Quotes By Letter: D

“All the world's light won't ease my pain
It won't cease, I'm diseased
Will you hang me please?”

-Sick Of It All, The Distillers

Recommended by Gwen.

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“I'm a girl
I'm only thirteen
My body rots
Cause I won't fucking eat
I'm a silent star on the b-roll
I'm a mirror fucking image of no control
Give me an award
I conquered food again
What else is better in life than to purge my pain?
If I cut, I won't look like that
If I cut, If I cut,
I won't feel like this shit.”

-Sick Of It All, The Distillers

Recommended by Gwen.

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“Here's me opening my wrists
before breakfast, Christmas day,
and here's you asking if it hurt.
Here's where I choose between mea culpa
and Why the hell should I tell you?”

-Acts of Contrition, Michael Donaghy

Recommended by Emma.

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“But Jesus, when you don't have any money, the problem is food. When you have money, it's sex. When you have both, it's health, you worry about getting rupture or something. If everything is simply jake then you're frightened of death.”

-The Ginger Man, J.P. Donleavy

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“Whenever any affliction assails me, I have the keys of my prison in mine own hand, and no remedy presents it selfe so soone to my heart, as mine own sword. Often meditation of this hath wonne me to a charitable interpretation of their action, who dy so: and provoked me a little to watch and exagitate their reasons, which pronounce so peremptory judgments upon them.”

-John Donne

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“Her pure and eloquent blood
Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought,
That one might almost say, her body thought.”

-Of The Progress of The Soul: The Second Anniversary, John Donne

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“'People in books are good and noble and unselfish and people aren't that way... and I feel, well... hornswaggled sometimes. By Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and Louisa May Alcott. Why do writers make things sugary when life isn't that way?' I asked too loudly. 'Why don't they tell the truth? Why don't they tell how a pigpen looks after a sow's eaten her children? Or how it is for a girl when her baby won't come out? Or that cancer has a smell to it? All those books, Miss Wilcox,' I said, pointing at a pile of them, 'and I bet not one of them will tell you what cancer smells like. I can, though. It stinks. Like meat gone bad and dirty clothes and bog water all mixed together. Why doesn't anyone tell you that?'”

-A Northern Light, Jennifer Donnelly

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“I thought that madness isn't like they tell it in books. It isn't Miss Havisham sitting in the ruins of her mansion, all vicious and majestic. And it isn't like in Jane Eyre, either, with Rochester's wife banging around in the attic, shrieking and carrying on and frightening the help. When your mind goes, it's not castles and cobwebs and silver candelabra. It's dirty sheets and sour milk and dog shit on the floor. It's Emmie cowering under her bed, crying and singing while her kids try to make soup from seed potatoes.”

-A Northern Light, Jennifer Donnelly

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“Right now I want a word that describes the feeling you get--a cold, sick feeling deep down inside--when you know something is happening that will change you, and you don't want it to, but you can't stop it. And you know, for the first time, for the very first time, that there will now be a before and an after, a was and a will be. And that you will never again be quite the same person you were.”

-A Northern Light, Jennifer Donnelly

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“They leave things behind sometimes, the guests. A bottle of scent. A crumpled handkerchief. A pearl button that fell off a dress and rolled under a bed. And sometimes they leave other sorts of things. Things you can't see. A sigh trapped in a corner. Memories tangled in the curtains. A sob fluttering against the windowpane like a bird that flew in and can't get back out. I can feel these things. They dart and crouch and whisper.”

-A Northern Light, Jennifer Donnelly

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

-Donnie Darko [movie]

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“Dr. Thurman: Do you feel alone right now?

Donnie: Oh, I don't know. I mean, I'd like to believe I'm not, but I just, I've just never seen any proof. So, I... I just don't debate it anymore, y'know? It's like, I could spend my whole life debating it over and over again, weighing the pros and cons, and in the end, I still wouldn't have any proof. So, I just, I just don't debate it anymore. It's absurd.

Dr. Thurman: The search for God is absurd?

Donnie: It is if everyone dies alone.”

-Donnie Darko [movie]

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“Every living creature in this world dies alone.”

-Donnie Darko [movie]

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“What if you can go back in time, and take away all those hours of pain and darkness and replace them with something better?”

-Donnie Darko [movie]

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“And the more I drink the more I feel it. That's why I drink. Because when I drink, I look for compassion, I look for feeling... I drink because I want to suffer.”

-Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky

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“I did not bow down to you, I bowed down to all the suffering of humanity.”

-Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky

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“I like them to talk nonsense. That's man's one privilege over all creation. Through error you come to the truth! I am a man because I err! You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen.”

-Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky

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“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

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“It's a burden to us even to be human beings–men with our own real body and blood; we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalized man.”

-Notes from the Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky

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“Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering, and that is a fact.”

-Notes From The Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky

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“The degree of civilization in a society is revealed by entering its prisons.”

-The House of the Dead, Fyodor Dostoevsky

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“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle.”

-Organizing For Social Change: A Mandate For Activity In The 1990s, Frederick Douglass

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“The fire is out, and spent the warmth thereof
(This is the end of every song man sings!)
The golden wine is drunk, the dregs remain,
Bitter as wormwood and as salt as pain;
And health and hope have gone the way of love
Into the drear oblivion of lost things.
Ghosts go along with us until the end;
This was a mistress, this, perhaps, a friend.
With pale, indifferent eyes, we sit and wait
For the dropt curtain and the closing gate:
This is the end of all the songs man sings.”

-Dregs, Ernest Dowson

Recommended by Blaed.

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“I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it - there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

-A Study in Scarlet, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

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“Is not all life pathetic and futile? ...We reach. We grasp. And what is left in our hands at the end? A shadow. Or worse than a shadow - misery.”

-The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

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