“So you're driving, it's rush hour
The cars on the freeway are moving like slugs
When you drift off to wake up do you always hit the brakes?
We're done lying for a living, the strange days have come and you're gone
Either dead or dying, either dead or trying to go.”

Strange Days, Matthew Good Band Recommended by Shay.

“It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are full of the fruitless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life.”

Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham

“Packing up. The nagging worry of departure. Lost keys, unwritten labels, tissue paper lying on the floor. I hate it all. Even now, when I have done so much of it, when I live, as the saying goes, in my boxes. Even to-day when shutting drawers and flinging wide a hotel wardrobe, or the impersonal shelves of a furnished villa, is a methodical matter of routine, I am aware of a sadness, of a sense of loss. Here, I say, we have lived, we have been happy. This has been ours, however brief the time. Though two nights only have been spent beneath a roof, yet we leave something of ourselves behind. Nothing material, not a hair-pin on a dressing table, not an empty bottle of aspirin tablets, not a handkerchief beneath a pillow, but something indefinable, a moment of our lives, a thought, a mood.

This house sheltered us, we spoke, we loved within its walls. That was yesterday. To-day we pass on, we see it no more, and we are different, changed in some infinitesimal way. We can never be quite the same again. Even stopping for luncheon at a way-side in, and going to a dark, unfamiliar room to wash my hands, the handle of the door unknown to me, the wall-paper peeling in strips, a funny little cracked mirror above the basin, for this moment, it is mine, it belongs to me. We know one another. This is the present. There is no past and no future. Here I am washing my hands and the cracked mirror shows me to myself, suspended as it were in time; this is me, this moment will not pass.”

Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier

“'There's nothing wrong,' I said. 'It's just that, as an individual, I've failed in life.'
'So have we all,' he said, 'you, I, all the people here in the station buffet. We are every one of us failures. The secret of life is to recognise the fact early on, and become reconciled. Then it no longer matters.'”

The Scapegoat, Daphne du Maurier

“You will not be remembered if you die now. You will be buried and mourned by a few, and what more can you ask for. But you feel so tremendously alone, because you fear that your blood is not strong or good and your friends are few and embattled too. But so what. That is the answer. So what so what so what so what so what so what so what. The world will spiral out from underneath you, and you will find nothing to hold on to because you are either too smart or too dumb to find God, and because what the fuck will Camus ever do for you? Just ideas. You are not an artist, you will not leave something behind. Maybe you are angry only because the way out is through love and you are horny and lonely. And she's dead, of course. Maybe this is the way it is for everybody, only you are weaker, or less lucky, or have seen something they all have not. You have seen that before you lies a great stretch of road, and it is windswept or blasted by the hot sun or covered in snow, or it is dirt or concrete or shrouded in darkness or bright and clear so you have to squint, but no matter what, it is utterly empty.”

Twelve, Nick McDonell

“We are nothing, no-one. In search of kicks they can never give us. A three hundred and sixty degree circle dome of emptiness surrounds us. We are doomed forever to be addicted to a fatal germ of hatred for ourselves. Our redemption can be nothing but torment and pain. A thin clingy film of uncomfortable sweat covers us. The film covers our ears, our eyes, our mouths, our noses. We cannot move, think, feel. Utterly trapped in the gridlock of theories and concepts, there is no escape. You are a fraud, I am a fraud, you are a failure. I am a failure. You are condemned. I am condemned. Conditioned, controlled and condemned. Your life is just a single grain of sand in a vast desert. Live or die, it doesn't matter. The icy winds that blow carry nothing but hopelessness, worthlessness, pointlessness, misery. The more you just exist, just survive, just are, the more your soul erodes, the more you become an empty shell, a walking corpse. In short, the more you live, the less intelligent you become. Hate your life, love your death. Accept everything. Be used. Boredom is bliss.”

Anthony Melder

“There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes his whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.”

Moby Dick, Herman Melville

“I have to believe in a world outside my own mind. I have to believe that my actions still have meaning, even if I don't remember them. I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world is still there. Do I believe the world's still there? Is it still out there?... Yeah. We all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we really are. I'm no different... Now where was I?”

Memento [movie]

“Life it seems, will fade away
Drifting further every day
Getting lost within myself
Nothing matters no one else
I have lost the will to live
Simply nothing more to give.”

Fade to Black, Metallica Recommended by Jared.

“The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.”

Paradise Lost, John Milton

“Nothing has turned out as we expected. It never does. Life's under no obligation to give us what we expect. We take what we get and are thankful it's no worse than it is.”

Gone With The Wind, Margaret Mitchell

“The ceaseless labour of your life is to build the house of death.”

Essays, Michel de Montaigne

“From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.”

Edvard Munch

“Illness, Insanity and Death are the black angels that kept watch over my cradle and accompanied me all my life.”

Edvard Munch

“Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life.

It's a cliché translated into words, but at the time I felt it not as words but as that knot of air inside me. Death exists - in a paperweight, in four red and white balls on a pool table - and we go on living and breathing it into our lungs like fine dust.

Until that time, I had understood death as something entirely separate from and independent of life. The hand of death is bound to take us, I had felt, but until the day it reaches out for us, it leaves us alone. This had seemed to me the simple, logical truth. Life is here, death is over there. I am here, not over there.”

Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami

“Sometimes it seems like we're all living in some kind of prison, and the crime is how much we all hate ourselves.”

My So-Called Life [television show]

“Don't stop to think, don't interrupt the scream, exhale, release life's rapture. Everything is blooming. Everything is flying. Everything is screaming, choking on its screams. Laughter. Running. Let-down hair. That is all there is to life.”

Gods, Vladimir Nabokov

“She thought of the endless waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had to endure; of the invisible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this tenderness, which is either crushed, or wasted, or transformed into madness; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners; of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer and helplessly have to watch the shadow of his simian stoop leave mangled flowers in its wake, as the monstrous darkness approaches.”

Signs And Symbols, Vladimir Nabokov

“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”

Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov

“Most people live through the day with this or that part of their mind in a happy state of somnolence: a hungry man eating a steak is interested in his food and not, say, in the memory of a dream about angels wearing top-hats which he happened to see seven years ago; but in my case all the shutters and lids and doors of the mind would be open at once at all times of the day. Most brains have their Sundays, mine was even refused a half-holiday. This state of constant wakefulness was extremely painful not only in itself, but in its direct results. Every ordinary act which, as a matter of course, I had to perform, took on such a complicated appearance, provoked such a multitude of associative ideas in my mind, and these associations were so tricky and obscure, so utterly useless for practical application, that I would either shirk the business at hand or else make a mess of it out of sheer nervousness. When one morning I went to see the editor of a review who, I thought, might print some of my Cambridge poems, a particular stammer he had, blending with a certain combination of angles in the pattern of roofs and chimneys, all slightly distorted owing to a flaw in the glass of the window-pane,-- this and a queer musty smell in the room (of roses rotting in the waste-paper basket?) sent my thoughts on such long and intricate errands that, instead of saying what I had meant to say, I suddenly started telling this man whom I was seeing for the first time, about the literary plans of a mutual friend, who, I remembered too late, had asked me to keep them secret...”

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Vladimir Nabokov

“I would rather lead an absurd life engaged in the particular than a seamless transcendental life immersed in the universal. Perhaps those who have tried both would laugh inscrutably at this preference. It reflects the belief that the absurdity of human life is not such a bad thing. There are limits to what we should be prepared to do to escape it - apart from the point that some of these cures may be more absurd than the disease.”

The View From Nowhere, Thomas Nagel

“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

(Aphorism 146)”

Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book... or you take a trip... and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might generate into death): absence of pleasure.

That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children.

And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death.

Some never awaken.”

Book Of Mirrors, Anaïs Nin

“Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous.”

The Diaries of Anaïs Nin, Anaïs Nin

“Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.”

The Diaries of Anaïs Nin, Anaïs Nin