“Beauty was deceptive. I would rather wear my pain, my ugliness. I was torn and stitched. I was a strip mine, and they would just have to look. I hoped I made them sick. I hoped they saw me in their dreams.”

White Oleander, Janet Fitch Recommended by annalise.

“I combed my hair and made a French twist, imagining myself as Olivia. I stalked the small room, walking the way she walked, hips first, like a runway model. What difference did it make if she was a whore. It sounded like ventriloquism even to say it. I hated labels anyway. People didn't fit into slots - prostitute, housewife, saint - like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.”

White Oleander, Janet Fitch

“Having gone through unprofessional agonies during her long relapse following Topsy's birth, he had, perforce, hardened himself about her, making a cleavage between Nicole sick and Nicole well. This made it difficult now to distinguish between his self-protective professional detachment and some new coldness in his heart. As an indifference cherished, or left to atrophy, becomes an emptiness, to this extent he had learned to become empty of Nicole, serving her against his will with negations and emotional neglect. One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.”

Tender Is The Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald

“His eyes were focused upon a spot of brilliant color on the roof of a house farther down the alley.It was a girl in a red negligé, silk surely, drying her hair by the still hot sun of late afternoon. His whistle died upon the stiff air of the room; he walked cautiously another step nearer the window with a sudden impression that she was beautiful. ...He watched her for several minutes. Something was stirred in him, something not accounted for by the warm smell of the afternoon or the triumphant vividness of red. He felt persistently that the girl was beautiful--then of a sudden he understood: it was her distance, not a rare and precious distance of soul but still distance, if only in terrestrial yards. The autumn air was between them, and the roofs and blurred voices. Yet for a not altogether explained second, posing perversely in time, his emotion had been nearer to adoration than in the deepest kiss he had ever know.”

The Beautiful And The Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald

“'Her voice is full of money,' he said suddenly.

That was it. I'd never understood before. It was full of money - that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it...high in a white palace the king's daughter, the golden girl.”

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

“'Listen, Nick; let me tell you what I said when she was born. Would you like to hear?'

'Very much.'

'It'll show you how I've gotten to feel about -- things. Well, she was less than an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling, and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. 'All right,' I said, 'I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.'

'You see I think everything's terrible anyhow,' she went on in a convinced way. 'Everybody thinks so -- the most advanced people. And I know. I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything.' Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way, rather like Tom's, and she laughed with thrilling scorn. 'Sophisticated -- God, I'm so sophisticated!'”

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

“His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy's white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.”

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
'Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,' he told me, 'just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.'”

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

“No matter! She was not happy, had never been so. Where did it come from, this feeling of deprivation, this instantaneous decay of things in which she put her trust? ... But, if there were somewhere a strong and beautiful creature, a valiant nature full of passion and delicacy in equal measure, the heart of a poet in the figure of an angel, a lyre with strings of steel, sounding to the skies elegiac epithalamia, why should she not, fortuitously, find such a one? What an impossibility! Nothing, anyway, was worth that great quest; it was all lies! Every smile concealed the yawn of boredom, every joy a malediction, every satisfaction brought its nausea, and even the most perfect kisses only leave upon the lips a fantastical craving for supreme pleasure.”

Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert

“He sent her a look that was meant to be utterly soulful; but she just stood there, as if he had done nothing at all.”

Sentimental Education, Gustave Flaubert

“She was reading a slim volume with grey covers. The corners of her mouth moved every now and then, and a gleam of pleasure lit up her face. He felt jealous of the man whose writings she seemed to find so fascinating.”

Sentimental Education, Gustave Flaubert

“I will set you free, to roam in lands far away, and hope you return. If and when you do come back, I shall hold you, and kiss you to make my world right. And then I will set you free once more.”

Anne Forehand

“Such people. I must have stood next to them in the tube, passed them in the street, of course I overheard them and knew they existed. But never really believed they exist. So totally blind. It never seemed possible.”

The Collector, John Fowles

“He felt his clumsiness, his stiffness, her greater dignity than his; perhaps he still felt her lips.”

The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles

“Will you be my anchor
When there is no-one around to hold me down
Will you be my anchor
I know you're not the answer.”

Angel At My Table, The Frames Recommended by Ronan.

“I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.”

The Diary of Anne Frank, Anne Frank

“Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

An Historical Review of the Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania, Benjamin Franklin

“It is soft and warm and I am not soft or warm but I imagine that it would be nice to be that way. I have never known it. I know a cold, hard, raging Fury deep inside of me and I am tired of it. I am tired of the feeling, I want to die so I don't have to feel it anymore. I would like to be soft and warm. I would be terrified to be that way. I could be hurt if I were soft and warm. I could be hurt by something other than myself. It is harder to be soft than it is to be hard. I could be hurt by something other than myself.”

A Million Little Pieces, James Frey Recommended by jo.

“To love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person. Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love.”

The Art of Loving, Erich Fromm

“I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.”

Robert Frost

“No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes--forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection), but still unique.

Without individuals we see only numbers.”

American Gods, Neil Gaiman

“You see, you scare the shit out of people, and that way they won't see how scared you are.”

Gia

“a life / our life / always together, forever /
drawing strength from one another / two beds, two heads, one mind / locked in / locked up / creating / stories / inventing life / you and me / you are me / I want to find a part of me / that doesn't belong to you / a poisoned mind / this is our game / virgins on the dole / tried a little witchcraft / trying to be invisible / someone is driving you insane. / it's me / stares and signals / my perception. your reception. clashing / you are me / you and me / you are me / a passing breeze across the sky / dreaming / separated / burning inside / this is our war / this is our life / who will give in / you or me / a division within and between / separated / only one should lose / I was missing from the world / you gave my life back to me / this is our life / this is our game / we once were two / we two made one / we no more two / through life be one.”

Jennifer and June Gibbons

“I wish I was a photograph
tucked into the corners of your wallet
I wish I was a photograph
you carried like a future in your pocket.”

Photograph, Andrea Gibson

“Who am I? Who are you? That is to say, 'Who are you really?' Do you know? Does anyone know? The restraints of this society make us put up so many walls of bullshit and facades to hide who we are that it is almost impossible to tell who anyone really is. We dig ourselves into a comfortable hole to hide away from the eyes of our peers, and it's in this hole that we bury ourselves. Dig yourselves out. Claw your way back into the light of day. Let your true self breathe, and in doing that, live.”

Half Life, Patrick Goins