“People are tricky, you can't afford to show
Anything risky, anything they don't know
The moment you try - kiss it goodbye.”

It's Not, Aimee Mann Recommended by Shay.

“On Sunday night I tried on the wedding dress in my step-mother's bedroom. I looked pale and clean in the mirror, wrapped in that cloud of powdery froth that reminded me of my mother's ghost. I said to myself in front of the mirror: 'That's me. Isabel. I'm dressed as a bride who's going to be married tomorrow morning.' And I didn't recognise myself; I felt weighted down with the memory of my dead mother. Meme had spoken to me about her on this same corner a few days before. she told me that after I was born my mother was dressed in her bridal clothes and placed in a coffin. And now, looking at myself in the mirror, I saw my mother's bones covered by the mold of the tomb in a pile of crumpled gauze and compact yellow dust. I was outside the mirror. Inside was my mother, alive again, looking at me, stretching her arms out from her frozen space, trying to touch the death that was held together by the first pins of my bridal veil. And in back, in the center of the bedroom, my father, perplexed: 'She looks just like her now in that dress.'

That night I received my first, last, and only love letter.”

Leaf Storm, Gabriel García Márquez

“Mirabelle informs Ray that though she is cautious, perhaps she has met somebody. 'I tell him about my medication and he doesn't care,' she says. This is the moment Ray has always known is coming, when she succumbs to the unrestricted, unbounded, and free-flowing passion of someone who is her peer. In spite of its predictability, he still feels this moment as a loss, and a curious one: how is it possible to miss a woman whom you kept at a distance, so that when she was gone you would not miss her?
”

Shop Girl, Steve Martin

“Her ghost meets me when I open the book from home. It is her copy of Death in Venice, the one she read in high school, in the years before I knew her. It is stained with suntan oil. She must have read it on a beach somewhere and imagined that water city.

I leaf through it. She writes 'important' in the margin next to Aschenbach's musings on the artist. 'Who shall unriddle the puzzle of the artist's nature? Who understands that mingling of discipline and license in it is so deeply rooted?'

She scrawls 'important' again on page twelve. She puts a question mark next to the word puerile, which she has circled. It is coupled with sensuality, underlined.

Puerile means childishly silly, Lola. It means juvenile.

Also there's a question mark next to 'very much he feared being ridiculous.' For what to this teenager could seem ridiculous in Aschenbach's delirious quest for beauty in a dying city?

'Solitude gives birth to the original in us,' I read, 'to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.'

I am toute seule. And I am afraid.

'The trip will be short and he wished it might last forever.'

I picture her as a girl on a beach reading Death in Venice and taking notes, underlining, making comments in the margin. And one day I will love her.”

The American Woman in the Chinese Hat, Carole Maso

“Fall on real life
is anybody left there sane?”

Black & White People, Matchbox 20

“Say hello
Well is it strange where you are
When you used to be kind of free.”

Apparations, Matthew Good Band Recommended by Shay.

“Good morning, don't cop out
You crawled from the cancer to land on your feet
Are you crazy to want this even for a while?
We're making this shit up, the reasons for being are easy to fake
You can't remember the others, they just kind of went away.”

Strange Days, Matthew Good Band Recommended by Shay.

“So you're driving, it's rush hour
The cars on the freeway are moving like slugs
When you drift off to wake up do you always hit the brakes?
We're done lying for a living, the strange days have come and you're gone
Either dead or dying, either dead or trying to go.”

Strange Days, Matthew Good Band Recommended by Shay.

“He remembered how passionately he had loved her, and he wondered why now he was entirely indifferent to her. The change in him filled him with dull pain. It seemed to him that all he had suffered had been sheer waste. The touch of her hand had filled him with ecstasy; he had desired to enter into her soul so that he could share every thought with her and every feeling; he had suffered acutely because, when silence had fallen between them, a remark of hers showed how far their thoughts had traveled apart, and he had rebelled against the insurmountable wall which seemed to divide every personality from every other. He found it strangely tragic that he had loved her so madly and now loved her not at all.”

Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham

“Sometimes Philip thought of Mildred. He avoided deliberately the streets in which there was a chance of seeing her; but occasionally some feeling, perhaps curiosity, perhaps something deeper which he would not acknowledge, made him wander about Piccadilly and Regent Street during the hours when she might be expected to be there. He did not know then whether he wished to see her or dreaded it. Once he saw a back which reminded him of hers, and for a moment he thought it was she; it gave him a curious sensation: it was a strange sharp pain in his heart, there was fear in it and a sickening dismay; and when he hurried on and found that he was mistaken he did not know whether it was relief that he experienced or disappointment.”

Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham

“Wells stood over the woman studying her. She'd been shot through the forehead and had tilted forward leaving part of the back of her skull and a good bit of dried brainmatter stuck to the slat of the rocker behind her. She had a newspaper in her lap and she was wearing a cotton robe that was black with dried blood. It was cold in the room. Wells looked around. A second shot had marked a date on a calendar on the wall behind her that was three days hence. You could not help but notice. He looked around the rest of the room. He took a small camera from his jacket pocket and took a couple of pictures of the dead woman and put the camera back in his pocket again. Not what you had in mind at all, was it darling? he told her.”

No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy

“I'm not explaining this right. What happened was this. There were these beautiful feelings and loose little pleasures inside me. And this woman was something like an assembly line for my soul. I run these little pieces of myself through her and I come out complete. Now do you follow me?”

A Tree A Rock A Cloud, Carson McCullers

“One day, when Eve was in the eighth grade, she had pretended to have cramps and had been allowed to sit out on the sidelines. She was sitting on a bench, absorbed in reading Plato's Republic for the third time. Her mother called to her and asked her to hold the long rope hanging from the ceiling while she showed some girls in the class how to shinny up it. Her mother never gave up trying to drag Eve into the physical world. Every day after school, when Clare and her mother went to field hockey practice, Eve would rush back to the seminary just in time to attend her father's class on Systematic Theology. Eve prided herself on being totally out of shape and joked about not wanting any more muscles in her body than were absolutey necessary to enable her to turn a page in The Republic.

When Eve pretended not to hear her mother's request to hold the rope for her, her mother asked another girl in the gym class to do it. Eve peered over her book for a second to watch her mother climbing up the rope toward the ceiling. Despite being slightly overweight, her mother was very strong and agile. As she got almost to the top, the girl holding the rope at the bottom was suddenly knocked off her feet by a basketball careening through the air from the other end of the gym. The rope was jerked out of the girl's hand and spun out into the air. Up near the ceiling, Eve's mother lost her balance and began to fall. She grasped for the rope as she fell, but she and the rope were spinning away from each other in opposite directions and she couldn't regain her grip.

The Republic dropped out of Eve's hands with a thud when her mother hit the ground. All the girls began screaming and looking over at Eve. But Eve was paralyzed. She couldn't get up to go over to her mother, who lay perfectly still on the floor of the gym.

When the ambulance arrived, her mother was already dead. She had died the moment she hit the floor. There was no blood, and no external sign of injury. As they carried her mother out on the stretcher, Eve noticed she looked like she was sleeping. Eve reached down and picked up The Republic. The school nurse came over and led Eve out of the gym. Eve kept one finger in The Republic so as not to lose her place.”

Eve's Longing: The Infinite Possibilities in All Things, Deborah McKay

“My need for you is near addiction.”

May 17, Rod McKuen

“Adia I thought that we could make it
I know I can't change the way you feel
I leave you with your misery
a friend who won't betray
I pull you from your tower
I take away your pain
and show you all the beauty you possess
if you'd only let yourself believe that
we are born innocent.”

Adia, Sarah McLachlan

“You come out at night
That's when the energy comes
In the dark side's light
And the vampires roam
You stretch your rasta wear
And your suicide pole
And across from a faith that died
Before Jesus came
You're building a mystery

You live in a church
Where you sleep with voodoo dolls
And you won't give up the search
For the ghosts in the halls
You wear sandals in the snow
And a smile won't wash away
Can you look out the window
Without your shadow getting in the way?”

Building a Mystery, Sarah McLachlan

“You're a beautiful
A beautiful fucked up man
You're setting up your
Razor wire shrine.”

Building a Mystery, Sarah McLachlan

“As I was going up the stair
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today.
I wish, I wish he'd stay away.”

The Psycho-ed, Hughes Mearns

“She was lucky to be there, because he was the only man in the world. The others were clay models with bad joints, and needleholes for eyes, and hearts of meat. He was the only one who was alive. She had seen a man slaughtered and left for dead on the ground that day. The others were dead too, even the standing up and moving. Only this one was living. He bowed to her and spoke words and mounted his horse and rode away, taking with him something greater than all her joys before, and every atom in the world had cowled again when he had gone. She had a little of him in her camera. She ran inside to show it to herself.”

The People's Act of Love, James Meek

“The hussar looked at Anna, and her face burned and then went cold, because she understood that before that time she had never pleased anyone in the way that she pleased the young horseman, and yet she'd not spoken, and she didn't know what it meant, to delight a man only by the way she appeared, to be looked at as if time was running backwards and he'd come face to face with his dearest memory before she was a memory, knowing her completely in an instant and unknowing her in a life.”

The People's Act of Love, James Meek

“We are nothing, no-one. In search of kicks they can never give us. A three hundred and sixty degree circle dome of emptiness surrounds us. We are doomed forever to be addicted to a fatal germ of hatred for ourselves. Our redemption can be nothing but torment and pain. A thin clingy film of uncomfortable sweat covers us. The film covers our ears, our eyes, our mouths, our noses. We cannot move, think, feel. Utterly trapped in the gridlock of theories and concepts, there is no escape. You are a fraud, I am a fraud, you are a failure. I am a failure. You are condemned. I am condemned. Conditioned, controlled and condemned. Your life is just a single grain of sand in a vast desert. Live or die, it doesn't matter. The icy winds that blow carry nothing but hopelessness, worthlessness, pointlessness, misery. The more you just exist, just survive, just are, the more your soul erodes, the more you become an empty shell, a walking corpse. In short, the more you live, the less intelligent you become. Hate your life, love your death. Accept everything. Be used. Boredom is bliss.”

Anthony Melder

“And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; there in they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber stamps.”

H.L. Mencken

“Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.”

Separation, W.S. Merwin

“Just when all seems fine
And I'm pain free
You jab another pin
Jab another pin in me.”

Fixxxer, Metallica Recommended by Jared.

“The marks inside your arms, spell me
Spell only me.”

Prince Charming, Metallica Recommended by Jared.