible. Recently it has been more accidental and instinctual rather than purposeful, though occasionally I have had to force myself to take it out on a white piece of paper with an angry red pen. It used to scare me, the things I could create as a result of my mistakes and shame. My creations seemed more destructive since they were the product of pain, rather than beauty. But then I realised how beautiful pain is. To create something means to feel emotions, and feeling emotions is the definition of human pain. And so even though the water does not run from my eyes, the liquid drips from the wounds in my heart. And though in the end, tears are wiped away easily, and it is almost effortless to excuse them, my imprints are the essence of what I feel, and on my body they shall stay.”
-Ray Kislem
“If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and make it the object of our game; to turn it into a toy. Avenarius is playing a game, and for him the game is the only thing of importance in a world without importance. But he knows that his game will not make anyone laugh. When he outlined his proposal to the ecologists, he had no intention of amusing anyone. He only wished to amuse himself. I said, 'You play with the world like a melancholy child who has no little brother.'”
-Immortality, Milan Kundera
“Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect some vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? Then why do we feel it even when the observation tower comes equipped with a sturdy handrail? No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”
-The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
“In this world, there's a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that's so. ”
-Angels in America, Tony Kushner
“It's the price of rootlessness. Motion sickness. The only cure: to keep moving.”
-Angels In America, Tony Kushner
“Love; that's a trap. Responsibility; that's a trap too. Like a father to a son I tell you this: Life is full of horror; nobody escapes, nobody; save yourself. Whatever pulls on you, whatever needs from you, threatens you. Don't be afraid; people are so afraid; don't be afraid to live in the raw wind, naked, alone... Learn at least this: What you are capable of. Let nothing stand in your way.”
-Angels In America, Tony Kushner
“Night flight to San Francisco. Chase the moon across America.... God! It's been years since I was on a plane! When we hit 35,000 feet, we'll have hit the tropopause. The great belt of calm air. As close as I'll ever get to the ozone. I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening... But I saw something only I could see, because of my astonishing ability to see such things: Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules, of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them, and was repaired. Nothing's lost forever. In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that's so.”
-Angels In America, Tony Kushner
“When I came out into society I was 15. I already knew then that the role I was condemned to, namely to keep quiet and do what I was told, gave me the perfect opportunity to listen and observe. Not to what people told me, which naturally was of no interest to me, but to whatever it was they were trying to hide. I practiced detachment. I learn how to look cheerful while under the table I stuck a fork onto the back of my hand. I became a virtuoso of deceit. I consulted the strictest moralists to learn how to appear, philosophers to find out what to think, and novelists to see what I could get away with, and in the end it all came down to one wonderfully simple principle: win or die.”
-Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
“When one woman strikes at the heart of another she seldom misses, and the wound is invariably fatal.”
-Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
“Insanity -- a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.”
-R.D. Lang
“Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.”
-Lady Chatterley's Lover, D.H. Lawrence
“I'm sorry to say this but those who are most worthy of love are never made happy by it. Do you still think men love the way we do? No... men enjoy the happiness they feel. We can only enjoy the happiness we give. They are not capable of devoting themselves exclusively to one person. So to hope to be made happy by love is a certain cause of grief.”
-Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
“I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.”
-Self-Pity, D. H. Lawrence
“We've all fallen, but at the same time we're not broken. There is the hint that we are going to get up again.”
-Amy Lee
“It is not wonderful. It is an ugly world. Not like this one. Annarres is all dusty and dry hills. All meager, all dry. And the people aren't beautiful. They have big hands and feet, like me...But not big bellies. They get very dirty, and take baths together, nobody here does that. The towns are very small and dull, and they are dreary. No palaces. Life is dull, and hard work. You can't always have what you want, or even what you need, because there isn't enough. You Urrasti have enough. Enough air, enough rain, grass, oceans, food, music, buildings, factories, machines, books, clothes, history. You are rich, you own. We are poor, we lack. You have, we do not have. Everything is beautiful here. Only not the faces. On Annares, nothing is beautiful, nothing but the faces. The other faces, the men and women. We have nothing but that, nothing but each other. Here you see the jewels, there you see the eyes. And in the eyes you see the splendor, the splendor of the human spirit. Because our men and women are free--possessing nothing, they are free. And you, the possessors, are the possessed. You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes--the wall, the wall!”
-The Dispossessed, Ursula K. LeGuin
“I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now? Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.”
-John Lennon
“Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans.”
-Beautiful Boy, John Lennon
“i was swallowing my pain, i was swallowing my pain.”
-Jealous Guy, John Lennon
“Dying is easy, it's living that scares me to death.”
-Cold, Annie Lennox
“I'm living in an empty room
With all the windows smashed
And I've got so little left to lose
That it feels just like I'm walking on broken glass.”
-Walking on Broken Glass, Annie Lennox
“Let me be the only one
To keep you from the cold.
Now the floor of heav'n is laid,
Its stars of brightest glow.
They shine for you.
They shine for you.
They burn for all to see.
Come into these arms again
And set this spirit free.”
-Love Song For A Vampire, Annie Lennox
“I had a dream my life would be
So different from this hell I'm living
So different now from what it seemed
Now life has killed the dream I dreamed.”
-I Dreamed a Dream, Les Miserables
“...we escape the struggles and responsibilities of actual life by residing in one that doesn't yet exist.”
-The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis
“It is funny how mortals always picture us [devils] as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.”
-The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis
“But one day, the things that make you free start to keep you down.”
-Here Kitty Kitty, Jardine Libaire
“I am the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be a cheerful face on earth. Whether I shall ever be better I cannot tell; I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible. I must die or be better.”
-Abraham Lincoln
“I don't care about happiness if it makes you feel alright
Close your eyes and bite your tongue
And you'll get through the night.”
-Not Inside My Head, Liveonrelease
“Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.”
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“There are two kinds of weakness; that which breaks, and that which bends.”
-James Russell Lowell
“And all the drugs in the world
Can't save us from ourselves.”
-There by the Grace of God, Manic Street Preachers
“So here I'm sitting in my car at the same old stop light
I keep waiting for a change but I don't know what
So red turns into green turning into yellow
But I'm just frozen here in the same old spot
And all I have to do is to press the pedal, but I'm not.”
-It's Not, Aimee Mann
“All their 'helpful' comments imply that if I'd only do_______, my problems would be solved. Like it's all within my grasp, able to be managed and mastered, if only I would try harder, longer, better. As I nod my head in polite and pathetic appreciation for their input, I scream inside, 'Shut up. Shut up. Unless you've been lost in this particular section of hell yourself, don't you dare try to give me directions.'”
-Undercurrents, Martha Manning
“Depression is such a cruel punishment. There are no fevers, no rashes, no blood tests to send people scurrying in concern. Just the slow erosion of the self, as insidious as any cancer. And, like cancer, it is essentially a solitary experience. A room in hell with only your name on the door.”
-Undercurrents, Martha Manning
“There's something cold and blank behind her smile
She's standing on an overpass
In her miracle mile
'You were from a perfect world
A world that threw me away today
Today to run away'.”
-Coma White, Marilyn Manson
“Theres not much left to love
Too tired today to hate
I feel the empty
I feel the minute of decay.”
-Minute of Decay, Marilyn Manson
“They'll just cut our wrists like
Cheap coupons and say that death
Was on sale today.”
-The Fight Song, Marilyn Manson
“Fall on real life
is anybody left there sane?”
-Black & White People, Matchbox 20
“She felt so old, so worn out, so far away from the best moments of her life that she even yearned for those that she remembered as the worst, and only then did she discover how much she missed the whiff of oregano on the porch and the smell of the roses at dusk. Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia. The need to feel sad was becoming a vice as the years eroded her. She became human in her solitude.”
-One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez