By Category: Other People

“Yet if you build your life on dreams
'Tis prudent to recall
The man with moonlight in his hand
Has nothing there at all.”

-Don Quixote: Man of La Mancha, Joe Darion

~

“Mom, there are hurdles here
That I cannot seem to clear
Dad, there are demons 'round
And though I said that I
Said I'd be alright, I lied
I lied
I lied
I lied.”

-Hurdles Even Here, The Decemberists

~

“How do you live with your self?
How could you possibly hurt someone like myself?
The saddest part, though, is I would take you back.
You've turned me into some spineless hypochondriac.”

-Bruises, Majanda Delfino

~

“Why do you decide to run these circles
bruised around my thighs?
Sleepless nights the bleeding clots
Why your eyes encapture my thoughts?”

-Siren, Majanda Delfino

~

“... But the actual touch of her lingered, inside his heart. That remained. In all the years of his life ahead, the long years without her, with never seeing her or hearing from her or knowing anything about her, if she was alive or happy or dead or what, that touch stayed locked within him, sealed in himself, and never went away. That one touch of her hand.”

-A Scanner Darkly, Philip K. Dick

~

“I recall once telling Charlotte about a village on the Orinoco where female children were ritually cut on the inner thigh by their first sexual partners, the point being to scar the female with the male's totem. Charlotte saw nothing extraordinary in this. 'I mean that's pretty much what happens everywhere, isn't it,' she said. 'Somebody cuts you? Where it doesn't show?'”

-A Book of Common Prayer, Joan Didion

~

“Donnie: [to his mother] How's it feel to have a wacko for a son?
Rose Darko: It feels wonderful.”

-Donnie Darko [movie]

~

“You know what kind of man I think you are? You're the kind of man who would stand there and smile at his torturers while they were tearing out his guts--if only he could find faith or a god.”

-Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky

~

“Please excuse her for the day, it's just the way the medication makes her...”

-Girl Anachronism, The Dresden Dolls

Recommended by Alyx.

~

“There is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence. There are glances of hatred that stab and raise no cry of murder; robberies that leave man or woman for ever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer --committed to no sound except that of low moans in the night, seen in no writing except that made on the face by the slow months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears. Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear.”

-Felix Holt, George Eliot

~

“THEY are rattling breakfast plates in basement kitchens,
And along the trampled edges of the street
I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids
Sprouting despondently at area gates.

The brown waves of fog toss up to me 5
Twisted faces from the bottom of the street,
And tear from a passer-by with muddy skirts
An aimless smile that hovers in the air
And vanishes along the level of the roofs.”

-Morning at the Window, T.S. Eliot

~

“Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.”

-The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot

~

“When one is invisible he finds such problems as good and evil, honesty and dishonesty, of such shifting shapes that he confuses one with the other, depending upon who happens to be looking through him at the time. Well, now I've been trying to look through myself, and there's risk in it. I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I've tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied--not even I. On the other hand, I've never been more loved and appreciated than when I tried to 'justify' and affirm someone's mistaken beliefs; or when I've tried to give my friends the incorrect, absurd answers they wished to hear.”

-Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

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“My male friends disdained my taste in women. Movie stars and fashion models left me bored. I dug career women in business attire. I dug that one skirt seam about to pop from 15 extra pounds. I didn't fall for the ones with perfect shapes and pert faces. I loved the smiles that didn't quite work and the sad eyes that couldn't lie. Mismatched features and oddly shaped breasts hit me hard. I was looking for sexual and psychological gravity.”

-My Dark Places, James Ellroy

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“People only see what they are prepared to see.”

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

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“Maria wandered the empty rooms of the rich with her dustpan and brush, and had their lives, down to the shower gel. There was nothing surprising about them after all, these people with blood-smeared diaries and clean smiles. The pornographic magazines were only remarkable once, though seven pairs of jeans, the same make and size, gave her a fright every time. She tried all the cosmetics in the bathroom cabinet. She cocked the guns and smoothed the sheets with a feeling hand.

The only thing she stole was the music, and even then she left no trace. Each disc she slid out of its sleeve was a different room to clean; the melody curving into the corners, making a joke of the gaps. She hummed as she went, imagining herself into a cleaning woman with a taste for Bach. Imagining herself into a woman who had, somehow, grown into a complete box set of Wagner's Ring cycle and a scratched half-hour of Al Stewart's The Year of the Cat.”

-What Are You Like?, Anne Enright

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“I'm not a concept. Too many guys think I'm a concept or I complete them or I'm going to make them alive, but I'm just a fucked up girl who is looking for my own peace of mind. Don't assign me yours.”

-Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind [movie]

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“The Object slept on her back. She told me once that back-sleepers were the leaders in life, born performers or exhibitionists. Stomach-sleepers like me were in retreat from reality, given to dark perception and the meditative arts. This theory applied in our case.”

-Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides

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“Most of the diary told us more about how the girls came to be than why they killed themselves. We got tired of hearing about what they ate ('Monday, February 13. Today we had frozen pizza...'), or what they wore, or which colors they favored. They all detested creamed corn. Mary had chipped her tooth on the monkey bars and had a cap. ('I told you,' Kevin Head said, reading that.) And so we learned about their lives, came to hold collective memories of times we hadn't experienced, harbored private images of Lux leaning over the side of a ship to stroke her first whale, and saying, 'I didn't think these would stink so much,' while Therese answered, 'It's the kelp in their baleens rotting.' We became acquainted with starry skies the girls had gazed at while camping years before, and the boredom of summers traipsing from back yard to front to back again, and even a certain indefinable smell that arose from toilets on rainy nights, which the girls called 'sewery.' We knew what it felt like to see a boy with his shirt off, and why it made Lux write the name Kevin in purple Magic Marker all over her three-ring binder and even on her bras and panties, and we understood her rage coming home one day to find that Mrs. Libson had soaked her things in Clorox, bleaching all the 'Kevins' out. We knew the pain of winter wind rushing up your skirt, and the ache of keeping your knees together in class, and how drab and infuriating it was to jump rope while the boys played baseball. We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to compliment each other, but sometimes, after one of us had read a long portion of the diary out loud, we had to fight back the urge to hug one another or to tell each other how pretty we were. We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn't fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that fascinated them.”

-The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides

~

“You put yourself in stupid places
Yes I think you know it's true
Situations where it's easy to look down on you
Think you like to be the victim
Think you like to be in pain
I think you make yourself a victim
Almost every single day.”

-Everything to Everyone, Everclear

Recommended by Ashley.

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“I hate those people who love to tell you money is the root of all that
kills.
They have never been poor, they have never had the joy of a welfare
Christmas.”

-I Will Buy You a New Life, Everclear

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“I think it's getting better for the two of us
I think it's getting easier for you and me to agree
That the white men in black suits
They are diminishing
Yes I think they are diminishing
Yes I think they diminish you and they diminish me
I think they are diminishing.”

-White Men in Black Suits, Everclear

Recommended by Ashley.

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“Such a pretty girl, happy in an ugly place
Watching all the pretty people do lots of ugly things.”

-White Men in Black Suits, Everclear

Recommended by Ashley.

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“It seemed I would not or could not catch up with her. As she walked, her shadow caught on a tree, fell to the ground and stretched, as if made of rubber bands, no china doll about to break, capable of stretching into any form I imagined, a cicada cry in her mouth.”

-Her, Lawrence Ferlinghetti

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“Please don't be fooled by me. Don't be fooled by the face I wear, for I wear a mask. I wear a thousand masks, masks that I'm afraid to take off and none of them are me. Pretending is an art that is second nature to me, but don't be fooled, for God's sake don't be fooled.

I give you the impression I'm secure and that all is sunny and unruffled with me, within as well as without, that confidence is my name, coolness my game, that water is calm and I'm in command and that I need no one, but don't believe me, please don't believe me.

My surface may be smooth, but my surface is a mask--my every varying and ever concealing mask. Beneath it dwells the real confusion, fear and aloneness. Beneath lies my smugness, my complacently, but I hide this--I don't want anyone to know it.

I panic at the thought of my weakness and fear being exposed. That's why I frantically created a mask to hide behind-- nonchalant sophisticated facades to help me pretend-- to shield me from the glance that knows-- but such a glance is precisely my salvation, my only salvation and I know it. That is if it's followed by acceptance. If it's followed by love, it's the only thing that can liberate me from myself, from my own self built prison walls and from the barriers that I so painstakingly erect. It's the only thing that will assure me of what I cannot assure myself, that I'm really worth while, but I don't tell you this, I don't dare--I'm afraid to.

I'm afraid that your glance will not be followed by acceptance and love. I'm afraid you'll think less of me and you'll laugh and your laugh will kill me. I'm afraid that deep down, I'm nothing and that I'm just no good and that you'll see this and reject me.”

-Don't Be Fooled by Me, Charles C. Finn

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