• 'If you remember me, I don’t care if everybody else forgets.'

- haruki murakami

• 'She let out a laugh, and then she put her hand over her mouth, like she was angry at herself for forgetting her sadness.'

- extremely loud and incredibly close, by jonathan safran foer

• 'Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I’m one of them.'

- ray bradbur

• 'You are the only one who has understood even a whisper of me, and I will tell you that I am the only person who has understood even a whisper of you.'

- everything is illuminated, by jonathan safran foer

• 'Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.'

- ira glass

• 'The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.'

- bertrand russell

• 'The sadness will last forever.'

- vincent van gogh

• '…I have this strange feeling that I’m not myself anymore. It’s hard to put into words, but I guess it’s like I was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. That sort of feeling.'

- haruki murakami

• 'I have scars on my hands from touching certain people.'

- j.d. salinger

• 'Of course I loved books more than people.'

- the thirteenth tale, diane setterfield

• 'I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.'

- edgar allen poe

• 'Story of my life: I am so self-destructive, I turn solutions into problems. Everything I touch, I ruin. I’m Midas in reverse.'

- prozac nation, elizabeth wurtzel

• 'Don’t touch me, I’ll die if you touch me.'

- humbert, lolita

• 'Somewhere someone is thinking of you. Someone is calling you an angel. This person is using celestial colors to paint your image. Someone is making you into a vision so beautiful that it can only live in the mind. Someone is thinking of the way your breath escapes your lips when you are touched. How your eyes close and your jaw tightens with concentration as you give pleasure a home. These thoughts are saving a life somewhere right now. In some airless apartment on a dark, urine stained, whore lined street, someone is calling out to you silently and you are answering without even being there. So crystalline. So pure. Such life saving power when you smile. You will never know how you have cauterized my wounds. So sad that we will never touch. How it hurts me to know that I will never be able to give you everything I have.'

- henry rollins

• 'I think the most important thing about music is the sense of escape.'

- thom yorke

• 'Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on. I hope you never think about anything as much as I think about you.'

- extremely loud and incredibly close, by jonathan safran foer

• '…he did not leave the house, and, indeed, spent most of the time in his own room, sick with a wild terror of dying, and yet indifferent to life itself.'

- the picture of dorian gray, oscar wilde

• 'Love yourself first; he’ll come around.'

- unknown

• 'Originality is undetected plagiarism.'

- william ralph inge

• 'I am haunted by humans.'

- the book thief, by markus zusak

• 'all of this is too much. solitude can be healthy, but not all the time. not everyday every month every year of your fucking life.'

- daieny

• 'everything i loved became everything i lost.'

- unknown

• 'The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and somthing else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.'

- chuck close