My favorite quotes

“Isn’t it pretty to think so?” -Ernest Hemingway

“It is better to say I am suffering that to say this landscape is ugly.” - Simone Well

“We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.” - George Orwell

“I stopped in the middle of that building and I saw — the sky. I saw the things that I love in this world. The work and the food and time time to sit and smoke. And I looked at the pen and said to myself, what the hell am I grabbing this for? Why am I trying to become what I don't want to be? What am I doing in an office, making a contemptuous, begging fool of myself, when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am! Why can't I say that, Willy?” - Arthur Miller

“I know that nothing can change. And I know there is no hope.” - Thomas Merton

“Time is the longest distance between two places.” - Tennessee Williams

“Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.” - J. D. Salinger

“It was a pleasure to burn.” - Ray Bradbury

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” - Gabriel García Márquez

“I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead.” - Jack Kerouac

“Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.” - Kurt Vonnegut 

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.” - Raymond Carver

“At the still point, there the dance is.” - T.S. Elliot

“There is a sense in which we are all each other’s consequences.” - Wallace Stegner

“And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.” - John Steinbeck

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart, I am, I am, I am.” - Sylvia Plath

“In our village folks say god crumbles up the old moon into stars.” - Alexander Solzhenitsyn 

“On such sunny, sad mornings I always feel in my bones that there is a chance yet of my not being excluded from Heaven, and that salvation may be granted to me despite the frozen mud and horror in my heart.”  - Vladimir Nabokov

“A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.” - Kurt Vonnegut

“I feel I understand Existence, or at least a minute part Of my existence, only through my art,” - Vladimir Nabokov

“Yet if over hill and hollow Still it is your will to follow, I am off;—to heel, Apollo!” - Edna St. Vincent Millay

“The tall masts quivered as they lay afloat, The temples and the people and the shore; One drew a sharp knife through my tender throat Slowly, and—nothing more.” - Alfred, Lord Tennyson

“I would like to be small enough to hear the dawn breaking, the tulip opening, the sand as it shifts under each tide, the long dream of rocks.” - Theodora Goss

“And then they just sat together, holding each other as the room filled with light.” - L.J. Smith

“A thousand years ago five minutes were

Equal to forty ounces of fine sand.

Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime and

Infinite aftertime: above your head

They close like giant wings, and you are dead.” - Vladimir Nabokov

“And blood-black nothingness began to spin. A system of cells interlinked, within cells interlinked, within cells interlinked within one stem. And dreadfully distinct against the dark, a tall white fountain played.” -Vladimir Nabokov

“For we die every day; oblivion thrives

Not on dry thighbones but on blood-ripe lives,

And our best yesterdays are now foul piles

Of crumpled names, phone numbers and foxed files.” - Vladimir Nabokov

“When the soul adores Him Who guides it through mortal life, when it distinguishes His sign at every turn of the trail, painted on the boulder and notched in the fir trunk, when every page in the book of one’s personal fate bears His watermark, how can one doubt that He will also preserve us through all eternity? So what can stop one from effecting the transition? What can help us to resist the intolerable temptation? What can prevent us from yielding to the burning desire for merging in God? We who burrow in filth every day may be forgiven perhaps the one sin that ends all sins.” - Vladimir Nabokov

“You will fall in love with train rides and sooner or later you will realize that nowhere feels like home anymore.” -Shinji Moon

“Remember, a stranger once told you that the breeze here is something worth writing poems about.” -Shinji Moon

“I once dreamt a girl was stripping right in front of me but she didn’t stop once all the skin was showing and she didn’t stop when I asked her to. She didn’t stop until there was nothing left but bone.” - Jackson Trice

“A sudden warm rainstorm washes down in sweet hyphens.” - J.M. Ledger

“I kept saying her name and she would ask What? and I’d say her name again. I’m not afraid of how this sounds to you. I’m not embarrassed now. But if you could understand, had I—can you see why there’s no way I could let her just go away after this? Why I felt this apical sadness and fear at the thought of her getting her bag and sandals and New Age blanket and leaving and laughing when I clutched her hem and begged her not to leave and said I loved her and closing the door gently and going off barefoot down the hall and never seeing her again? Why it didn’t matter if she was fluffy or not terribly bright? Nothing else mattered. She had all my attention. I’d fallen in love with her. I believed she could save me. I know how this sounds, trust me. I know your type and I know what you’re bound to ask. Ask it now. This is your chance. I felt she could save me I said. Ask me now. Say it. I stand here naked before you. Judge me, you chilly cunt. You dyke, you bitch, cooze, cunt, slut, gash. Happy now? All borne out? Be happy. I don’t care. I knew she could. I knew I loved. End of story.” - David Foster Wallace

“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.” - Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“I had always heard your entire life flashes in front of your eyes the second before you die. First of all, that one second isn’t a second at all, it stretches on forever, like an ocean of time… For me, it was lying on my back at Boy Scout camp, watching falling stars… And yellow leaves, from the maple trees, that lined our street… Or my grandmother’s hands, and the way her skin seemed like paper… And the first time I saw my cousin Tony’s brand new Firebird… And Janie… And Janie… And… Carolyn. I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me… but it’s hard to stay mad, when there’s so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst… And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life… You have no idea what I’m talking about, I’m sure. But don’t worry… you will someday.” - Alan Ball

“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.” - David Foster Wallace

“It was one of those days when it’s a minute away from snowing and there’s this electricity in the air, you can almost hear it. Right? And this bag was just dancing with me. Like a little kid begging me to play with it. For fifteen minutes. That’s the day I realized that there was this entire life behind things, and this incredibly benevolent force that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid, ever. Video’s a poor excuse, I know. But it helps me remember… I need to remember… Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world, I feel like I can’t take it, and my heart is just going to cave in.” - Alan Ball

“I do things like get in a taxi and say, “The library, and step on it.” - David Foster Wallace

“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.” - David Foster Wallace

“You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.” - David Foster Wallace

“He is coming, and I am here.” - Audrey Niffenegger

“What I’m not sure about, is if our lives have been so different from the lives of the people we save. We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we’ve lived through, or feel we’ve had enough time.” - Kazuo Ishiguro

“She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.” - J. D. Salinger

“Yes, there are times we live for somebody else.” - The Lumineers

“As long as your heart beats, as long as body and soul keep together, I cannot admit that any creature endowed with a will has need to despair of life.” - Jules Verne

“And I will remember your small room

the feel of you

the light in the window

your records

your books

our morning coffee

our noons our nights

our bodies spilled together

Sleeping

the tiny flowing currents

immediate and forever

your leg my leg

your arm my arm

your smile and the warmth

of you

who made me laugh

Again.

little dark girl with kind eyes

you have no

knife. the knife is

mine and I won’t use it

Yet.” - Charles Bukowski

“I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.” -Vincent Van Gogh

“You can’t just make me different and then leave.” - John Green

“I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

“She did not need much, wanted very little. A kind word, sincerity, fresh air, clean water, a garden, kisses, books to read, sheltering arms, a cosy bed, and to love and be loved in return.” - Starra Neely Blade

“in front of my mother and my sisters, i pretend love is cheap and vulgar. i act like it’s a sin– i pretend that love is for women on a dark path. but at night i dream of a love so heavy it makes my spine throb– i dream up a lover who makes love like he is separating salt from water.” - Salma Deera

“And love is a word used too much and much too soon.” - Charles Bukowski

“My life is like the falling leaf; Jesus, quicken me.” - Sylvia Plath

“She had the startled eyes of a wild bird. This is the kind of sentence I go mad for. I would like to be able to write such sentences, without embarrassment. I would like to be able to read them without embarrassment.” - Margaret Atwood

“After a long absence, I put on a record of Bach, inhale the fragrant earth in the garden. I think again of poems and novels to be written and I return to the silence of the morning rain.” - Pier Paolo Pasolini

“I’ve known no other love in me except the blue sky on dark days–” - Pier Paolo Pasolini

“I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. Nothing more than an empty house, the warm hazy weariness from a day spent setting strawberry runners in the sun, a glass of cool sweet milk, and a shallow dish of blueberries bathed in cream. Now I know how people can live without books, without college. When one is so tired at the end of a day one must sleep, and at the next dawn there are more strawberry runners to set, and so one goes on living, near the earth. At times like this I’d call myself a fool to ask for more.” - Sylvia Plath

“And it’s true, I don’t remember another word.” - Tatyana Tolstaya

“Some people survive and talk about it. Some people survive and go silent. Some people survive and create. Everyone deals with unimaginable pain in their own way, and everyone is entitled to that, without judgement.” - Nikita Gill

“I know little about love. I only remember that I feared him and sought him.” - Clarice Lispector

“I love the rain. I love how it softens the outlines of things. The world becomes softly blurred, and I feel like I melt right into it.” - Hanamoto Hagumi

“We fuck like we’re the only ones who do it right. You say my name and it comes out like a dark confession. Our mouths swing open like doors. Our mouths open and we spill into each other, like wine.” - Tera K.

“…and you drink a little too much and try a little too hard. And you go home to a cold bed and think, ‘That was fine’. And your life is a long line of fine.” - Gillian Flynn

“There is always something left to love.” - Gabriel García Márquez

“We used to mess up sheets every night when our bodies intertwined, but now the sheets become messy from my restlessness, trying to find a body other than mine.” - Morsus Engel

“Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it.” - Sylvia Plath

“How do we forgive ourselves for all of the things we did not become?” - David ‘Doc’ Luben

“You remember too much,
 my mother said to me recently.
 Why hold onto all that? And I said, Where do I put it down?” - Anne Carson

“A long time ago, before I even met you,

someone replaced my chest with a broken record.

For years, it’s been stammering through

the same old tune.

I want you to know I’m trying.

I quit smoking. I’m doing yoga. And those days

I wake up wishing for death are getting fewer

and farther apart.

No, I’m not ok. But I haven’t been ok

since I was 11, maybe 12. I am still here though.

I’m still breathing. For me, sometimes, that

will have to be enough.” - Clementine von Radics

“As my father always used to tell me, ‘You see, son, there’s always someone in the world worse off than you.’ And I always used to think, ‘So?” - Bill Bryson

“We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.” - Louise Glück

“I forgave everybody, I gave up, I got drunk.” - Jack Kerouac

“And if I said I didn’t plan for it to turn out this way I’d be lying. I was born to be the other woman. I was in the winter of my life, and the men I met on the road were my only summer” - Lana Del Rey

“Allen says when people get religious they start feeding everybody” - Jack Kerouac

“He must have felt a disturbance just beyond the boundless world his eyes perceived. Maybe like dogs we know when we are being hunted.” - Garth Risk Hallberg

“She should have died hereafter.

There would have been a time for such a word.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

To the last syllable of recorded time,

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.” - Shakespeare

“Love is our highest word and the synonym of God” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

“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.” - Jack Kerouac

“It tastes like orange trident gum, riding shotgun in my stepdad’s car back and forth from the barn, when it was still alive and pulsing. Maria gave me gold earrings, kissed my forehead goodbye, spoke Spanish into my heart. That summer was very beautiful and very painful. I woke up every morning before the sun and watched the morning glories unfurl as I lugged water buckets up and down the shed row, chased the fat calico cat up and down the road. The woman who mothered me for my entire life left with her family back to Japan; my sister went to Korea for a year. I pretended I didn’t miss them but I missed them both very much. I think that’s the year I grew up though. I rebelled in this spectacular and terrible way, drank for the first time – drank too much because I had been told throughout my life: “both of your bloodlines are great drinkers. you were born with a high tolerance.” My dad was mad at me a whole lot. I was angry and hurt and incredibly sad but all of these emotions were displaced and I never allowed them. I talked about the boys that would never love me out on benches with people I would not be friends with in a couple of months. My friendships were very heavy. My love was far too thick. I didn’t know how to make friends – which was something that wasn’t much of a problem in middle school. I wanted to die a lot. I wore t-shirts that were far too low. owned one bra: a cheetah print push-up from Victoria’s Secret. I wore mascara, curled my eyelashes up, got them all smudged on my glasses, didn’t eat, wanted my hips to be little points that could break others in half. I dissociated completely from everything that had defined me in previous years. I completely became the opposite of the person I was just months ago. That summer being the pivotal point, the turn around, the turn into. For a while, that was who I was. it scared my family, I think, but it was necessary. That year, I violently became, and had no idea it was happening.” - Shinji Moon

“When god became lonely

he created man,

Or was it

When man became lonely

he created god.” - Melanie Exle

“Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” - Dylan Thomas

“We were happy at least a good part of each day and nearly always at night and this night, in bed together, under the mosquito netting with the flaps of the tent open so that we could see the long burned-through logs of the big fire and the wonderful darkness that receded jaggedly as the night wind struck the fire and then closed in quickly as the wind dropped, we were very happy.” - Ernest Hemingway

“I am no good

Goodness is not the point anymore

Holding on to things

Now that’s the point” - Dorothea Lasky

“I know who I am. It’s a chance but also a pain. And I know I love you. I love what you are and how you think. I love you. Definitely. I love you forever.” - Phillipe Garell

“Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.” - David Foster Wallace

“And now I cannot remember how I would

have had it. It is not a conduit (confluence?) but a place.

The place, of movement and an order.

The place of old order.

But the tail end of the movement is new.

Driving us to say what we are thinking.

It is so much like a beach after all, where you stand

and think of going no further.

And it is good when you get to no further.

It is like a reason that picks you up and

places you where you always wanted to be.

This far, it is fair to be crossing, to have crossed.

Then there is no promise in the other.

Here it is. Steel and air, a mottled presence,

small panacea

and lucky for us.

And then it got very cool.” - John Ashberry

“Want me to tell you? Think you can bear it?” - Edna St. Vincent Millay

“You reduce my name to a signal fire

I want to say love and mean a dozen

foxes tearing up sheets of snow

I want to say love and mean everything

that is wrong with us but doesn’t stop

me from touching you the same way

I flick light-switches with wet fingertips” - Scherezade Siobhan

“I cannot imagine myself without her; it seems to me that without her I should never have been anything. Each of my thoughts sprang into being in relation to her.” - André Gide

“But it was still summer. I didn’t want to sleep. I never wanted to sleep these days. Then I didn’t want to wake up. I didn’t want the leaves turning, the nights turning dark early.” - Louise Glück

“Who will look out for me now? Who will remember me as I was?” - Joan Didion

“Some men get the world, some men get ex-hookers and a trip to Arizona. You’re in with the former, but my God I don’t envy the blood on your conscience.” - James Elroy

“I drive better at night

when there’s nowhere to go and the stores are neon “closed” signs

and everyone is buried under blankets

and late night phone conversations

and black and blue marks

and knocking in your door at midnight

just aren’t priorities anymore

I wanted to be taller so I could reach your mouth

So I wore my mother’s heels

and the cracks in the pavement swallowed my shoes

I was just bleeding knees and ankles smashed against the empty parking lot

I missed your call and when I called you back

your voicemail knocked my teeth out

I thought you were in love with me

You thought I was a pretty good kisser

and sort of pretty if you thought about it

They will never play my favorite song on the radio

and I’ll probably never find my name on a keychain in a souvenir shop

I’ll probably never be all the things you need

I’m so unlucky I’ll probably live forever.” - Anonymous

“Nobody really likes you anyway, and they never did.” - Stephen King

“Truth will set you free but not until it is finished with you.” - Stephen King

“The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren and to do good is my religion.” - Thomas Paine

“They rushed down the street digging everything in the early way they had which later became so much sadder and perceptive.” - Jack Kerouac

“She was too goddamn-all petrifyingly pretty to approach any other way but liquored up past all horror.” - David Foster Wallace

“You get on a train, you disappear. You write your name on a window, you disappear. There are places like this everywhere, places you enter as a young girl, from which you never return.” - Louis Gluck

“Life is so precious and I am so sad and full of hope.” -Shinji Moon

“I don’t know what your favorite color is, but I know what color you bleed when you’re with me.” - Shinji Moon

“How many losses does it take to stop a heart, to lay waste to the vocabularies of desire?” - Dorianne Laux

“Goodbye, goodbye. I can’t feel you anymore. The night is almost too pure for my soul to contain.” -Tim Tharp

“And I swear to god I’ll find myself in the end.” - 30 Seconds to Mars

“The fall it was simple, it was calm. Now it’s different in the winter and I’m whispering to god.” - Earl Sweatshirt

“Make it all for everybody, always. Everybody can’t turn around and tell everybody. Everybody already knows. I told them.” - Childish Gambino

“I have hated words, and I have loved them and I hope I have made them right.” - Markus Zusak

“But that’s not true. The truth is I got on the bus a boy and I never got off the bus. I still haven’t” -Childish Gambino

“It was September, the season of the dog. Our parents didn’t know where we were and didn’t care. It was spectacular.” - Tim Tharp

“Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.” - Jack Kerouac

“Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.” - Vladimir Nabakov

“Everybody worships, the only choice we get is what we worship.” - David Foster Wallace

“She was so beautiful it almost stunned one to look at her.” - Charles Bukowksi

“Tyler gets me a job as a waiter. After that Tyler’s pushing a gun in my mouth and saying the first step to eternal life is you have to die.” - Chuck Palahniuk

“A man said to the universe

Sir I exist!

However, replied the universe

‘The fact has not created in me a sense of obligation.” - Stephen Crane

“Tired,

looking for a place to stay;

hanging wisteria” - Matsuo Basho

“The soul burns out the eyes.” - Jack Kerouac

“…you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” - Samuel Beckett

“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.” - Charles Dickens

“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” - James Joyce

“So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.” - Jack Kerouac

“You have fallen into art—return to life” - William H. Gass

“In your rocking-chair, by your window dreaming, shall you long, alone. In your rocking-chair, by your window, shall you dream such happiness as you may never feel.” - Theodore Dreiser

“It was the nightmare of real things, the fallen wonder of the world.” - Don DeLillo

“This is not the scene I dreamed of. Like much else nowadays I leave it feeling stupid, like a man who lost his way long ago but presses on along a road that may lead nowhere.” – J. M. Coetzee

And death shall have no dominion.

No more may gulls cry at their ears

Or waves break loud on the seashores;

Where blew a flower may a flower no more

Lift its head to the blows of the rain;

Though they be mad and dead as nails,

Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;

Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,

And death shall have no dominion.” - Dylan Thomas

A thousand suns will stream on thee,

A thousand moons will quiver;

But not by thee my steps shall be,

For ever and for ever.” - Alfred Lord Tennyson

“Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.” - Oscar Wilde

“What are men to rocks and mountains?” - Jane Austin

“A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down, but I wish you to know that you inspired it.” - Charles Dickens

“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” - Genesis in the Bible

“They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.” - Waiting for Godot

“Dear Jesus, do something.” - Vladimir Nabokov

“My God died young. Theolatry I found

Degrading, and its premises, unsound.

No free man needs God; but was I free?” - Vladimir Nabokov

“The summer night was starless and stirless, with distant spasms of silent lightning.” -Vladimir Nabokov

“She wore her sexuality with an older woman’s ease, and not like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to just put it down.” - Zadie Smith

“Boys are just boys after all, but sometimes girls really seem to be the turn of a pale wrist, or the sudden jut of a hip, or a clutch of very dark hair falling across a freckled forehead. I’m not saying that’s what they really are. I’m just saying sometimes it seems that way, and that those details (a thigh mole, a full face flush, a scar the precise shape and size of a cashew nut) are so many hooks waiting to land you.” - Zadie Smith

“Our children will be born of our actions. Our accidents will become their destinies. Oh, the actions will remain. It is a simple matter of what you will do when the chips are down, my friend. When the fat lady is singing. When the walls are falling in, and the sky is dark, and the ground is rumbling. In that moment our actions will define us. And it makes no difference whether you are being watched by Allah, Jesus, Buddah, or whether you are not. On cold days a man can see his breath, on a hot day he can’t. On both occasions, the man breathes.” - Zadie Smith

“No matter what Jody did, she said nothing. She had learned how to talk some and leave some. She was a rut in the road. Plenty of life beneath the surface but it was kept beaten down by the wheels.” -Zadie Smith

I.

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,

Who never to himself hath said,

This is my own, my native land!

Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d,

As home his footsteps he hath turn’d,

From wandering on a foreign strand!

If such there breathe, go, mark him well;

For him no Minstrel raptures swell;

High though his titles, proud his name,

Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;

Despite those titles, power, and pelf,

The wretch, concentred all in self,

Living, shall forfeit fair renown,

And, doubly dying, shall go down

To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,

Unwept, unhonour’d, and unsung.

II.

O Caledonia! stern and wild,

Meet nurse for a poetic child!

Land of brown heath and shaggy wood,

Land of the mountain and the flood,

Land of my sires! what mortal hand

Can e’er untie the filial band,

That knits me to thy rugged strand!

Still as I view each well-known scene,

Think what is now, and what hath been,

Seems as, to me of all bereft,

Sole friends thy woods and streams were left;

And thus I love them better still,

Even in extremity of ill.

By Yarrow’s streams still let me stray,

Though none should guide my feeble way;

Still feel the breeze down Ettrick break,

Although it chill my wither’d cheek;

Still lay my head by Teviot Stone,

Though there, forgotten and alone,

The Bard may draw his parting groan.” - Sir Walter Scott

“If I cannot be better than them, I will become so much worse.” - Holly Black

“He fought the real battle in the tunnel alone, before he ever saw the vast danger that lay in wait.” -J.R.R. Tolkein, The Hobbit

“It was as though the very constellations knew our impending sorrow.” - Ralph Waldo Emmerson, The invisible Man

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” - Zora Neale Hurston 

“I have done it again.   

One year in every ten   

I manage it——

A sort of walking miracle, my skin   

Bright as a Nazi lampshade,   

My right foot

A paperweight,

My face a featureless, fine   

Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin   

O my enemy.   

Do I terrify?——

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?   

The sour breath

Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh

The grave cave ate will be   

At home on me

And I a smiling woman.   

I am only thirty.

And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.   

What a trash

To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.   

The peanut-crunching crowd   

Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot——

The big strip tease.   

Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands   

My knees.

I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.   

The first time it happened I was ten.   

It was an accident.

The second time I meant

To last it out and not come back at all.   

I rocked shut

As a seashell.

They had to call and call

And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying

Is an art, like everything else.   

I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.   

I do it so it feels real.

I guess you could say I’ve a call.

It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.

It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.   

It’s the theatrical

Comeback in broad day

To the same place, the same face, the same brute   

Amused shout:

‘A miracle!’

That knocks me out.   

There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge   

For the hearing of my heart——

It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge   

For a word or a touch   

Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.   

So, so, Herr Doktor.   

So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,

I am your valuable,   

The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.   

I turn and burn.

Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash—

You poke and stir.

Flesh, bone, there is nothing there——

A cake of soap,   

A wedding ring,   

A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer   

Beware

Beware.

Out of the ash

I rise with my red hair   

And I eat men like air.” - Sylvia Plath, Lady Lazarus

“The floor seemed comfortably solid. It was comforting to know that I had fallen and could fall no further.” - Sylvia Plath, Bell Jar

“Life is thickly sown with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to pass quickly through them. The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.” - Voltaire

“We shall hear the angels, we shall see the whole sky all diamonds, we shall see how all earthly evil, all our sufferings, are drowned in the mercy that will fill the whole world. And our life will grow peaceful, tender, sweet as a caress…You’ve had no joy in your whole life; but wait Uncle Vanya, wait… We shall rest.” - Chekhov, Uncle Vanya

“A small man can be just as exhausted as a great man.” - Arthur Miller

“We must go on because we can’t turn back.” - Robert Louis Stevenson

“And blood-black nothingness began to spin... A system of cells interlinked within cells interlinked within cells interlinked within one stem... And dreadfully distinct against the dark, a tall white fountain played.” - Vladimir Nobokov/Blade Runner 2049

“I made it all the way to Phoenix on the money I saved. The trees looked different, but everything else was exactly the same. I started using a new name, sleeping at the cheapest hostel I could find. the pink opaque was over. I got a job at the mall. at build-a-bear, filling the dolls up with stuffing. i'd got out of that town; the place i knew that'd kill me if i stayed. but something was still wrong, wronger even. time wasn't right. it was moving too fast. and then i was 19, and then i was 20. i felt like one of those dolls, asleep in the supermarket... stuffed. and then i was 21. like tracks that were skipped over on a dvd. i told myself 'this isn't normal. this isn't normal. this isn't how my life is supposed to feel.' i thought about running away again; about moving to santa fe and changing my name one more time. but i knew that everywhere would just be the same. i had seen how it ended. i knew where i was. a little bit after my 22nd birthday, i paid this burn out kid who used to hit on me at the food court $50 to bury me alive. i mean— he didn't know he was burying me alive. but i doubt he would've cared too much even if he did. i bought a coffin, i dug a hole, i got inside, and i closed the lid. i said to myself, 'this is crazy. what you're doing is crazy.' but another part of me knew that it wasn't. that it was survival. and that i didn't have much time. that what felt like years in this world was actually just seconds. so i waited. and then finally.. the first spade full of dirt hit the top of the box. and then another. and then another. i sang songs to myself. i counted to 10,000 without skipping any numbers. i pissed and i shit my pants and i forced my mouth to produce any saliva it could muster just so i'd have something to drink. i screamed as loud as i could for help. i apologized for the whole thing. and i begged god for someone to come along and save me. i tried and tried to claw my way out, but that burn out guy had packed the dirt in too tight, just like i'd asked him to do. and then, after i don't know how long, i felt myself start to leave myself. and it was like i was watching myself on tv from across the room, and i was moving further and further away from the screen, until the screen was so small that i couldn't even see myself anymore. and then i was clawing my way up out of the ground. and then i was at the surface, gasping for air, rain pouring down on me, thunder and lightning. and i was finally back there, back at our old sleep away camp. and just like i was waking up from a bad dream, that whole life, that whole reality where i was maddy wilson... drifted away like a brief hallucination that after a few moments i could hardly even remember. and all those memories that had felt so real, washed away with the rain back on our old sleep away camp. and i was me. i was finally me again, and it was the season 6 premiere. i tried looking for you, but mr melancholy had covered his tracks too well. i knew you must be buried someplace close by, but i didn't know where. and your signal! that signal that i used to be able to close my eyes and feel so vividly... it was nowhere. i wasn't picking up anything on the psychic plane. i found my heart... isabel, oh my god, i found yours too, and it was still beating! stored indefinitely in a- in an industrial freezer! i left our hearts there because i knew i wasn't done yet. and i found mr melancholy's cauldron, i found the luna juice he used to send us to the midnight realm! and i took a big sip straight out from the ladle, and i laid back down, and i waited to fall back asleep. i knew i needed to come back here. i knew i needed to come back and save you, so that the show could continue. so that we can get to season 6.” - Jane Schoenbrun, I Saw the TV Glow 

"Being born a woman is an awful tragedy…. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars - to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording - all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.." - Sylvia Plath

"Jessica has a forehead scar from the deep end of a pool. I ask Jessica what drowning feels like and she says not everything feels like something else." - Angie Sijun Lou

"Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on. I hope you never have to think about anything as much as I think about you." -Jonathan Safran Foerk, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“I never wanted to be a god, he thought. I wanted only to disappear like a jewel of trace dew caught by the morning. I wanted to escape the angels and the damned-alone… as though by an oversight.” - Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah 

“I was getting to where I could see the truth. Someday I’ll be brave enough to speak it.” - S.E. Hinton 

“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow. Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead. Walk beside me… just be my friend” - Albert Camus

“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.” - Albert Camus

“In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion." [The Minotaur]” - Albert Camus