“....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

“...and the worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic.”

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.

“So, big surprise, I just stopped smoking
Yeah, la di dah, now don't remind me
I think I'm going insane.”

Stop Smoking, Dar Williams

“What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no. It's curved like a road through mountains.”

A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams

“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

“Everyone thinks their own situation is most tragic. I am no exception.”

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson

“Love, they say, enslaves and passion is a demon and many have been lost for love. I know this is true, but I know too that without love we grope the tunnels of our lives and never see the sun. When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself. I lifted my hand in bewilderment and felt my cheeks, my neck. This was me. And when I had looked at myself and grown accustomed to who I was, I was not afraid to hate parts of me because I wanted to be worthy of the mirror bearer.”

The Passion, Jeanette Winterson

“I don't like to think of myself as an insincere person but if I say I love you and I don't mean it then what else am I? Will I cherish you, adore you, make way for you, make myself better for you, look at you and always see you, tell you the truth? And if love is not those things then what things?”

Written On The Body, Jeanette Winterson

“The youth was drowned in the deepest sea--an atom bombarded, ignorant of all defense in a tumultuous world. The shell of custom, the easy thoughtless life which had sucked pleasure from the world about, these four years past, crumbled like caked mud. He was nothing, nobody--there was no heart or bravery left in him; he was conscious of unfathomable ignorance--the beginning, as Socrates suggested, of wisdom--he was lost.

He had wanted to cut a figure in the world--he had simply never imagined the number of people that were in it. And like most people who hug loneliness to them like a lover, the need of occasional companionship, forever tender and forever true, which might be summoned or dismissed at will, cut through him like a sword.”

Of Time and the River, Thomas Wolfe

“Knowing that everything comes to an end is a gift of experience, a consolation gift for knowing that we ourselves are coming to an end. Before we get it we live in a continuous present, and imagine the future as more of that present. Happiness is endless happiness, innocent of its own sure passing. Pain is endless pain.”

This Boy's Life: A Memoir, Tobias Wolff

“Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title.”

Virginia Woolf

“But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? - the entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world - a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.”

An Unwritten Novel, Virginia Woolf

“Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.”

Montaigne, Virginia Woolf

“She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on... far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.”

Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

“Once conform, once do what others do because they do it, and a kind of lethargy steals over all the finer senses of the soul.”

The Common Reader, Virginia Woolf

“Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.”

A Blessing, James Wright

“I always carry lots of stuff with me wherever I roam, always weighted down with books, with cassettes, with pens and paper, just in case I get the urge to sit down somewhere, and oh, I don't know, read something or write my masterpiece. I want all my important possessions, my worldly goods, with me at all times. I want to hold what little sense of home I have left with me always. I feel so heavy all the time, so burdened. This must be a little bit like what it's like to be a bag lady, to drag your feet here, there, and everywhere, nowhere at all.”

Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel

“I start to get the feeling that something is really wrong. Like all the drugs put together...can no longer combat whatever it is that was wrong with me in the first place. I feel like a defective model, like I came off the assembly line flat-out fucked and my parents should have taken me back for repairs before the warranty ran out.”

Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel

“I was scared of the way I felt as I ran away, knowing that if I stopped, I might have to confront the reason why I was always running - and I'd have to admit that there was no reason. Run, run, run. Was it toward something or away from something else? ”

Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel Recommended by Shay.

“I wonder if any of them can tell from just looking at me that all I am is the sum total of my pain, a raw woundedness so extreme that it might be terminal. It might be terminal velocity, the speed of the sound of a girl falling down to a place from where she can't be retrieved. What if I am stuck down here for good?”

Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel

“I would actually sit on the bus to Dr. Sterlings office trying to think of things to talk about. I felt like a girl heading out for a first date with her dream boy, creating a mental agenda of potential conversation ideas just in case, heaven forbid, there was any kind of lag. I worried I wasn't entertaining Dr. Sterling enough, I worried that she's put me on some list of her dull patients that she'd share with her husband late at night, of the ones who couldn't even scare up enough psychodrama in their lives to get themselves through a fifty-minute hour. I worried that my decision to abstain from self-destruction was turning me into a bore. I began to think that in my current state I was too sane for therapy.”

Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel

“That's the thing about depression: A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight. But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it's impossible to ever see the end. The fog is like a cage without a key.”

Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel

“What do you do with pain so bad it has no redeeming value? It cannot even be alchemized into art, into words, into something you can chalk up to an interesting experience because the pain itself, its intensity, is so great that there is no way to objectify it or push it outside or find its beauty within. That is the pain I'm feeling now. It's so bad, it's useless. The only lesson I will ever derive from this pain is how bad pain can be.”

Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel