“'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

“A part of adolescence is feeling that there's no one else around who's enough like yourself to understand you.”

The World According to Garp, John Irving

“It was easy enough to kill yourself in a fit of despair. It was easy enough to play the martyr. It was harder to do nothing. To endure your life. To wait.”

Fear Of Flying, Erica Jong

“The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.”

Dubliners, James Joyce

“Maeterlinck says: If Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend. Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves. The playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly.. is doubtless all in all in all of us.”

Ulysses, James Joyce

“We all leave childhood with wounds. In time we may transform our liabilities into gifts. The faults that pockmark the psyche may become the source of a man's or woman's beauty. The injuries we have suffered invite us to assume the most human of all vocations - to heal ourselves and others.”

Sam Keen

“Everything's a lot tougher when it's for real. That's when you choke. When it's for real.”

It, Stephen King

“But I don't happen to agree. If chained is where you have been, your arms will always bear marks of the shackles. What you have to lose is your story, your own slant. You'll look at the scars on your arms and see mere ugliness, or you'll take great care to look away from them and see nothing. Either way, you have no words for the story of where you came from.”

The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver Recommended by Theresa.

“But still, still bless me anyway. I want more life. I can't help myself. I do. I've lived through such terrible times and there are people who live through much worse. But you see them living anyway. When they're more spirit than body, more sores than skin, when they're burned and in agony, when flies lay eggs in the corners of the eyes of their children - they live. Death usually has to take life away. I don't know if that's just the animal. I don't know if it's not braver to die, but I recognize the habit; the addiction to being alive. So we live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that's it, that's the best I can do. It's so much not enough. It's so inadequate. But still bless me anyway: I want more life. ”

Angels in America, Tony Kushner Recommended by Shay.

“In this world, there's a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that's so. ”

Angels in America, Tony Kushner Recommended by Shay.

“Love; that's a trap. Responsibility; that's a trap too. Like a father to a son I tell you this: Life is full of horror; nobody escapes, nobody; save yourself. Whatever pulls on you, whatever needs from you, threatens you. Don't be afraid; people are so afraid; don't be afraid to live in the raw wind, naked, alone... Learn at least this: What you are capable of. Let nothing stand in your way.”

Angels In America, Tony Kushner

“Night flight to San Francisco. Chase the moon across America.... God! It's been years since I was on a plane! When we hit 35,000 feet, we'll have hit the tropopause. The great belt of calm air. As close as I'll ever get to the ozone. I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening... But I saw something only I could see, because of my astonishing ability to see such things: Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules, of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them, and was repaired. Nothing's lost forever. In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that's so.”

Angels In America, Tony Kushner

“It is not wonderful. It is an ugly world. Not like this one. Annarres is all dusty and dry hills. All meager, all dry. And the people aren't beautiful. They have big hands and feet, like me...But not big bellies. They get very dirty, and take baths together, nobody here does that. The towns are very small and dull, and they are dreary. No palaces. Life is dull, and hard work. You can't always have what you want, or even what you need, because there isn't enough. You Urrasti have enough. Enough air, enough rain, grass, oceans, food, music, buildings, factories, machines, books, clothes, history. You are rich, you own. We are poor, we lack. You have, we do not have. Everything is beautiful here. Only not the faces. On Annares, nothing is beautiful, nothing but the faces. The other faces, the men and women. We have nothing but that, nothing but each other. Here you see the jewels, there you see the eyes. And in the eyes you see the splendor, the splendor of the human spirit. Because our men and women are free--possessing nothing, they are free. And you, the possessors, are the possessed. You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes--the wall, the wall!”

The Dispossessed, Ursula K. LeGuin

“Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans.”

Beautiful Boy, John Lennon Recommended by James.

“Dying is easy, it's living that scares me to death.”

Cold, Annie Lennox

“In the middle of the room was a canopy, from which hung curtains of red brocaded stuff, and, under the canopy, an open coffin. 'That is where I sleep,' said Erik. 'One has to get used to everything in life, even to eternity.'”

The Phantom Of The Opera, Gaston Leroux

“...we escape the struggles and responsibilities of actual life by residing in one that doesn't yet exist.”

The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis

“She's the sort of woman who lives for others - you can always tell the others by their hunted expression.”

The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis

“Sitting alone in my own world
By myself
Euphoric feelings of floating
far away
Slow burning candles
Incense Hendrix
I got my friends.”

My World, Lit

“Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream! --
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.”

A Psalm of Life, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“You're tender and you're tired
You can't be bothered to decide
Whether you live or die
Or just forget about your life
Drift away and die
Never say goodbye.”

You're Tender and You're Tired, Manic Street Preachers Recommended by david.

“So here I'm sitting in my car at the same old stop light
I keep waiting for a change but I don't know what
So red turns into green turning into yellow
But I'm just frozen here in the same old spot
And all I have to do is to press the pedal, but I'm not.”

It's Not, Aimee Mann Recommended by Shay.

“But I can't confront the doubts I have
I can't admit that maybe the past was bad
And so, for the sake of momentum,
I'm condemning the future to death
So it can match the past.”

Momentum, Aimee Mann Recommended by Shay.

“On Sunday night I tried on the wedding dress in my step-mother's bedroom. I looked pale and clean in the mirror, wrapped in that cloud of powdery froth that reminded me of my mother's ghost. I said to myself in front of the mirror: 'That's me. Isabel. I'm dressed as a bride who's going to be married tomorrow morning.' And I didn't recognise myself; I felt weighted down with the memory of my dead mother. Meme had spoken to me about her on this same corner a few days before. she told me that after I was born my mother was dressed in her bridal clothes and placed in a coffin. And now, looking at myself in the mirror, I saw my mother's bones covered by the mold of the tomb in a pile of crumpled gauze and compact yellow dust. I was outside the mirror. Inside was my mother, alive again, looking at me, stretching her arms out from her frozen space, trying to touch the death that was held together by the first pins of my bridal veil. And in back, in the center of the bedroom, my father, perplexed: 'She looks just like her now in that dress.'

That night I received my first, last, and only love letter.”

Leaf Storm, Gabriel García Márquez

“She felt so old, so worn out, so far away from the best moments of her life that she even yearned for those that she remembered as the worst, and only then did she discover how much she missed the whiff of oregano on the porch and the smell of the roses at dusk. Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia. The need to feel sad was becoming a vice as the years eroded her. She became human in her solitude.”

One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez