“There are times when a feeling of expectancy comes to me, as if something is there, beneath the surface of my understanding, waiting for me to grasp it. It is the same tantalizing sensation when you almost remember a name, but don't quite reach it. I can feel it when I think of human beings, of the hints of evolution suggested by the removal of wisdom teeth, the narrowing of the jaw no longer needed to chew such roughage as it was accustomed to; the gradual disappearance of hair from the human body; the adjustment of the human eye to fine print, the swift, colored motion of the twentieth century. The feeling comes, vague and nebulous, when I consider the prolonged adolescence of our species; the rites of birth, marriage and death; all the primitive, barbaric ceremonies streamlined to modern times. Almost, I think, the unreasoning, bestial purity was best. Oh, something is there, waiting for me. Perhaps someday the revelation will burst in upon me and I will see the other side of this monumental grotesque joke. And then I'll laugh. And then I'll know what life is.”

Unabridged Journals, Sylvia Plath

“Why the hell are we conditioned into the smooth strawberry and cream, Mother Goose world, Alice in Wonderland fable, only to be broken on the wheel as we grow older and become aware of ourselves as individuals with a dull responsibility in life?”

Unabridged Journals, Sylvia Plath

“Take this kiss upon the brow! And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow--
You are not wrong who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.”

A Dream Within A Dream, Edgar Allan Poe

“I don't want to die,
I sometimes wish I'd never been born at all.”

Bohemian Rhapsody, Queen Recommended by Zoe.

“One by one
Only the good die young
They're only flying too close to the sun
And life goes on
Without you.”

No One But You, Queen Recommended by Zoe.

“I didn't forge the mind of man. Your precious God did that. Cramming it full of rancor and bloodlust . Like Zeus, thrusting all those winged demons, into the tiny confines of Pandora's box. Don't hate me just because I turn the key, and let them loose. 'Fly, my darlings, fly! All the way to heaven, till you burst the clouds, and blacken the sun!'”

Quills [movie]

“I write of the great eternal truths that bind together all mankind the whole world over: We eat, we shit, we fuck, we kill, and we die.”

Quills [movie]

“A heart that's full up like a landfill
A job that slowly kills you
Bruises that won't heal.”

No Surprises, Radiohead Recommended by david.

“'Then why are you going there?'

'Because I haven't tried it before. That's all there is left to try. It's somewhere to go. Just to keep moving... You know,' he added suddenly, 'I don't think it will be any use. But there's nothing to do in the East except sit under some hedge and wait to die. I don't think I mind it much now, the dying. I know it would be a lot easier. Only I think it's a sin to sit down and let your life go without making a try for it.'”

Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand

“Find glory
Beyond the cheap colored lights
One song
Before the sun sets
Glory -- on another empty life
Time flies -- time dies.”

Rent

“Even where love has run thin
the child's soul musters strength...
--the rush of purpose to make a life
worth living past abandonment
building the layers up again
over the torn hole.”

meditations for a savage child, Adrienne Rich

“So you mustn't be frightened, dear Mr. Kappus, if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and over everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. ”

Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke

“O witches, O misery, O hate, to you has my treasure entrusted entrusted! I contrived to purge my mind of all human hope. On all joy, to strangle it, I pounced with the strength of a wild beast. I called to the plagues to smother me in blood, in sand, misfortune was my God.”

un saison en enfers (A Season In Hell), Jean Nicholas Arthur Rimbaud

“We turned back to Miss Rietta, who at that very moment sprung from the top of the pole.

A nine-year-old may be told that humans are confined by the laws of nature or society, may repeat those laws with sincerity, but it is a pretense, a concession to the ambient consensus of which the child at that age is becoming too well aware. But that night we were at the circus, and Miss Rietta could fly.

With her flight all was quiet. It was her neck that broke the silence.

My father was the first to speak. 'Very unusual,' he whispered to me and my friends.

Miss Rietta was taken to the hospital but that, I'm afraid, was a formality. [An article appearing in the next day's paper speculated] as to what had happened at the top of the pole: Miss Rietta, some thought, had passed out and was unconscious when she met the ground. I did not believe that; I believed that Miss Rietta, having slipped, knew she was going to die and wanted to leave us with that last illusion - that we were more splendid, if only for a moment, than the forces which confined us.”

The Face of a Naked Lady, Michael Rips

“...to emphasize the afterlife is to deny life. To concentrate on Heaven is to create hell. In their desperate longing to transcend the disorderliness, friction, and unpredictability that pesters life; in their desire for a fresh start in a tidy habitat, germ-free and secured by angels, religious multitudes are gambling the only life they may ever have on a dark horse in a race that has no finish line.”

Skinny Legs And All, Tom Robbins

“I don't believe in fate or destiny. I believe in various degrees of hatred, paranoia, and abandonment. However much of that gets heaped upon you doesn't matter - it's only a matter of how much you can take and what it does to you.”

Henry Rollins Recommended by Tricia.

“Men are not prisoners of fate, but prisoners of their own minds.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt

“How does a newness come into the world? How is it born? Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made? How does it survive, extreme and dangerous as it is? What compromises, what deals, what betrayals of its secret nature must it make to stave off the wrecking crew, the exterminating angel, the guillotine? Is birth always a fall? Do angels have wings?”

The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie

“It is certainly no crime to depict the bizarre ideas that nature inspires.”

Marquis de Sade

“My life is like a sandless sand clock, you'll turn them up side down and still you'll get Nothing...”

Sagi

“Everything everybody does is so—I don't know—not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and—sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much as everybody else, only in a different way.”

Franny And Zooey, J.D. Salinger

“If or when I do start going to an analyst, I hope to God he has the foresight to let a dermatologist sit in on consultation. A hand specialist. I have scars on my hands from touching certain people. Once, in the park, when Franny was still in the carriage, I put my hand on the downy pate of her head and left it there too long. Another time, at Loew's Seventy-Second Street, with Zooey during a spooky movie. He was about six or seven, and he went under the sear to avoid watching a scary scene. I put my hand on his head. Certain heads, certain colors and textures of human hair leave permanent marks on me. Other things, too. Charlotte once ran away from me, outside the studio, and I grabbed her dress to stop her, to keep her near me. A yellow cotton dress I loved because it was too long for her. I still have a lemon-yellow mark on the palm of my right hand....”

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, J.D. Salinger

“Incidentally, did you hear her last week? She went on at beautiful length about how she used to fly all around the apartment when she was four and no one was home. The new announcer is worse than Grant - if possible, even worse than Sullivan in the old days. He said she surely just dreamt that she was able to fly. The baby stood her ground like an angel. She said she knew she was able to fly because when she came down she always had dust on her fingers from touching the light bulbs.”

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, J.D. Salinger

“Life begins on the other side of despair.”

Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, Jean-Paul Sartre

“And I-soft, weak, obscene, digesting, juggling with dismal thoughts-I too was In the way. Fortunately, I didn't feel it, although I realized it, but I was uncomfortable because I was afraid of feeling it (even now I am afraid-afraid that it might catch me behind my head and lift me up like a wave). I dreamed vaguely of killing myself to wipe out at least one of these superfluous lives. But even my death would have been In the way. In the way, my corpse, my blood on these stones, between these plants, at the back of this smiling garden. And the decomposed flesh would have been In the way in the earth which would received my bones, at last, cleaned, stripped, peeled, proper and clean as teeth, it would have been In the way: I was In the way for eternity.”

Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre