“The furies are at home in the mirror; it is their address. Even the clearest water, if deep enough can drown. Never think to surprise them. Your face approaching ever so friendly is the white flag they ignore. There is no truce with the furies. A mirror's temperature is always at zero. It is ice in the veins. Its camera is an X-ray. It is a chalice held out to you in silent communion, where gaspingly you partake of a shifting identity never your own.”

Reflections, R.S. Thomas

“There's music playing
But we dance to the beat
Of our own black hearts
And draw diagrams
Of suicide on each other's wrists
Then trace them with razorblades.”

Jet Black New Years, Thursday Recommended by Iggy.

“He walked down, for a long while avoiding looking at her as at the sun, but seeing her, as one does the sun, without looking.”

Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

“Don't you love my idealism? My hypocrisy? My willingness to sound as loving and naive as possible? At least I know that I don't know anything at all. I can admit it. Can you? Can you look yourself in the mirror in the morning and admit that you are no different from every other bundle of bones on this planet? And maybe the only things that make you different are your hands, the way you touch things, and what happens to them.”

Please Don't Kill the Freshman, Zoe Trope

“She felt him in constant danger of doing something incorrect. Once she had a piano teacher who, in performing scales with her side by side on the bench, made a mistake. She had never forgotten it, and never learned the piano.”

My Lover Has Dirty Fingernails, John Updike

“I wish they would only take me as I am.”

Dear Theo: Autobiography of Vincent Van Gogh, Vincent Van Gogh

“She said, 'You won't understand, and you may as well not try'
But her face was a child's, and he thought she would cry
But she closed herself up like a fan.”

The Queen And The Soldier, Suzanne Vega Recommended by Rosie.

“'What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets.'

'Obviously, Doctor, you've never been a thirteen year old girl.'”

The Virgin Suicides [movie]

“What we have here is a dreamer. Someone completely out of touch with reality.”

The Virgin Suicides [movie]

“Sometimes [he] would talk to me about the planet he was on before he was transported in a steel box to [the New York State Maximum Security Adult Correctional Institution at] Athena. 'Drugs were food,' he said. 'I was in the food business. Just because people on one planet eat a certain kind of food they're hungry for, that makes them feel better after they eat it, that doesn't mean people on other planets shouldn't eat something else. On some planets I'm sure there are people who eat stones, and then feel wonderful for a little while afterwards. Then it's time to eat stones again.'”

Hocus Pocus, 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

“We did not feel sorry for them, my parents, wandering miserably through their grand house like ghosts. All we knew was that they were not like other parents, and we hated them for it. Other mothers spent afternoons making a cake with you, not sleeping or talking about their old boyfriends. Other fathers sat down to dinner, and played Zim Zam on Sunday afternoons instead of drinking in the den. When you are small, if you reach out, and nobody takes your hand, you stop reaching out, and reach inside, instead. That's the way it was.”

How To Be Lost, Amanda Eyre Ward

“Flatter me, and I may not believe you. Criticize me, and I may not like you. Ignore me, and I may not forgive you. Encourage me, and I may not forget you.”

William Arthur Ward

“I could have slapped his face. I could have slapped that god-damned handsome, eagle-beakered, strong-boned, rubignious-hided high old face, in which the eyes weren't old but hard and bright without any depth to them and were an insult to look into. And the Boss laughed, and I could have slapped his goddamned face. I could have walked right out and left the two of them alone there, alone in that cheese-smelling room until hell froze over, and just kept walking.

But I didn't, and perhaps it was just as well, for maybe you cannot ever really walk away from the things you most want to walk away from.”

All The King's Men, Robert Penn Warren

“Hounded out by everyone
Met with hatred everywhere
No kind words from anyone
No compassion anywhere
Why? Why?”

Phantom Of The Opera, Andrew Lloyd Webber Recommended by Sibyl.

“I remember [...] the Sex Pistols saying that 'no one is innocent'. Too true. What also has to be said though, is that some are more guilty than others.”

Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh

“The expression of the face balks account,
But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face,
It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists,
It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees, dress does not hide him,
The strong sweet quality he has strikes through cotton and broadcloth,
To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more,
You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side.”

I Sing The Body Electric, Walt Whitman

“A true friend stabs you in the front.”

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

“....There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence. No other activity was like it. To project one's soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one's own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion, and youth; to convey one's temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume: there was a real joy in that-perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims...”

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

“He played with the idea, and grew willful; tossed it into the air and transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent with fancy, and winged it with paradox. The praise of folly, as he went on, soared into a philosophy, and Philosophy herself became young, and catching the mad music of Pleasure, wearing, one might fancy, her wine-stained robe and wreath of ivy, danced like a Bacchante over the hills of life, and mocked the slow Silenus for being sober. Facts fled before her like frightened forest things. Her white feed trod the huge press at which wise Omar sits, till the seething grape-juice rose round her bare limbs in waves of purple bubbles, or crawled in red foam over the vat's black, dripping, sloping sides. It was an extraordinary improvisation. He felt that the eyes of Dorian Gray were fixed on him, and the consciousness that amongst his audience there was one whose temperament he wished to fascinate, seemed to give his wit keenness, and to lend colour to his imagination. He was brilliant, fantastic, irresponsible. He charmed his listeners out of themselves, and they followed his pipe laughing. Dorian Gray never took his gaze off him, but sat like one under a spell, smiles chasing each other over his lips, and wonder growing grave in his darkening eyes.”

The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

“Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.”

The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Oscar Wilde Recommended by beck.

“Under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. We have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. We have never seen a totally sane human being.”

Right Where You Are Sitting Now, Robert Anton Wilson

“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

“Time is a great deadener. People forget, get bored, grow old, go away. There was a time in England when everyone was much concerned with building wooden boats and sailing off against the Turks. When that stopped being interesting, what peasants there were left limped back to the land, and what nobles there were left plotted against each other. Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It's a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it's a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time. Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don't believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like a string full of knots. It's all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat's cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more. History should be a hammock for swinging and a game for playing, the way cats play. Claw it, chew it, rearrange it and at bedtime it's still a ball of string full of knots....it's an all-purpose rainy day pursuit, this reducing of stories called history.”

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson