• "Why does tragedy exist?/ Because you are full of rage./ Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief."

Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

• "She knew herself by heart too, and was sick of the old story."

Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

• "Stop thinking… The more you think, the faster you cut your own throat. What is there to think about? It always ends up the same way. In your mind there is a bolted door. You have to work hard not to go near that door. Parties, lovers, career, charity, babies, who cares what it is, so long as you avoid the door. There are times, when I am on my own, fixing a drink, walking upstairs, when I see the door waiting for me. I have to stop myself pulling the bolt and turning the handle. Why? On the other side of the door is a mirror, and I will have to see myself. I’m not afraid of what I am. I’m afraid I will see what I am not."

Jeanette Winterson, from “The World and Other Places,” The World and Other Places

• “Then it’s hopeless?” “It is never hopeless. But sometimes I cannot hope. I try always to hope but sometimes I cannot.”

Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

• "Every friendship is an inconspicuous drama, a series of subtle wounds."

Emil Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born

• "I know beyond all doubt that the dark things crowding in on me either did not exist or were not dangerous to me, and still I was afraid."

John Steinbeck - from Travels With Charley: In Search of America

• "The body can endure compromise and the mind can be seduced by it. Only the heart protests. The heart. Carbon-based primitive in a silicon world."

Jeanette Winterson, The Powerbook

• "Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing — between two fictions."

E.M. Cioran, Anathemas And Admirations

• "Why it is that around me things sink away like fallen snow, whereas for other people even a little liqueur glass stands on the table steady as a statue."

Franz Kafka

• ""We all have one foot in a fairytale, and the other in the abyss."

Paulo Coelho

• "Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery."

Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

• "Sadness gives depth. Happiness gives height. Sadness gives roots. Happiness gives branches. Happiness is like a tree going into the sky, and sadness is like the roots going down into the womb of the earth. Both are needed, and the higher a tree goes, the deeper it goes, simultaneously. The bigger the tree, the bigger will be its roots. In fact, it is always in proportion. That’s its balance."

Osho Rajneesh

• "Those nights lying alone/ are not discontinuous with this cold hectic dawn./ It is who I am."

Anne Carson, The Glass Essay

• "By becoming a different me, I could free myself of everything. I seriously believed I could escape myself – as long as I made the effort. But I always hit a dead end. No matter where I go, I still end up me. What’s missing never changes. The scenery may change, but I’m still the same old incomplete person. The same missing elements torture me with a hunger that I can never satisfy. I think that lack itself is as close as I’ll come to defining myself."

Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

• "Franz Kafka is Dead. He died in a tree from which he wouldn’t come down. “Come down!” they cried to him. “Come down! Come down!” Silence filled the night, and the night filled the silence, while they waited for Kafka to speak. “I can’t,” he finally said, with a note of wistfulness. “Why?” they cried. Stars spilled across the black sky. “Because then you’ll stop asking for me.”"

Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

• "And, drunk with my own madness, I shouted at him furiously, “Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!”"

Charles Baudelaire

• "Clear moments are so short. There is much more darkness. More ocean than terra firma. More shadow than form."

Adam Zagajewski, Moment

• "I am besieged by such strange thoughts, such dark sensations, such obscure questions, which still crowd my mind - and somehow I have neither the strength nor the desire to resolve them. It is not for me to resolve all this!"

Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights

• "Are people crazy? People waited all their lives. They waited to live, they waited to die. They waited in line to buy toilet paper. They waited in line for money. And if they didn’t have any money they waited in longer lines. You waited to go to sleep and then you waited to awaken. You waited to get married and you waited to get divorced. You waited for it to rain, you waited for it to stop. You waited to eat and then you waited to eat again. You waited in a shrink’s office with a bunch of psychos and you wondered if you were one."

Charles Bukowski, Pulp

• "You want to go back/ to where the sky was inside us."

Margaret Atwood, Selected Poems: 1965-1975

• "In the violence of overcoming, in the disorder of my laughter and my sobbing, in the excess of raptures that shatter me, I seize on the similarity between a horror and a voluptuousness that goes beyond me, between an ultimate pain and an unbearable joy!"

Georges Bataille, The Tears of Eros

• "I have a very childlike rage, and a very childlike loneliness."

Richey Edwards

• "It was the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things. Dusk, silence, iron chill. Something lonely in the bone."

Don DeLillo, White Noise

• "A man who has become conscious of the absurd is for ever bound to it."

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

• "No matter how the sun shone, the sea held forth no more promises."

Albert Camus, “The Silent Men,” Exile and the Kingdom

• "And the night smells like snow./ Walking home for a moment/ you almost believe you could start again./ And an intense love rushes to your heart,/ and hope. It’s unendurable, unendurable."

Franz Wright, closing lines to “Night Walk” from God’s Silence

• "One day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the sound of the ocean on a cold sunless shore and said, ‘We need a voice to call across the water, to warn ships; I’ll make one. I’ll make a voice like all of time and all of the fog that ever was; I’ll make a voice that is like an empty bed beside you all night long, and like an empty house when you open the door, and like trees in autumn with no leaves. A sound like the birds flying south, crying, and a sound like November wind and the sea on the hard, cold shore. I’ll make a sound that’s so alone that no one can miss it, that whoever hears it will weep in their souls, and hearths will seem warmer, and being inside will seem better to all who hear it in the distant towns. I’ll make me a sound and an apparatus and they’ll call it a Fog Horn and whoever hears it will know the sadness of eternity and the briefness of life."

The Foghorn, Ray Bradbury

• We are unutterably alone, essentially, especially in the things most intimate and most important to us.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

• "Give me that dark moment I will carry it everywhere/ like a mouthful of rain."

Mary Oliver, Blue Pastures

• "I think sometimes/ too much is asked of us;/ I think sometimes/ our consolations are the costliest thing."

Louise Glück, from Relic

• "My heartbeat has reached the epitome of rottenness; It is no longer part of my heart. Time for the shadows to come and grab me by the brain. Dearest, I am asking you again: Just how far is the sky?"

Friedrich Nietzsche, Selected Letters

• "Whole trees I feel/ as if they were inside me, splintered."

Peter Balakian, from “Domestic Lament,” Poetry

• "I’m tired of everybody. Please forgive me."

Ernest Hemingway, from The Garden Of Eden

• "I may be trying to destroy you in order to live. I may only be trying to love you."

Alice Notley, In The Pines

• "There is a kind of pressure in humans to take whatever is most/ beloved by them/ and smash it."

Anne Carson, excerpt of Book of Isaiah

• "You think you can get rid of things, and people too – leave them behind. You don’t yet know about the habit they have, of coming back. Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you’ve been."

Margaret Atwood

• "No matter how careful you are, there’s going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn’t experience it all. There’s that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should’ve been paying attention. Well, get used to that feeling. That’s how your whole life will feel some day. This is all practice."

Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

• "He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others–the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by the midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad. "

Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

• "How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn’t they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a little while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise?"

Don DeLillo

• We are as forlorn as children lost in the woods. When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours. And if I were to cast myself down before you and weep and tell you, what more would you know about me than you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful? For that reason alone we human beings ought to stand before one another as reverently, as reflectively, as lovingly, as we would before the entrance to Hell."

Franz Kafka, Letter to Oskar Pollak

• "I’m sick to death of this particular self. I want another."

Orlando, Virginia Woolf

• "I don’t do anything with my life except romanticize and decay with indecision."

Allen Ginsberg - from The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice: First Journals and Poems: 1937-1952

• "She just drifts along doing nothing. It frightens me terribly how she just drifts along."

Tennessee Williams, from The Glass Menagerie

• "Yes, you can love the river. The knife. The pills. / The wine. You can love a thousand lonelinesses."

Jeanann Verlee, from “Polyamory, with Knives” Nailed (21 July 2014)

• "I am sick of having opinions, I am sick of talking."

Susan Sontag, from Reborn: Journals & Notebooks (1947-1963)

• "This entity I call my mind, this hive of restlessness,/ this wedge of want my mind calls self,/ this self which doubts so much and which keeps reaching…"

C. K. Williams, from “The Clause,” in The Singing

• "…and on the long nights I could not turn the moon off or count the lights of cars across the ceiling. I lay as single as death. I smiled and there was no one to notice."

Anne Sexton, from The Complete Poems: Fourth Psalm

• I am worn out with dreams;"

William Butler Yeats, from “Men Improve with the Years,” in The Wild Swans at Coole

• I search for a lost sky."

Mahmoud Darwish, from “The Hoopoe,” If I Were Another trans. by Fady Joudah (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011)

• "I do not forget, I just leave things aside."

Mahmoud Darwish

• “Forget everything. Open the windows. Clear the room. The wind blows through it. You see only its emptiness, you search in every corner and don’t find yourself.”

Franz Kafka, from Diaries, 1910-1923 (Schocken, 2009)

• "Dread of night. Dread of not-night."

Franz Kafka, from “The Third Octavo Notebook,” The Blue Octavo Notebooks

• "To the best of myself I prayed:/ Was that enough?"

Theodore Roethke, excerpt of “My Instant of Forever” from Straw for the Fire

• "I opened my hands—/ like a promise/ I would keep my whole life,/ and have—/ and let it go."

Mary Oliver, from “Pipefish,” House of Light

• Melancholy, the pondering of existing sorrows, has nothing to do with a death wish. It is a form of resistance. And on an artistic level, its function is completely different than simply reactive or reactionary. When, with a fixed gaze, it goes over how things have happened, it is revealed that the motor functions of hopelessness and knowledge are identically executed. The description of misery involves the possibility of overcoming it."

W.G. Sebald, Die Beschreibung des Unglücks, 1985

• "What can a flame remember? If it remembers a little less than is necessary, it goes out; if it remembers a little more than is necessary, it goes out. If only it could teach us, while it burns, to remember correctly."

George Seferis, from a journal entry featured in A Poet’s Journal; Days of 1945 - 1951

• "How many futures — (how many deaths I can die?)"

Sylvia Plath, from the Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

• "My memories have turned into anxieties."

Fernando Pessoa

• "How are you?/ Silence again./ Fine, fine, I mumble, fine,/ unraveling like string"

Sandra Cisneros, from “Drought” featured in My Wicked Ways: Poems

• "MARCUS ANDRONICUS: Why dost thou laugh? it fits not with this hour./TITUS ANDRONICUS: Why, I have not another tear to shed:"

William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus

• "Why inspiration comes, why inspiration disappears… who knows? Why do we love violently and then stop loving? Violence, violent emotions: always temporary? Or are they meant to be transformed…?"

Joyce Carol Oates, from The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973-1982

• "I have sung over so many abysses,/ And lived in so many mirrors."

Anna Akhmatova, from The First Warning

• "To put it another way, pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world. Why must it be pain? Why can’t he rouse us more gently, with violins or laughter? Because the dream from which we must be wakened, is the dream that all is well."

William Nicholson, Shadowlands

• "But, as I said, I am pure error. And I have a left-handed soul."

Clarice Lispector, from Complete Stories; “Brasília”

• "My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child–wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry."

Virginia Woolf - from A Writer’s Diary