“You never come back, not all the way. Always there is an odd distance between you and the people you love and the people you meet, a barrier thin as the glass of a mirror, you never come all the way out of the mirror; you stand, for the rest of your life, with one foot in this world and no one in another, where everything is upside down and backward and sad.”

Wasted, Marya Hornbacher

“Here's the thing about Maureen: She had a lot more guts that I had. She'd stuck around to find out what it would feel like, never to live the life she had planned for herself. I didn't know what those plans were, but she had them, same as everybody, and when Matty came along, she'd waited around for twenty years to see what she'd offered as a replacement, and she was offered nothing at all. There was a lot of feeling in that slap, and I could imagine hitting people pretty hard when I was her age, too. That was one of the reasons I didn't intend ever to be her age.”

A Long Way Down, Nick Hornby

“You know that things aren't going well for you when you can't even tell people the simplest fact about your life, just because they'll presume you're asking them to feel sorry for you. I suppose it's why you feel so far away from everyone, in the end; anything you can think of to tell them just ends up making them feel terrible.”

A Long Way Down, Nick Hornby

“I remembered what it is I like about sex: what I like about sex is that I can lose myself in it entirely. Sex, in fact, is the most absorbing activity I have discovered in adulthood. When I was a child I used to feel this way about all sorts of things—Legos, The Jungle Book, The Hardy Boys, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Saturday morning cartoons...I could forget where I was, the time of day, who I was with. Sex is the only thing I've found like that as a grown-up, give or take the odd film: books are no longer like that once you're out of your teens, and I've certainly never found it in my work. All the horrible pre-sex self-consciousness drains out of me, and I forget where I am, the time of day...and yes, I forget who I'm with, for the time being.”

High Fidelity, Nick Hornby

“You need as much ballast as possible to stop you from floating away; you need people around you, things going on, otherwise life is like some film where the money ran out, and there are not sets, or locations, or supporting actors, and it's just one bloke on his own staring into the camera with nothing to do and nobody to speak to, and who'd believe in this character then?”

High Fidelity, Nick Hornby

“You see those pictures of people in Pompeii and you think, how weird: one quick game of dice after your tea and you're frozen, and that's how people remember you for the next few thousand years. Suppose it was the first game of dice you've ever played? Suppose you were only doing it to keep your friend Augustus company? Suppose you'd at just that moment finished a brilliant poem or something? Wouldn't it be annoying to be commemorated as a dice player?”

High Fidelity, Nick Hornby

“I stopped watching, turned away from the alley. Something warm was running down my wrist. I blinked, I saw I was still biting down on my fist, hard enough to draw blood from the knuckles. I realized something else. I was weeping. From just around the corner, I could hear Assef's quick, rhythmic grunts.

I had one last chance to make a decision. One final opportunity to decide who I was going to be. I could step into that alley, stand up for Hassan--the way he'd stood up for me all those times in the past--and accept whatever would happen to me. Or I could run.

In the end, I ran.

I ran because I was a coward. I was afraid of Assef and what he would do to me. I was afraid of getting hurt. That's what I told myself as I turned my back to the alley, to Hassan. That's what I made myself believe. I actually aspired to cowardice, because the alternative, the real reason I was running, was that Assef was right: Nothing was free in the world in the world. Maybe Hassan was the price I had to pay, the lamb I had to slay, to win Baba. Was it a fair price? The answer floated to my conscious mind before I could thwart it: He was just a Hazara, wasn't he?”

The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini

“These bandages cover more than scrapes,
cuts and bruises from regrets and mistakes.”

Bandages, Hot Hot Heat Recommended by Hilary.

“All my life I could do anything, except the one thing I wanted.”

The Hours [movie]

“If I were thinking clearly, I would tell you that I wrestle alone in the dark, in the deep dark. And that only I can know, only I can understand my own condition. You live with the threat, you tell me you live with the threat of my extinction. I live with it too. This is my right; it is the right of every human being. I choose not the suffocating anesthetic of the suburbs but the violent jolt of the Capital. That is my choice. The meanest patient, yes, even the very lowest is allowed some say in the matter of her own prescription. Thereby she defines her humanity.”

The Hours [movie]

“My life has been stolen from me.... I wish I could be happy in this peaceful place. But if I had to choose between Richmond and death, I choose death.... You cannot find peace by avoiding life, Leonard.”

The Hours [movie] Recommended by Rachel.

“All fled--all done, so lift me on the pyre;
The feast is over, and the lamps expire.”

Robert E. Howard [suicide note]

“It was like the moment when a bird decides not to eat from your hand,
and flies, just before it flies, the moment when rivers seem to still
and stop because a storm is coming, but there is no storm, as when
a hundred starlings lift and bank together before they wheel and drop,
very much like the moment, driving on bad ice, when it occurs to you
your car could spin, just before it slowly begins to spin, like
the moment just before you forgot what it was you were about to say,
it was like that, and after that, it was still like that, only
all the time.”

Part of Eve's Discussion, Marie Howe

“Everyone has the potential to do anything they want. It's all the matter of putting that potential energy into kinetic.”

Richard Hsu

“First use six or eight thickness' of Kleenex pulled on at time from the slot in the box... then fit them over the doorknob and open the bathroom door. Please leave the bathroom door open so there will be no need to touch anything when you leave.”

The Kleenex Protocol, Howard Hughes

“What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore-
And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over-
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?”

A Dream Deferred, Langston Hughes Recommended by J.

“Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken winged bird
That cannot fly.”

Dreams, Langston Hughes

“I cried, in bed alone, and couldn't stop. I buried my head under the quilts, but my aunt heard me. She woke up and told my uncle I was crying because the Holy Ghost had come into my life, and because I had seen Jesus. But I was really crying because I couldn't bear to tell her that I had lied, that I had deceived everybody in the church, that I hadn't seen Jesus, and that now I didn't believe there was a Jesus anymore, since he didn't come to help me.”

Salvation, Langston Hughes

“The calm,
Cool face of the river
Asked me for a kiss.”

Suicide's Note, Langston Hughes Recommended by Holly.

“The greatest happiness of life it the conviction that we are loved -- loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.”

Victor Hugo

“She was melancholy with an obscure sadness of which she did not herself know the secret. There breathed from her whole person the stupor of a life that was finished, and which had never had a beginning.”

Les Misérables, Victor Hugo

“Then Tea Cake came prancing around her where she was and the song of the sigh flew out of the window and lit in the top of the pine trees. Tea Cake, with the sun for a shawl. Of course he wasn't dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking. The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.”

Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston

“Maybe this world is another planet's hell.”

Aldous Huxley Recommended by Kevin.

“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.”

Aldous Huxley

“The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.”

Aldous Huxley