If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell. I’ll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days. — Sylvia Plath

God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of “parties” with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering. — Sylvia Plath

What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don’t live up until their death. They don’t honor their own lives, they piss on their lives. They shit them away. Dumb fuckers. They concentrate too much on fucking, movies, money, family, fucking. Their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them. Their brains are stuffed with cotton. They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly. Play them the great music of the centuries and they can’t hear it. Most people’s deaths are a sham. There’s nothing left to die. — Charles Bukowski

It all ends in tears anyway. — Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

I don’t owe people anything, and I don’t have to talk to them any more than I feel I need to. — Ned Vizzini, It’s Kind of a Funny Story

Things are sweeter when they’re lost. I know—because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly…And when I got it it turned to dust in my hands. — F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

You know, it’s quite a job to start loving somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment, in the very beginning, when you have to jump across a precipice: if you think about it you don’t do it. I know I’ll never jump again. — Jean-Paul Sartre

We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It’s our own concept — our own selves — that we love. — Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Socializing is as exhausting as giving blood. People assume we loners are misanthropes, just ­sitting thinking, ‘Oh, people are such a bunch of assholes,’ but it’s really not like that. We just have a smaller tolerance for what it takes to be with others. It means having to perform. I get so tired of communicating. — Anneli Rufus

The more you struggle to live, the less you live. Give up the notion that you must be sure of what you are doing. Instead, surrender to what is real within you, for that alone is sure.. you are above everything distressing. — Baruch Spinoza

If you do not want to write, at least spit on a piece of paper, put it in an envelope, and send it to me. You are not taking any notice of me at all. God forgive you - all I wanted was a few words from you. — Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Live to the point of tears. — Albert Camus

I want to hide under your rib cage Your heart and I Fall asleep to your breath, every night. — Suomia

I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension. — Anaïs Nin

I know nothing - nothing in the world - of the hearts of men. I only know that I am alone - horribly alone. — Ford Madox Ford

“I am a dreamer. I know so little of real life that I just can’t help re-living such moments as these in my dreams, for such moments are something I have very rarely experienced. I am going to dream about you the whole night, the whole week, the whole year.” — Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

“You are most powerful when you are most silent. People never expect silence. They expect words, motion, defense, offense, back and forth. They expect to leap into the fray. They are ready, fists up, words hanging leaping from their mouths. Silence? No.” — All Rivers Flow to the Sea, Alison McGhee