“Those who don't build must burn.”

Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

“Well, after all, this is the age of the disposable tissue. Blow your nose on a person, wad them, flush them away, reach for another, blow, wad, flush. Everyone using everyone else's coattails.”

Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

“Why love the woman who is your wife? Her nose breathes in the air of the world I know; therefore I love her nose. Her ears hear music that I might sing the whole night through; therefore I love her ears. Her eyes delight in seasons of the land; and so I love those eyes. Her tongue knows quince, peach, chokeberry, mint and lime; I love to hear it speaking. Because her flesh knows heat, cold, affliction, I know fire, snow, and pain. Shared and once again shared experience. Billions of prickling textures. Cut one sense away, cut part of life away. Cut two senses, life halves itself on the instant. We love what we know, we love what we are.”

Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury

“He had been crying quietly all evening. It did not show, not a vestige of it, on his face. It was all hidden somewhere and it wouldn't stop.”

The October Game, Ray Bradbury

“When tears of scarlet form at your ankles, tears of anguish form at my heart.”

Joel Bradshaw Recommended by Adrienne.

“Watch me as I cut myself wide open
on this stage. Yes, I am paid to spill my guts.”

I Will Play My Game Beneath The Spin Light, Brand New Recommended by Jess.

“The more sensitive you are, the more likely you are to be brutalised, develop scabs, never evolve. Never allow yourself to feel anything, because you always feel too much.”

Marlon Brando

“When you take your pill
it's like a mine disaster.
I think of all the people
lost inside of you.”

The Pill vs. The Springhill Mine Disaster, Richard Brautigan

“You know what's wrong with you, Miss Whoever-you-are? You're chicken, you've got no guts. You're afraid to stick out your chin and say, 'Okay, life's a fact, people do fall in love, people do belong to each other, because that's the only chance anybody's got for real happiness.' You call yourself a free spirit, a 'wild thing,' and you're terrified somebody's gonna stick you in a cage. Well baby, you're already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it's not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somali-land. It's wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself. ”

Breakfast at Tiffany's [movie] Recommended by Shay.

“If some kid watches Buffy the Vampire Slayer and then blows the high school up, then goddammit... start parenting better.”

Nicholas Brendon

“Perhaps life needs to be deciphered like a cryptogram. Secret staircases, frames from which the paintings quickly slip aside and vanish (giving way to an archangel bearing a sword or to those who must forever advance), buttons which must be indirectly pressed to make an entire room move sideways or vertically, or immediately change all its furnishings; we may imagine the mind's greatest adventure as a journey of this sort to the paradise of pitfalls.”

Nadja, André Breton

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that the moment one area of your life starts going okay, another part of it falls spectacularly to pieces.”

Bridget Jones's Diary [movie]

“And prescription pills
Well, I take two a day
To make my brain behave
It never does, but who's to say?
At least my doctor gets paid.”

Loose Leaves, Bright Eyes Recommended by Shay.

“As I hide behind these books I read,
While scribbling my poetry,
Like art could save a wretch like me,
With some ideal ideology that no one can hope to achieve.
And I am never real; it is just a sketch of me.
And everything I made is trite and cheap
And a waste of paint, of tape, of time.”

Waste of Paint, Bright Eyes Recommended by Shay.

“I came to understand that these memories were my salvation. I no longer wanted to know why I had done such things if it meant I wouldn't want to do them anymore. I put my notebooks aside forever. I was different, and that was all. I had always know I was different; I could not trudge through life contentedly chewing whatever cud I found in my mouth, as those around me seemed to do.”

Exquisite Corpse, Poppy Z. Brite Recommended by Ghost.

“I've got to get out of this place, he thought just before dawn, and the ghosts of all the decades of middle-class American children afraid of complacency and stagnation and comfortable death drifted before his face, whispering their agreement...”

Lost Souls, Poppy Z. Brite

“I believe in whatever gets you through the night. Night is the hardest time to be alive. For me, anyway. It lasts so long, and four AM knows all my secrets. Four AM is when my dreams die.”

Lost Souls, Poppy Z. Brite

“Some nights are made for torture, or reflection, or the savoring of loneliness.”

Lost Souls, Poppy Z. Brite

“I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you -- especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous Channel, and two hundred miles or so of land come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I've a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly.”

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë

“'You teach me now how cruel you've been - cruel and false. WHY did you despise me? WHY did you betray your own heart, Cathy? I have not one word of comfort. You deserve this. You have killed yourself. Yes, you may kiss me, and cry; and wring out my kisses and tears: they'll blight you - they'll damn you. You loved me - then what RIGHT had you to leave me? What right - answer me - for the poor fancy you felt for Linton? Because misery and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, YOU, of your own will, did it. I have not broken your heart - YOU have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine. So much the worse for me that I am strong. Do I want to live? What kind of living will it be when you - oh, God! would YOU like to live with your soul in the grave?'”

Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë

“If he loved you with all the power of his soul for a whole lifetime, he couldn't love you as much as I do in a single day.”

Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë

“I am not alone in this. I only let him do to me what men have ever done to women: march off to empty glory and hollow acclaim and leave us behind to pick up the pieces. The broken cities, the burned barns, the innocent injured beasts, the ruined bodies of the boys we bore and the men we lay with.

The waste of it. I sit here, and I look at him, and it is as if a hundred women sit beside me: the revolutionary farm wife, the English peasant woman, the Spartan mother - 'Come back with your shield or on it,' she cried, because that was what she was expected to cry. And then she leaned across the broken body of her son and the words turned to dust in her throat.

Thank God that I have daughters only, and no sons.”

March, Geraldine Brooks

“I fear the line between myself and madness is as fine these days as a cobweb, and I have seen what it means when a soul crosses over into that dim and wretched place.”

Year of Wonders, Geraldine Brooks

“I fear the line between myself and madness is as fine these days as a cobweb, and I have seen what it means when a soul crosses over into that dim and wretched place.”

Year Of Wonders, Geraldine Brooks

“I never knew what it exactly means: 'to pray'. Although there has been a time that I knew all prayers, litanies and formulas of the catholic religion by heart. I quickly realised that, just the 'saying' of these texts wasn't 'praying', but that there had to be more to do with it, and I didn't know what. I stopped thinking about it. Millions of hale mary's I've recited, but not one did I 'pray'. 'Praying helps you get at ease,' my grandmother said. I get at ease by watching the flames in an open fire. That 'praying', just like staring into the flames, serves no purpose and leads to nothing, now is a part of my 'knowledge of life', a heritage of my years in the Tjideng prisoner camp.”

Bezonken Rood, Jeroen Brouwers