"Look what can happen in this country, they’d say. A girl lives in some out-of-the-way town for nineteen years, so poor she can’t afford a magazine, and then she gets a scholarship to college and wins a prize here and a prize there and ends up steering New York like her own private car. Only I wasn’t steering anything, not even myself. I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolleybus. I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn’t get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo." - The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)

"The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move. . . . Nobody’d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you." - Holden in Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger.)

"... For this in the end is what we have. The love of something... There is much to love, and that love is what we are left with... We can never let the world take our memories of love away, and if there are no memories, we must invent love all over again... The wheel turns. Blue above, green below, we wander a long way, but love is what the cup of our soul contains when we leave the world and the flesh."
-Louise Murphy, The True Story of Hansel and Gretel A Novel of War and Survival

"....I remember the day he smiled at me and said, 'Do you know what a poem is, Esther?''No, what?' I said.'A piece of dust.' And he looked so proud of having thought of this that I just stared at his blond hair and his blue eyes and his white teeth - he had very long, strong white teeth - and said 'I guess so.'It was only in the middle of New York a whole year later that I finally thought of an answer to that remark. I spent a lot of time having imaginary conversations with Buddy Willard. He was a couple of years older than I was and very scientific, so he could always prove things. When I was with him I had to work to keep my head above water. These conversations I had in my mind usually repeated the beginnings of conversations I'd really had with Buddy, only they finished with me answering him back sharply, instead of just sitting around and saying 'I guess so'.Now, lying on my back in bed, I imagined Buddy saying, 'Do you know what a poem is, Esther?''No, what?' I would say.'A piece of dust."Then just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, 'So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you're curing. They're dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.'And of course Buddy wouldn't have any answer to that, because what I said was true. People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn't see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick or couldn't sleep.My trouble was I took everythinbg Buddy Willard told me as the honest-to-god truth....."-The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use— silence, exile and cunning. -A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

Sally Owens: Sometimes I feel there is a hole inside me... An emptiness that, at times, seems to burn. I think if you lifted my heart to your ear, you could probably hear the ocean. And the moon tonight: there's a circle around it --- a sign of trouble not far behind. I have this dream of being whole... Of not going to sleep each night wanting, but still sometimes, when the wind is warm or the crickets sing, I dream of a love that even time will lie down and be still for. I just want someone to love me. I want to be seen. I don't know... Maybe I've had my happiness. I don't want to believe it, but there is no man... Only that moon.

-Dreaming of Lovewritten by Robin Swicord, Akiva Goldsman, & Adam Brooks, from the novel by Alice Hoffman

"The best kind of love, it's not always an easy road. Because life will throw you curve balls. People change, people grow and sad things happen sometimes. I think that the greatest loves are those that have overcome obstacles because they have withstood those things that life can throw at them." -The Notebook By Nicholas Sparks

Diary By Chuck Palahniuk
Just for the record, knowing when people are only pretending to like you isn't such a great skill to have.
You writting, you walking down a street, your whole life shows in every physical action. How you hold your shoulders, Angel says. It's all an art. What you do with your hands, you're always blabbing your life story.
Who knows where an idea comes from. Our insparation. Why do we imagine what we imagine.
"What I mean is sometimes, for an artist, chronic pain can be a gift."
Your handwritting . The way you walk. Which china pattern you choose. It's all giving you away. Everything you do shows your hand. Everything is a self-portrait.
Its funny the way your mind tries to make sense of chaos.
The truth is, wherever you choose to be, it's the wrong place.
"We all die." She says, " The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will".
It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to rember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We must learn so little from peace.
What they don't teach you in art school is how your whole life is about discovering who you already were.
What the don't teach you in art school. How you're still always trapped.
People killed in a fire, people in long-term vegetative state, they all end up posed about the same. The same as a baby waiting to be born.

Wonder When you'll Miss me- By Amanda Davis
It was like I'd left behind something at Berrybrook besides the forty-eight pounds and seven months. Some invisable part of my brain forgotten on a shelf somewhere, some key ingredient to navigating the world abandoned in that stupid Tudor buliding on that stupid green hill. I didn't even know how to look for what was gone, how to recognize it if I found it. How to ask for help.
But I didn't want to be better than anyone. I just wanted to be me. And, yes, I wanted to show up, to be noticed. But inside some of me still wanted desperately to disappear. Of course that's what had gotten me to Beryybrook in the first place: trying to disappear.
Then each morning I woke up to the blinding Berrybrook sunlight and thought I was a little girl in my bed at home again, that my father would come and wake me at any minute. And then, slowly, I blinked awake to the ceiling tiles and the scrffed wood floor, the chrome-rimmerd bed and the hum of the room, and relized that I'd grown up.
But it was just one more thing. One more way the days would form and even at the bottom of everything I was, I just didn't care that much right then. It was all about one more day and just for now and every other cliche in the world. It was all about waking and eating and running and sleeping. And it was about getting through to the next day, all of it even, nobody hurt. Me alive, though I still wasn't sure i wanted to be.
"Careful." She gave a snort. "Jesus. You're so careful that you're a danger to yourself..."

When he says, "I love you, honey," you realize that he never calls you by your name. You will say good-bye for all the right reasons. You're tired of living in wait for his apocalypse. You have your own fight on your hands, and though it's no bigger or more noble than his, it will rewuire all of your energy. It's you who has to hold on to the earth. You have to tighten your grip- which means letting go of him.

-The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank

Before dinner, my grandmother read the newspaper, tsk-tsking and complaining to no one in particular that the world was going to hell. Everything was wrong; nothing was the way it used to be."What do you think was so good about the good old days?" I asked in exasperation. But I heard how harsh my voice was and didn't like it. I said, "What do you miss, I mean?"While she thought, I waite to make my point: that everything was much better now than it used to be; I'd cite the civil rights and women's movements."The boy who lit the street lamps in the evening," she said, finally. "HE carried a stool with him."I understood then-- it was like missing Nantucket-- and I put my hand on top of hers. It occure dto me that everything was more complicated than I thought. - The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank

"To die, to sleep - to sleep, perchance to dream, ay there's the rub, for in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause; there's the respect that makes calamity of so long life"
-- 'Hamlet' Shakespeare

She say, Celie, tell the truth, have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God.--Alice Walker, The Color Purple

"There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten, but I've loved another with all my heart and soul, and to me, this has always been enough."-Nicholas Sparks, "The Notebook"

"I'd begun to realise that there was an unspoken prejudice among book-learned people, a secret conviction they all seemed to share, that life as we know it is an imperfect vision of reality, and that only art, like a pair of reading glasses, can correct it. The scholars and intellectuals I met at our dinner-table always seemed to hold a grudge against the world. They could never quite reconcile themselves that our lives don't follow the dramatic arc that a good author gives to a great literary character. Only in accidents of pure perfection does the world actually become a stage. And that, they seemed to think, was a shame."
- The Rule of Four, Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason

"Yes," he continued, "that is one of the great secrets of life. Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes."

~Oscar Wilde,The Picture of Dorian Gray

And this was perhaps the first time in my life that death occurred to me as a reality. I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it--it, the physical act. I had thought of suicide when I was much younger, as, possibly, we all have, but then it would have been for revenge, it would have been my way of informing the world how awfully it had made me suffer. But the silence of the evening, as I wandered home, had nothing to do with that storm, that far-off boy. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.
-James Baldin, Giovanni's Room

"We are an exceptional model of the human race. We no longer know how to produce food. We no longer can heal ourselves. We no longer raise our young. We have forgotten the names of the stars, fail to notice the phases of the moon. We do not know the plants and they no longer protect us. We tell ourselves we are the most powerful specimens of our kind who have ever lived. But when the lights are off we are helpless. We cannot move without traffic signals. We must attend classes in order to learn by rote numbered steps toward love or how to breast-feed our baby. We justify anything, anything at all by the need to maintain our way of life. And then we go to the doctor and tell the professionals we have no life. We have a simple test for making decisions: our way of life, which we cleverly call our standard of living, must not change except to grow yet more grand. We have a simple reality we live with each and every day: our way of life is killing us."

Blood Orchid by Charles Bowden

Quote from Sexus by Henry Miller
"Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes deperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there."

"You know the feeling of recognition you get when you look in a mirror? 'That's me,' you think to yourself, 'My hair needs to be combed and, hey, there's a pimple on my nose!' Well I got that same feeling no matter where I looked. I looked at the asphalt road and it was my face. I looked at the bridge and the bridge was me staring back at myself. It was a physical sensation, as if the sky had my eyes and could see me staring up at it. There was no doubt that this state was 'true.' It was far more true than the state I had considered to be normal up until then. I had no need to confirm it with anyone.
It's all me."-Brad Warner, Hardcore Zen