“Beauty is terror.
Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.
And what could be more terrifying and beautiful,
to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely?
To throw off the chains of being for an instant,
to shatter the accident of our mortal selves?”

The Secret History, Donna Tartt

“I think that when you want things so badly, it shows on your body...”

The Chelsea Whistle, Michelle Tea

“And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I'm dying
Are the best I've ever had.”

Mad World, Tears For Fears

“My soul is a broken field
plowed by pain.”

The Broken Field, Sara Teasdale

“I wake up exhausted - it's not morning
And it's back to sleep to re-dream me.”

Wake Up Exhausted, Tegan and Sara

“She turns out the light,
Anticipating night falling tenderly around her
And watches the dusk - the words won't come
She carries the act so convincingly
The fact is sometimes she believes it
That she can be happy the way things are,
Be happy with the things she's done .”

The Tower, Vienna Teng Recommended by Shay.

“What were her thoughts when he left her? She remained for hours after he was gone, the sunshine pouring into the room, and Rebecca sitting alone on the bed’s edge. The drawers were all opened and their contents scattered about--dresses and feathers, scarfs and trinkets, a heap of tumbled vanities lying in a wreck. Her hair was falling over her shoulders; her gown was torn where Rawdon had wrenched the brilliants out of it. She heard him go downstairs a few minutes after he left her, and the door slamming and closing on him. She knew he would never come back. He was gone forever. Would he kill himself?--she thought--not until after he had met Lord Steyne. She thought of her long past life, and all the dismal incidents of it. Ah, how dreary it seemed, how miserable, lonely and profitless! Should she take laudanum, and end it, to have done with all hopes, schemes, debts, and triumphs? The French maid found her in this position--sitting in the midst of her miserable ruins with clasped hands and dry eyes. The woman was her accomplice and in Steyne’s pay. 'Mon Dieu, madame, what has happened?' she asked.

What had happened? Was she guilty or not? She said not, but who could tell what was truth which came from those lips, or if that corrupt heart was in this case pure?

All her lies and her schemes, an her selfishness and her wiles, all her wit and genius had come to this bankruptcy.”

Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray

“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

“'I shared a dark suspicion,' Kemp says, 'that the life we were leading was a lost cause, we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles — a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other — that kept me going.'”

The Rum Diary, Hunter S. Thompson

“Nothing makes us so lonely as our secrets.”

Paul Tournier

“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 realized since leaving Samantha, there was a part of me that had never stopped grieving. And all this time, it was not Samantha for whom I had often woken up sobbing, but for my self, for the plague of indifference that had kept me from her all these years. Like a ship, I had dropped anchor in the middle of the sea. I had chosen quietly to rot.”

The Secret Lives of People In Love, Simon Van Booy

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

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

“I'd like to help you doctor, yes I really really would
But the din in my head - it's too much and it's no good
I'm standing in a windy tunnel shouting through the roar
And I'd like to give the information you're asking for
But blood makes noise, it's ringing in my ear
Blood makes noise and I can't really hear you in the thickening of fear.”

Blood Makes Noise, Suzanne Vega Recommended by Shay.

“Don't tell me
How to be
'Cause I like some suffering
Don't ask me
What I need
I'm just fine
Here finding
Me.”

Finding Me, Vertical Horizon Recommended by Darci.

“You ask me, how am I?
Well I'm still standing, aren't I?
That's something, that's one thing that's gone my way
It's so hard, to go out, like everything ok now
When inside, I still cry for yesterday.”

Unhappy Anniversary, Vitamin C Recommended by Rosie.

“'[I]s there not pleasure in criticizing, in finding faults where other men think they see beauty?'
'That is to say,' said Martin, 'that there is pleasure in not being pleased.'”

Candide, Volatire

“--teaching that a propagandist of my sort was as much a murderer as Heydrich, Eichmann, Himmler, or any of the gruesome rest.
That may be so. I had hoped, as a broadcaster, to be merely ludicrous, but this is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so incapable of thought, so eager to believe and snarl and hate. So many people wanted to believe me!
Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.”

Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut

“And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.

So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.”

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

“my figure feels odd compared to yours
and I'm crooked in places where I shouldn't be
those girls in magazines all look so straight
they're not crooked at all
not like you and not like me.”

Tight, Brenda Weiler

“So if you care to find me, look to the western sky
As someone told me lately: 'Everyone deserves the chance to fly'
And if I'm flying solo, at least I'm flying free -
To those who'd ground me, take a message back from me
Tell them how I am defying gravity, I'm flying high, defying gravity.”

Defying Gravity, Wicked Recommended by Shay.

“Every woman is a rebel, and usually in a wild revolt against herself.”

A Woman Of No Importance, Oscar Wilde