By Category: Life

“Oh doctor
We're dying
There's no use in crying
So live for tomorrow
And do what you have to.”

-Parade, Garbage

Recommended by nikola.sydney.

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“She's pretty, but in her face you can see all the things she's given up on in life.”

-I Wish Someone Were Waiting For Me Somewhere, Anna Gavalda

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“Life and death, energy and peace. If I stop today it was still worth it. Even the terrible mistakes that I made and would have unmade if i could. The pains that have burned me and scarred my soul, it was worth it for having been allowed to walk where I've walked, which was to hell on earth, heaven on earth, back again, into, under, far in between, through it, and above.”

-Gia

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“a life / our life / always together, forever /
drawing strength from one another / two beds, two heads, one mind / locked in / locked up / creating / stories / inventing life / you and me / you are me / I want to find a part of me / that doesn't belong to you / a poisoned mind / this is our game / virgins on the dole / tried a little witchcraft / trying to be invisible / someone is driving you insane. / it's me / stares and signals / my perception. your reception. clashing / you are me / you and me / you are me / a passing breeze across the sky / dreaming / separated / burning inside / this is our war / this is our life / who will give in / you or me / a division within and between / separated / only one should lose / I was missing from the world / you gave my life back to me / this is our life / this is our game / we once were two / we two made one / we no more two / through life be one.”

-Jennifer and June Gibbons

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“Maybe everyone out there is a liar. And maybe the whole world is stupid, and ignorant. But I'd rather be in it. I'd rather be fucking in it, than down here with you.”

-Girl, Interrupted [movie]

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“Who am I? Who are you? That is to say, 'Who are you really?' Do you know? Does anyone know? The restraints of this society make us put up so many walls of bullshit and facades to hide who we are that it is almost impossible to tell who anyone really is. We dig ourselves into a comfortable hole to hide away from the eyes of our peers, and it's in this hole that we bury ourselves. Dig yourselves out. Claw your way back into the light of day. Let your true self breathe, and in doing that, live.”

-Half Life, Patrick Goins

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“Life, like some grand mosaic slowly loses hold over time, and the fragile strands that connect the many different parts unravels. The universe is a mirror, fragile and reflective, and we all stand in awe of our own human vanity. Fools see the universe as linear, absolute, all knowing. The wise see the universe as chaotic, unknown, fragile. Only on the verge of infinity can one see the fall apart universe. Sadness is knowing that we all stand upon a universe with a cracked glass bottom, and in an instant we may all sink into oblivion. Everything falls apart. Empires rise and crumble as tin soldiers hold plastic banners of righteous intent, all soaked with the blood of innocents. Hands raise and fall to the deafening sound of a million questions all unanswered. Love is just another unfelt emotion, talked about but never seen in full bloom. Love is only rumor and hearsay in the fall apart universe. Eventually we all must stand upon the jagged glass of the broken boundaries and broken promises. We must all suffer the soul bleeding that follows as the tattered splinters dig deep.”

-The Fall Apart Universe, Patrick Goins

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“Life is pain. Anyone who tells you something different is selling something.”

-The Princess Bride, William Goldman

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“You bleed just to know you're alive.”

-Iris, Goo Goo Dolls

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“The world has started spinning backwards.
Only the acceleration has increased.
When you noticed, it was dark before your feet.
You were standing at the edge of a cliff.

You can't pull back.
Even if you turn pale nothing will happen.

With the light you've sharpened to the utmost,
you continue persistently even if the end of this path is
the end of the world.

There's more to life
than money or honor.
You will forever pretend not to understand.
It's frightening to notice and get hurt.

Your dream at that time, your wishes,
They were all granted, but...
Faster than everyone, you even pass the wind.
Higher than everyone, you even pierce the clouds.
Even if you live too quickly.”

-Too Late, Ayumi Hamasaki

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“Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.”

-Strictly Personal, Sydney J. Harris

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“Sleep is good, death is better; but of course, the best thing would to have never been born at all.”

-Morphine, Heinrich Heine

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“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?”

-Ernest Hemingway

Recommended by khrystian.

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“At first Krebs, who had been at Belleau Wood, Soissons, the Champagne, St. Mihiel and in the Argonne did not want to talk about the war at all. Later he felt the need to talk but no one wanted to hear about it. His town had heard too many atrocity stories to be thrilled by actualities. Krebs found that to be listened to at all he had to lie and after he had done this twice he, too, had a reaction against the war and against talking about it. A distaste for everything that had happened to him in the war set in because of the lies he had told. All of the times that had been able to make him feel cool and clear inside himself when he thought of them; the times so long back when he had done the one thing, the only thing for a man to do, easily and naturally, when he might have done something else, now lost their cool, valuable quality and then were lost themselves.

His lies were quite unimportant lies and consisted in attributing to himself things other men had seen, done or heard of, and stating as facts certain apocryphal incidents familiar to all soldiers. Even his lies were not sensational at the pool room. His acquaintances, who had heard detailed accounts of German women found chained to machine guns in the Argonne and who could not comprehend, or were barred by their patriotism from interest in, any German machine gunners who were not chained, were not thrilled by his stories.

Krebs acquired the nausea in regard to experience that is the result of untruth or exaggeration, and when he occasionally met another man who had really been a soldier and the talked a few minutes in the dressing room at a dance he fell into the easy pose of the old soldier among other soldiers: that he had been badly, sickeningly frightened all the time. In this way he lost everything.”

-Soldier's Home, Ernest Hemingway

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“I saw no other way of escape from this dreadful spectre. Suppose that today cowardice won a victory over despair, tomorrow and each succeeding day I would again face despair heightened by self-contempt. It was merely taking up and throwing down the knife till at last it was done. Better today then I reasoned with myself as though with a frightened child. But the child would not listen. It ran away. It wanted to live. ”

-Steppenwolf: A Novel, Herman Hesse

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“The day had gone by just as days go by. I had killed it in accordance with my primitive and retiring way of life.”

-Steppenwolf: A Novel, Hermann Hesse

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“This is what I know, the one and only thing. The best way to die is while you're living. Even for someone like me. You'd laugh to know how long it's taken for me to figure that out, when all I had to do was cross over the mountains. When I walk to my car in the parking lot on winter nights, I have often noticed bats, a black cloud in the darkening sky. They bring me comfort. They make me feel you're not so far away. To think, I used to be afraid. I used to run and hide. Now I stand and look upward. I don't mind what the weather is; the cold has never bothered me. I hope what I'm seeing is the ever after. I hope it's you.”

-The Ice Queen, Alice Hoffman

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“I didn't particularly want to live much longer than [twenty]. Life seemed rather daunting. It seems so to me even now. Life seemed like too long a time to have to stick around, a huge span of years through which one would be required to tap-dance and smile and be Great! and be Happy! and be Amazing! and be Precocious! I was tired of my life by the time I was sixteen. I was tired of being too much, too intense, too manic. I was tired of people, and I was incredibly tired of myself. I wanted to do whatever Amazing Thing I was expected to do -- it might be pointed out that these were my expectations, mine alone -- and be done with it. Go to sleep. Go to a heaven where there was nothing but bathtubs and books.”

-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher

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“You need as much ballast as possible to stop you from floating away; you need people around you, things going on, otherwise life is like some film where the money ran out, and there are not sets, or locations, or supporting actors, and it's just one bloke on his own staring into the camera with nothing to do and nobody to speak to, and who'd believe in this character then?”

-High Fidelity, Nick Hornby

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“You see those pictures of people in Pompeii and you think, how weird: one quick game of dice after your tea and you're frozen, and that's how people remember you for the next few thousand years. Suppose it was the first game of dice you've ever played? Suppose you were only doing it to keep your friend Augustus company? Suppose you'd at just that moment finished a brilliant poem or something? Wouldn't it be annoying to be commemorated as a dice player?”

-High Fidelity, Nick Hornby

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“All my life I could do anything, except the one thing I wanted.”

-The Hours [movie]

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“My life has been stolen from me.... I wish I could be happy in this peaceful place. But if I had to choose between Richmond and death, I choose death.... You cannot find peace by avoiding life, Leonard.”

-The Hours [movie]

Recommended by Rachel.

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“It was like the moment when a bird decides not to eat from your hand,
and flies, just before it flies, the moment when rivers seem to still
and stop because a storm is coming, but there is no storm, as when
a hundred starlings lift and bank together before they wheel and drop,
very much like the moment, driving on bad ice, when it occurs to you
your car could spin, just before it slowly begins to spin, like
the moment just before you forgot what it was you were about to say,
it was like that, and after that, it was still like that, only
all the time.”

-Part of Eve's Discussion, Marie Howe

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“Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken winged bird
That cannot fly.”

-Dreams, Langston Hughes

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“'But I like the inconveniences.'

'We don't,' said the Controller. 'We prefer to do things comfortably.'

'But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.'

'In fact,' said Mustapha Mond, 'you're claiming the right to be unhappy.'

'All right then,' said the Savage defiantly, 'I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.'

'Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphillis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.' There was a long silence.

'I claim them all,' said the Savage at last.

Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. 'You're welcome,' he said.”

-Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

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