“It's 2:45 in the morning
And I'm putting myself on warning
For waking up in an unknown place
With a recollection you've half erased
Looking for somebody's arms to
Wave away past harms.”

2:45 AM, Elliott Smith

“Church bells and now I'm awake and I guess it must be some kind of holiday
I can't seen to join in the celebration
But I'll go to the service
And I'll go to pray
And I'll sing the praises of my maker's name
Like I was as good as she made me
And I wanted her to tell me that she would never wake me.”

Last Call, Elliott Smith

“i'll tell you why i don't
want to know where you are
i got a joke i been dying to tell you
a silent kid is looking down the barrel
to make the noise that i kept so quiet
i kept it from you, pitseleh

i'm not what's missing from your life now
i could never be the puzzle pieces
they say that god makes problems
just to see what you can stand
before you do as the devil pleases
and give up the thing you love
but no one deserves it

the first time i saw you
i knew it would never last
i'm not half what i wish i was
i'm so angry, i don't think it'll ever pass
and i was bad news for you, just because
i never meant to hurt you.”

Pitseleh, Elliott Smith

“Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair. When it comes, it degrades one's self and ultimately eclipses the capacity to give or receive affection. It is the aloneness within us made manifest, and it destroys not only connection to others but also the ability to be peacefully alone with oneself. ”

The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, Andrew Solomon Recommended by Shay.

“And the taste of dried-up hopes in my mouth
And a landscape of merry and desperate drought
Once I knew myself, and with knowing came love
I would know love again if I had faith enough
But too far is next spring and her jubilant shout
So angels, inside is the only way out.”

Drought, Vienna Teng Recommended by Shay.

“In unending storms, we search for space to breathe
How our hearts are worn - we've come so far
In this desert storm, how we blossom and we cease
Tell your story now, we have so much to know
Shine with all the untold, hold the light given unto you
Find the love to unfold in this broken world.”

Shine, Vienna Teng Recommended by Shay.

“I held you tight like an empty bottle...
But the glass broke
(and the poison spilled out of your mouth).”

Division St., Thursday

“Who sleeps at night? No one is sleeping.
In the cradle a child is screaming.
An old man sits over his death, and anyone
young enough talks to his love, breathes
into her lips, looks into her eyes.”

Insomnia, Marina Tsvetaeva

“I realized since leaving Samantha, there was a part of me that had never stopped grieving. And all this time, it was not Samantha for whom I had often woken up sobbing, but for my self, for the plague of indifference that had kept me from her all these years. Like a ship, I had dropped anchor in the middle of the sea. I had chosen quietly to rot.”

The Secret Lives of People In Love, Simon Van Booy

“It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.”

Notebooks, Voltaire

“Let the buyer beware... He bought, on the basis of the wrappings, sex and love. He opened the package, and to his amazement, sex was the smallest part of the contents, love was not quite the right size, and the rest of the contents had not been bargained for and could not be disposed of.”

The Plot, Irving Wallace

“Each man kills the thing he loves.”

The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Oscar Wilde

“If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.”

The Importance Of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde

“...and the worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic.”

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

“A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.”

The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

“sorcery of self:
a phrase i coined
and now surrender to you

it's as if i've swallowed
an interior decorator

i like my heart where it is

i cannot make
your past disappear

only rabbits, my love,
only rabbits.”

Said The Shotgun to The Head, Saul Williams

“If you want to know how a mistress marriage works, ask a triangle. In Euclidean geometry the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees and parallel lines never meet. Everyone knows the score, and the women are held in tension, away from one another. The shape is beguiling and it could be understood as a new geometry of family life.

Unfortunately, Euclidean theorems work only if space is flat.

In curved space, the angles over-add themselves and parallel lines always meet.

His wife, his mistress, met.”

Gut Symmetries, Jeanette Winterson

“Walk with me, hand in hand through the neon and styrofoam. Walk the razor blades and the broken hearts. Walk the fortune and the fortune hunted. Walk the chop suey bars and the tract of stars.

I know I am a fool, hoping dirt and glory are both a kind of luminous paint; the humiliations and exaltations that light us up. I see like a bug, everything too large, the pressure of infinity hammering at my head. But how else to live, vertical that I am, pressed down and pressing up simultaneously? I cannot assume you will understand me. It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear. Some story we must have. Stray words on crumpled paper. A weak signal into the outer space of each other.

The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love.”

Gut Symmetries, Jeanette Winterson

“I didn't know what hate felt like, not the hate that comes after love. It's huge and desperate and it longs to be proved wrong. And every day it's proved right it grows a little more monstrous. If the love was passion, the hate will be obsession. A need to see the once-loved weak and cowed beneath pity. Disgust is close and dignity is far away. The hate is not only for the once loved, it's for yourself too; how could you ever have loved this?”

The Passion, Jeanette Winterson

“Love, they say, enslaves and passion is a demon and many have been lost for love. I know this is true, but I know too that without love we grope the tunnels of our lives and never see the sun. When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself. I lifted my hand in bewilderment and felt my cheeks, my neck. This was me. And when I had looked at myself and grown accustomed to who I was, I was not afraid to hate parts of me because I wanted to be worthy of the mirror bearer.”

The Passion, Jeanette Winterson

“Love has got complicated, tied up with promises, bruised with plans, dogged with an ending that nobody wants - when all love is, is what it always is - that you look at me and want me and I don't turn away. If I want to say no, I will, but for the right reasons. If I want to say yes, I will, but for the right reasons. Leave the consequences. Leave the finale. Leave the grand statements. This simplicity of feeling should not be taxed.”

The Powerbook, Jeanette Winterson

“You are closed and shuttered to me now, a room without doors or windows, and I cannot enter. But I fell in love with you under the open sky and death cannot change that.

Death can change the body but not the heart.”

The Powerbook, Jeanette Winterson

“Articulacy of fingers, the language of the deaf and dumb, signing on the body longing. Who taught you to write in blood on my back? Who taught you to use your hands as branding irons? You have scored your name into my shoulders, referenced me with your mark. The pads of your fingers have become printing blocks, you tap a message onto my skin, tap meaning into my body. Your Morse code interferes with my heart beat. I had a steady heart before I met you, I relied upon it, it had seen active service and grown strong. Now you alter it's pace with your own rhythm, you play upon me, drumming me taut.

Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like Braille. I like to keep my body rolled away from prying eyes. Never unfold too much, tell the whole story. I don't know that Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me into her own book.”

Written On The Body, Jeanette Winterson

“I don't like to think of myself as an insincere person but if I say I love you and I don't mean it then what else am I? Will I cherish you, adore you, make way for you, make myself better for you, look at you and always see you, tell you the truth? And if love is not those things then what things?”

Written On The Body, Jeanette Winterson

“Millicent Bruton, whose lunch parties were said to be extraordinarily amusing, had not asked her. No vulgar jealousy could separate her from Richard. But she feared time itself, and read on Lady Bruton's face, as if it had been a dial cut in impassive stone, the dwindling of life; how year by year her share was sliced; how little the margin that remained was capable any longer of stretching, of absorbing, as in the youthful years, the colours, salts, tones of existence, so that she filled the room she entered, and felt often, as she stood hesitating one moment on the threshold of her drawing-room, an exquisite suspense, such as might stay a diver before plunging while the sea darkens and brightens beneath him, and the waves which threaten to break, but only gently split their surface, roll and conceal and encrust as they just turn over the weeds with pearl.”

Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf