By Category: Life

“The hardest thing in this world, is living in it.”

-Buffy the Vampire Slayer [television show]

Recommended by Suggested by Holly.

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“What is not meant to be will pass us by, leaving scars that never heal, but fade slowly over time.”

-Brook Burkhalter

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“For exactly the same reason, it is sometimes satisfying to cut yourself and bleed. On those gray days where eight in the morning looks no different from noon and nothing has happened and nothing is going to happen and you are washing a glass in the sink and it breaks - accidentally - and punctures your skin. And then there is this shocking red, the brightest thing in the day, so vibrant it buzzes, this blood of yours. That is okay sometimes because at least you know you're alive.”

-Running With Scissors, Augusten Burroughs

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“How come I'm not getting ready for college? I'm fourteen and should be sitting at the kitchen table with my father, saying, 'But Dad, Princeton has the better football team. I don't care that Grandpa went to Harvard. Can't I just do it my way? Like Sinatra?' Instead, I'm laying on a used twin bed with somebody else's pee stains. I'm in my mother's psychiatrists house for god sakes, eating candy canes for breakfast.”

-Running With Scissors, Augusten Burroughs

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“A wonderful realization will be the day you realize that you are unique in all the world. There is nothing that is an accident. You are a special combination for a purpose-and don't let them tell you otherwise, even if they tell you that purpose is an illusion. (Live an illusion if you have to). You are that combination so that you can do what is essential for you to do. Don't ever believe that you have nothing to contribute. The world is an incredible unfulfilled tapestry. And only you can fulfill that tiny space that is yours.”

-Leo Buscaglia

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“The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain.”

-Lord George Gordon Byron

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“Sometimes it takes more courage to live than to shoot yourself.”

-Albert Camus

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“Thus I progressed on the surface of life, in the realm of words as it were, never in reality. All those books barely read, those friends barely loved, those cities barely visited, those women barely possessed! I went through the gestures out of boredom or absent-mindedness. Then came the human beings, they wanted to cling, but there was nothing to cling to, and that was unfortunate - for them. As for me, I forgot. I never remembered anything but myself.”

-The Fall, Albert Camus

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“...so few of us learn that love is tenderness, and tenderness is not, as a fair proportion suspect, pity; and still fewer know that happiness in love is not the absolute focusing of all emotion in another: one has always to love a good many things which the beloved must come to symbolize; the true beloveds of this world are in their lover's eyes lilac opening, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favorite suit, autumn and all it's seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory.”

-Other Voices, Other Rooms, Truman Capote

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“Be what you would seem to be -- or if you'd like it put more simply -- Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.”

-Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

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“It's strange you never start out life with the intention of becoming bankrupt or an alcoholic or a cheat and a thief. Or a liar.”

-to Maryann Burk Carver, Raymond Carver

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“'...How are you feeling?'
'All right,' he said. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, and I saw that he was trying to keep himself from smiling. 'I guess I'm feeling sort of glad I didn't kill myself tonight.'
I stood up and put my hand on his shoulder, and reached out with my other hand to open the door.
'What more could you ask for?' I said.”

-Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon

Recommended by Keri.

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“When your life is never what you wanted
Not even halfway normal
Just tarnished and soiled
When in your reach
A framed and frozen moment
So far from perfection
Not truth or transcendence
Will set you free
Still you don't believe.”

-Broken, Tracy Chapman

Recommended by Anne.

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“You got a fast car
But is it fast enough so we can fly away
We gotta make a decision
We leave tonight or live and die this way.”

-Fast Car, Tracy Chapman

Recommended by Ashley.

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“I walked over to the hill where we used to go and sled. There were a lot of little kids there. I watched them flying. Doing jumps and having races. And I thought that all those little kids are going to grow up someday. And all of those little kids are going to do the things we do now. And they will all kiss someone someday. But for now, sledding is enough. I think it would be great if sledding were always enough, but it isn't.”

-The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky

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“And you may find somebody kind to help and understand you
Someone who is just like you and needs a gentle hand to guide them along
So maybe I'll see you there
We can forget all our troubles, forget all our cares, and go

Downtown, things'll be great when you're
Downtown, don't wait a minute more
Downtown, everything's waiting for you.”

-Downtown, Petula Clark

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“Although we think we are in control, it is merely an illusion. It is our desires that control us, that feed us and sustain our existence, for we are the servants of that which we have no control over.”

-Dorian Cleavenger

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“Certain people, in their eagerness to construct a world which no external threat can penetrate, build exaggeratedly high defenses against the outside world, against new people, new places, different experiences, and leave their inner world stripped bare. It is there that Bitterness begins its irrevocable work.

The will was the main target of Bitterness (or Vitriol, as Dr. Igor preferred to call it). The people attacked by this malaise began to lose all desire, and within a few years, they became unable to leave their world, where they had spent enormous reserves of energy constructing high walls in order to make reality what they wanted it to be.

In order to avoid external attack, they had also deliberately limited internal growth, they continued going to work, watching television, having children, complaining about the traffic, but these things happened automatically, unaccompanied by any particular emotion, because, after all, everything was under control.

The great problem with poisoning by Bitterness was that the passions -- hatred, love, despair, enthusiasm, curiosity -- also ceased to manifest themselves. After a while, the embittered person felt no desire at all. They lacked the will either to live or to die, that was the problem.”

-Veronika Decides To Die, Paulo Coelho

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“I gotta tell you, it gets better every day you stay alive
And I'm amazed every day that the sun decides to rise
every minute, every hour, is another chance to change
Life is beautiful & terrible & strange.”

-Take Me Home, Concrete Blond

Recommended by Shay.

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“I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be. I was within a hair's-breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I would have nothing to say.”

-Heart Of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

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“My faith in the firmness of time slips away gradually. I begin to believe that chronological time is an illusion and that some other principle organizes existence. My memories flash like clips of film from unrelated movies. I wonder, suddenly, if I am alive. I know I'm not dead, but am I alive? I look into the memories for reassurance, searching for signs of life.”

-Stop-Time, Frank Conroy

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“In foresight life takes forever while a glance back reduces it to an instant.”

-Christopher Copeland

Recommended by Manda.

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“...life is just an endless banquet of loss, and each time a new loss is doled out, you have to move your mental furniture around, throw things out, and by then there's more loss, and the cycle goes on and on.”

-All Families Are Psychotic, Douglas Coupland

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“One of my big problems is time sickness. When I feel lonely, I assume that the mood will never pass--that I'll feel lonely and bad for the rest of my life, which means that I've wrecked both the present and the future. And if I look back on my past, I wreck that too, by concentrating on all the things I did wrong. The brutal thing about time sickness is that naming it is no cure. I look at the philodendron on the kitchen windowsill, the only thing in my condo that ever changes. I found it at a bus stop twelve years ago and I've kept it going ever since. I like it because up close its leaves are pretty, and also because it makes me think of time in a way that doesn't totally depress me. ”

-Eleanor Rigby, Douglas Coupland

Recommended by Shay.

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“I am reminded that no matter how hard you try, you can never be more than twelve years old with your parents. Parents earnestly try not to inflame, but their comments contain no scale and a strange focus. Discussing your private life with parents is like misguidedly looking at a zit in a car's rearview mirror and being convinced, in the absence of contrast or context, that you have developed combined heat rash and skin cancer.”

-Generation X, Douglas Coupland

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