“Our life is frittered away by detail - Simplify, simplify.”

Henry David Thoreau

“But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before.”

Walden, Henry David Thoreau

“Here I sit and wait throughout my days
Waiting for something, for my spirit to ascend
It's not that I so badly want to die
But at these times I struggle for desire to live.”

Under Saturns Shadow, Tiger Army Recommended by Mal.

“And Levin remembered a scene he had lately witnessed between Dolly and her children. The children, left to themselves, had begun cooking raspberries over the candles and squirting milk into each other's mouths with a syringe. Their mother, catching them at these pranks, began reminding them in Levin's presence of the trouble their mischief gave to the grown-up people, and that this trouble was all for their sake, and that if they smashed the cups they would have nothing to drink their tea out of, and that if they wasted the milk, they would have nothing to eat, and die of hunger.

And Levin had been struck by the passive, weary incredulity with which the children heard what their mother said to them. They were simply annoyed that their amusing play had been interrupted, and did not believe a word of what their mother was saying. They could not believe it indeed, for they could not take in the immensity of all they habitually enjoyed, and so could not conceive that what they were destroying was the very thing they lived by”

Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

“Levin said what he had genuinely been thinking of late. He saw nothing but death or the advance toward death in everything. But his cherished scheme only engrossed him all the more. Life had to be got through somehow till death did come. Darkness had fallen, upon everything for him; but just because of this darkness he felt that the one guiding clue in the darkness was his work, and he clutched it and clung to it with all his strength.”

Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

“Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed- interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing sprit- crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing you last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life... But why would I want to do a thing like that?”

Transpotting [movie]

“And if the night runs over
And if the day won't last
And if your way should falter
Along this stony pass

It's just a moment
This time will pass.”

Stuck In A Moment, U2 Recommended by Sarah.

“It's strange, the layers of misery that there are. You get used to feeling pretty miserable most of the time - what might be called 'low-level misery' - a sort of permanent background of misery, and you learn to cope with it; it almost gets to feel normal. But then something happens, like me trying to draw something, which reminds you of what it was like not to feel miserable, and it hurts so much you almost just can't bear it.”

Plague, Jean Ure

“There's nothing terribly wrong with feeling lost, so long as that feeling precedes some plan on your part to actually do something about it. Too often a person grows complacent with their disillusionment, perpetually wearing their 'discomfort' like a favorite shirt. I can't say I'm very pleased with where my life is just now... but I can't help but look forward to where it's going.”

Johnny The Homicidal Maniac, Jhonen Vasquez

“Death twitches my ear. 'Live,' he says, 'I am coming.'”

Minor Poems, Copa, Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro)

“I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.”

Kurt Vonnegut

“The biggest truth to face now—what is probably making me unfunny now for the remainder of my life—is that I don't think people give a damn whether the planet goes on or not. It seems to me as if everyone is living as members of Alcoholics Anonymous do, day by day. And a few more days will be enough. I know of very few people who are dreaming of a world for their grandchildren.”

A Man Without A Country, Kurt Vonnegut

“What froze me was the fact that I had absolutely no reason to move in any direction. What had made me move through so many dead and pointless years was curiosity. Now even that flickered out.”

Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut

“I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living.”

Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut

“Jesus said how awful life was, in the Sermon on the Mount: 'Blessed are they that mourn,' and 'Blessed are the meek,' and 'Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness.'

Henry David Thoreau said most famously, 'The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.'

So it is not one whit mysterious that we poison the water and air and topsoil, and construct ever more cunning doomsday devices, both industrial and military. Let us be perfectly frank for a change. For practically everybody, the end of the world can't come soon enough. ”

Timequake, Kurt Vonnegut

“Life is all in perception...Do you see what I see?”

D.W.

“I'd rather be dreaming than living
Living's just too hard to do
It's chances not choices
Noises not voices
A day's just a thing to get through
Living's just too hard to do

I'd rather be dreaming than talking
There's nothing to hear or to say
With ears covered mouth closed
The world is opposed
Nothing gets in or away
There's nothing to hear or to say

I'd rather be dreaming than thinking
Thoughts are small comfort to me
Dreams might be pretend
But at least dreams end
And I just can't stop thinking you see
Thoughts are small comfort to me

I'd rather be dreaming than sleeping
Just sleeping you're just as well dead
In dreams I can fly
In dreams I don't die
That's why I lie here in this bed
Just sleeping you're just as well dead

I'd rather be dreaming”

Dreaming, Loudon Wainwright III Recommended by Marilyn.

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”

Oscar Wilde

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”

De Profundis, Oscar Wilde

“Don't squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing... A new Hedonism--that is what our century wants. You might be its visible symbol. With your personality there is nothing you could not do. The world belongs to you for a season... The moment I met you I saw that you were quite unconscious of what you really are, of what you really might be. There was so much in you that charmed me that I felt I must tell you something about yourself. I thought how tragic it would be if you were wasted. For there is such little time that your youth will last--such a little time. The common hill-flowers wither, but they blossom again. The laburnum will be as yellow next June as it is now. In a month there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year after year the green night of its leaves will hold its purple stars. But we never get back our youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to.”

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

“Human life - that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of any value. It was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one's face a mask of glass, nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain, and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams. There were poisons so subtle that to know their properties one had to sicken of them. There were maladies so strange that one had to pass through them if one sought to understand their nature. And, yet, what a great reward one received! How wonderful the whole world became to one! To note the curious hard logic of passion, and the emotional coloured life of the intellect - to observe where they met, and where they separated, at what point they were in unison, and at what point they were discord - there was a delight in that! What matter what the cost was? One could never pay too high a price for any sensation.”

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

“The next day he did not leave the house, and, indeed, spent most of the time in his own room, sick with a wild terror of dying, and yet indifferent to life itself.”

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

“There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie. Gradually white fingers creep through the curtains, and they appear to tremble. In black fantastic shapes, dumb shadows crawl into the corners of the room, and crouch there. Outside, there is the stirring of birds among the leaves, or the sound of men going forth to their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down from the hills, and wandering round the silent house, as though it feared to wake the sleepers, and yet must needs call forth sleep from their purple cave. Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern. The wan mirrors get back their mimic life. The flameless tapers stand where we had left them, and beside them lies the half-cut book that we had been studying, or the wired flower that we had worn to the ball, or the letter that we had been afraid to read, or that we had read too often. Nothing seems to us changed. Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same, wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours, and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of joy having its bitterness, and the memories of pleasure their pain.”

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde Recommended by Jitske.

“The youth was drowned in the deepest sea--an atom bombarded, ignorant of all defense in a tumultuous world. The shell of custom, the easy thoughtless life which had sucked pleasure from the world about, these four years past, crumbled like caked mud. He was nothing, nobody--there was no heart or bravery left in him; he was conscious of unfathomable ignorance--the beginning, as Socrates suggested, of wisdom--he was lost.

He had wanted to cut a figure in the world--he had simply never imagined the number of people that were in it. And like most people who hug loneliness to them like a lover, the need of occasional companionship, forever tender and forever true, which might be summoned or dismissed at will, cut through him like a sword.”

Of Time and the River, Thomas Wolfe

“Between the tides and double wides, she'd always stop to dream.
For sometimes, it's the quiet ones who grow up to scream.”

Beth Woodson