- "I am not a graceful person. I am not a Sunday morning or a Friday sunset. I am a Tuesday 2am, I am gunshots muffled by a few city blocks, I am a broken window during February. My bones crack on a nightly basis. I fall from elegance with a dull thud, and I apologize for my awkward sadness. I sometimes believe that I don't belong around people, that I belong to all the leap days that didn't happen. The way light and darkness mix under my skin has become a storm. You don't see the lightning, but you hear the echoes." - Anna Peters
- "I hate purity. I hate goodness. I don't want any virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones." - George Orwell
- "If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world." - C. S. Lewis
- "I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life." - Virginia Woolf
- "When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?" - Virginia Woolf
- "You can't punish me for that. Don't ask me my opinion and then punish me for the answer I give you! Better still, just don't ask. Or don't expect truth. Fruit from the tree of knowledge. I love it! If you think I'm going to give you an opinion that's popular then you are talking to the wrong person. I don't know how to do that. I don't know how to turn my brain off and do what you would like me to do.” - Jack White
- The reason it hurts so much to separate is because our souls are connected. Maybe they always have been and will be. Maybe we've lived a thousand lives before this one and in each of them we've found each other. And maybe each time, we've been forced apart for the same reasons. That means that this goodbye is both a goodbye for the past ten-thousand years and a prelude to what will come. When I look at you, I see your beauty and grace and know they have grown stronger with every life you have lived. And I know I have spent every life before this one searching for you. Not someone like you, but you, for your soul and mine must always be together. And then, for a reason neither of us understands, we've been forced to say goodbye. I would love to tell you that everything will work out for us, and I promise to do all I can to make sure it does. But if we never meet again and this is goodbye, I know we will see each other again in another life. We will find each other again, and maybe the stars will have changed, and we will not only love each other in that time, but for all the times we've had before. - The Notebook
- “I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing.” - Neil Gaiman
- “Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.” - Neil Gaiman
- “It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?” - Charles Bukowski
- “I’ve never really enjoyed life. I’ve never known how. I seem to have such overbearingly high standards that I set for myself that there’s not really any way in which I can win. I don’t say that with moist cheeks and a trembling voice. I say it quite matter-of-factly. I’m not really frightened by death; it’s not a particularly horrendous thing for me. I feel sad for other people, but not for me.” - Morrissey
- “I don’t quite know what I am yet. I’ve tried smoking a pipe, flipping coins, listening exclusively to French crooners. Other times I go to the beach and stare at the sea. Someone made a documentary about a prominent thinker who struggled with unspeakable loss. I’ve even had a brief hat phase. But nothing stuck.” - Oliver Tate, Submarine
- “Tonight I stumbled across an encyclopaedia entry on ultrasound. Ultrasound is a sound vibration too high frequency to be audible. It was first developed to locate submerged objects – submarines, depth charges, Atlantis and such. Some animals, like bats, dolphins and dogs, can hear within the ultrasonic frequency. But no human can. No one can truly know what anyone thinks or feels. What’s inside Mum? What’s inside Dad? What’s inside Jordana? We’re all travelling under the radar undetected. And no-one can do a thing about it.” - Oliver Tate, Submarine
- "If you look at the amount of shit that's poured down people's throats, it's no wonder they regurgitate so much. People make music they expect people to want to hear. With us, as with our favourite bands, lots of people just don't get it. But those who do, do. And if you get it, we're making it for you." - Faris Badwan, The Horrors
- "A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.” - Albert Einstein
- "Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you." - Carl Jung
- "In my mind I am eloquent; I can climb intricate scaffolds of words to reach the highest cathedral ceilings and paint my thoughts. But when I open my mouth, everything collapses." - Isaac Marion
- "I remained too much inside my head and ended up losing my mind." - Edgar Allan Poe
- "I cannot stand small talk, because I feel like there’s an elephant standing in the room shitting all over everything and nobody is saying anything. I’m just dying to say, “Hey, do you ever feel like jumping off a bridge?” or “Do you feel an emptiness inside your chest at night that is going to swallow you?” But you can’t say that at a cocktail party." - Paul Gilmartin
- "I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I am." - Sylvia Plath
- "Black is not sad. Bright colors are what depresses me. They’re so… empty. Black is poetic. How do you imagine a poet? In a bright yellow jacket? Probably not." - Ann Demeulemeester
- "I want to explain how exhausted I am. Even in my dreams. How I wake up tired. How I’m being drowned by some kind of black wave." - Elizabeth Wurtzel
- “As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know." - Carl Jung
- "We are born at a given moment, in a given place, and like vintage years of wine, we have the qualities of the year and of the season in which we are born." - Carl Jung
- "The fact that a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing...He must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths...There are not a few who are called awake by the summons of the voice, whereupon they are at once set apart from the others, feeling themselves confronted with a problem about which the others know nothing. In most cases it is impossible to explain to the others what has happened, for any understanding is walled off by impenetrable prejudices. "You are no different from anybody else," they will chorus or, "there's no such thing," and even if there is such a thing, it is immediately branded as "morbid"...He is at once set apart and isolated, as he has resolved to obey the law that commands him from within. "His own law!" everybody will cry. But he knows better: it is the law...The only meaningful life is a life that strives for the individual realization--absolute and unconditional--of its own particular law...To the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his being...he has failed to realize his own life's meaning. The undiscovered vein within us is a living part of the psyche; classical Chinese philosophy names this interior way "Tao," and likens it to a flow of water that moves irresistibly towards its goal. To rest in Tao means fulfillment, wholeness, one's destination reached, one's mission done; the beginning, end, and perfect realization of the meaning of existence innate in all things." - Carl Jung
- "Be silent and listen: have you recognized your madness and do you admit it? Have you noticed that all your foundations are completely mired in madness? Do you not want to recognize your madness and welcome it in a friendly manner? You wanted to accept everything. So accept madness too. Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly dawn on you. Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give it life...If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature...Be glad that you can recognize it, for you will thus avoid becoming its victim. Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life." - Carl Jung
- "My dear, I don’t know what to do today, help me decide. Should I cut myself open and pour my heart on these pages? Or should I sit here and do nothing, nobody’s asking anything of me afterall. Should I jump off the cliff that has my heart beating so and develop my wings on the way down? Or should I step back from the edge, and let the others deal with this thing called courage. Should I stare back at the existential abyss that haunts me so and try desperately to grab from it a sense of self? Or should I keep walking half-asleep, only half-looking at it every now and then in times in which I can’t help doing anything but? Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee? Falsely yours." - Albert Camus
- "I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched." - Edgar Allan Poe
- "Mental illness is constantly either demonized or romanticized by society and there is no space in that dichotomy for real people with mental illness to exist without feeling shamed and invalidated and that isn’t fair."
- "Why can’t I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which one fits best?" - Sylvia Plath
- "I am afraid of getting older … I am afraid of getting married. Spare me from cooking three meals a day—spare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote. I want to be free…. I want, I want to think, to be omniscient…. I think I would like to call myself ‘The girl who wanted to be God." - Sylvia Plath
- "People say, 'I have heart disease,' not 'I am heart disease.' Somehow the presumption of a person's individuality is not compromised by those diagnostic labels. All the labels tell us is that the person has a specific challenge with which he or she struggles in a highly diverse life. But call someone 'a schizophrenic' or 'a borderline' and the shorthand has a way of closing the chapter on the person. It reduces a multifaceted human being to a diagnosis and lulls us into a false sense that those words tell us who the person is, rather than only telling us how the person suffers." - 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." - Martha Manning
- "I don’t want to earn my living; I want to live." - Oscar Wilde
- "Killing oneself is, anyway, a misnomer. We don’t kill ourselves. We are simply defeated by the long, hard struggle to stay alive. When somebody dies after a long illness, people are apt to say, with a note of approval, “He fought so hard.” And they are inclined to think, about a suicide, that no fight was involved, that somebody simply gave up. This is quite wrong." - Sally Brampton
- "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
- "People empty me. I have to get away to refill." - Charles Bukowski
- "We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing." - Charles Bukowski
- "The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed." - Carl Jung
- "In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order." - Carl Jung
- "I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud." - Carl Jung
- "Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous." - Anais Nin
- "I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic - in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself." - Anais Nin
- "I have an attitude now that is immovable. I shall remain outside of the world, beyond the temporal, beyond the organizations of the world. I only believe in poetry." - Anais Nin
- "Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born." - Anais Nin
- "I feel a fatigue of the tongue seeking to utter impossible things until it twists itself into a knot and chokes me. I feel a fatigue at this mass of nerves seeking to uphold a world that is falling apart. I feel a fatigue at feeling, at the fervor of my dreams, the fever of my thought, the intensity of my hallucinations. A fatigue at the sufferings of others and my own. I feel my own blood thundering inside of me, I feel the horror of falling into abysms. But you and I would always fall together and I would not be afraid. We would fall into abysms, but you would carry your phosphorescences to the very bottom of the abysms. We could fall together and ascend together, far into space. I was always exhausted by my dreams, not because of the dreams, but because of the fear of not being able to return. I do not need to return. I will find you everywhere. You alone can go wherever I go, into the same mysterious regions. You too know the language of the nerves. You will always know what I am saying even if I do not." - Anais Nin
- "In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest, where no one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art." - Rumi
- "I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close." - Pablo Neruda
- "I actually attack the concept of happiness. The idea that - I don’t mind people being happy - but the idea that everything we do is part of the pursuit of happiness seems to me a really dangerous idea and has led to a contemporary disease in Western society, which is fear of sadness. It’s a really odd thing that we’re now seeing people saying “write down 3 things that made you happy today before you go to sleep”, and “cheer up” and “happiness is our birthright” and so on. We’re kind of teaching our kids that happiness is the default position - it’s rubbish. Wholeness is what we ought to be striving for and part of that is sadness, disappointment, frustration, failure; all of those things which make us who we are. Happiness and victory and fulfillment are nice little things that also happen to us, but they don’t teach us much. Everyone says we grow through pain and then as soon as they experience pain they say “Quick! Move on! Cheer up!” I’d like just for a year to have a moratorium on the word “happiness” and to replace it with the word “wholeness”. Ask yourself “is this contributing to my wholeness?” and if you’re having a bad day, it is." - Hugh Makay
- I’ve had so many knives stuck into me, when they hand me a flower I can’t quite make out what it is. It takes time." - Charles Bukowski
- "With you, intimacy colours my voice. Even ‘hello’ sounds like ‘come here’." - Warzan Shire
nov 25 2012 ∞
jan 23 2015 +