Anais Nin

• "I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls."
• "What I cannot love, I overlook."
• "When one is pretending the entire body revolts."

Chuck Palahniuk

Invisible Monsters

• "The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open."
• "Rip yourself open. Sew yourself shut."
• "Who you are moment to moment is just a story. What I needed was a new story."
• "You can’t be beautiful until you feel beautiful."
• "Find what you’re afraid of most and go live there."

John Green

Looking For Alaska

• "Forgetting her mother, failing her mother and her friends and herself - those are awful things, but she did not need to fold into herself and self-destruct. Those awful things are survivable, because we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be. When adults say, "Teenagers think they are invincible" with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are. We need never be hopeless because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But the part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail. So I know she forgives me, just as I forgive her. Thomas Edison's last words were: "Its very beautiful over there." I don't know where there is, but I believe its somewhere and I hope its beautiful."

The Mirror Has Two Faces (movie)

• "I believe in love and lust and sex and romance. I don’t want everything to add up to some perfect equation. I want mess and chaos. I want someone to go crazy out of his mind for me. I want to feel passion and heat and sweat and madness and I want Valentines and Cupids and all the rest of that crap. I want it all."

Isadora Duncan

• "You were once wild here. Don't let them tame you."

Buddha

• "You yourself, as much as anybody else, deserve your love and affection."

Richard Selzer

• "And if the surgeon is like a poet, then the scars you have made on countless bodies are like verses into which you have poured your soul."

Jonathan Safran Foer

Everything Is Illuminated

• "...The only thing worse than being sad is for other 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 ribcage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad."
• "Brod’s life was a slow realization that the world was not for her, and that for whatever reason, she would never be happy and honest at the same time. She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release [...] It was not the world that was the great and saving lie, but her willingness to make it beautiful and fair, to live a once-removed life, in a world once-removed from the one in which everyone else seemed to exit."
• "But more than that, no unloving words were ever spoken, and everything was held up as another small piece of proof that it can be this way, it doesn't have to be that way; if there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it heavy walls, and we will furnish it with soft red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweler's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tired everything that does."

W. Somerset Maugham

Of Human Bondage

• "She loved him now with a new love because he had made her suffer."

Karl Lagerfeld

• "Only the minute and the future are interesting in fashion - it exists to be destroyed. If everybody did everything with respect, you'd go nowhere."