“Most people, Kamala, are like a falling leaf that drifts and turns in the air, flutters, and falls to the ground. But a few others are like stars which travel one defined path: no wind reaches them, they have within themselves their guide and path.”

Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse

“And here it must be said that to call suicides only those who actually destroy themselves is false. Among these, indeed, there are many who in a sense are suicides only by accident and in whose being suicide has no necessary place. Among the common run of men there are many of little personality and stamped with no deep impress of fate, who find their end in suicide without belonging on that account to the type of the suicide by inclination; while, on the other hand, of those who are to be counted as suicides by the very nature of their beings are many, perhaps a majority, who never in fact lay hands upon themselves. [...]
But just as there are those who at the least indisposition develop a fever, so do those whom we call suicides, and who are always very emotional and sensitive, develop at the least shock the notion of suicide. [...]
All suicides are familiar with the struggle against the temptation of suicide. Every one of them knows very well in some corner of his soul that suicide, though a way out, is rather a mean and shabby one, and that it is nobler and finer to be felled by life than by one's own hand.”

Steppenwolf: A Novel, Hermann Hesse

“I saw no other way of escape from this dreadful spectre. Suppose that today cowardice won a victory over despair, tomorrow and each succeeding day I would again face despair heightened by self-contempt. It was merely taking up and throwing down the knife till at last it was done. Better today then I reasoned with myself as though with a frightened child. But the child would not listen. It ran away. It wanted to live. ”

Steppenwolf: A Novel, Herman Hesse

“The day had gone by just as days go by. I had killed it in accordance with my primitive and retiring way of life.”

Steppenwolf: A Novel, Hermann Hesse

“The day had gone by just as days go by. I had killed it in accordance with my primitive and retiring way of life.”

Steppenwolf: A Novel, Hermann Hesse

“Scars are wisdom in disguise.”

Napolean Hill

“I see your scars
I know where they're from
So sensually carved and bleeding
Until you're dead and gone.”

Beyond Redemption, HIM Recommended by ariasna.

“No one can hurt you now
In this haven safe and sound
No one can save you now
From this grace you are drowning
in
Just hold your breath on your way down
This fortress of tears
I've built from my fears for you.”

Fortress of Tears, HIM Recommended by ariasna.

“Things were rough all over, but it was better that way. That way you could tell the other guy was human, too.”

The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton

“A meeting between two people who complete each other, who are made for each other, borders already, in my opinion, on a miracle.”

Adolf Hitler Recommended by J.

“By means of shrewd lies, unremittingly repeated, it is possible to make people believe that heaven is hell -- and hell heaven. The greater the lie, the more readily it will be believed.”

Adolf Hitler

“How lucky for rulers that men do not think.”

Adolf Hitler

“Often we ask ourselves
to make absolute sense
out of what just happens,
and in this way, what we are practicing

is suffering,
which everybody practices,
but strangely few of us
grow graceful in.”

Self-Improvement, Tony Hoagland

“I thought about how the Boy with No Fear had played cards with the dead, how he'd grinned and thrown an ace on the table, how he'd walked through graveyards without a single shiver, how he knew death from the inside out. I wanted a man like that, one it was impossible to kill, who wouldn't flinch if you wished him dead, who'd already been there and back.”

The Ice Queen, Alice Hoffman

“People hide their truest natures. I understood that; I even applauded it. What sort of world would it be if people bled all over the sidewalks, if they wept under trees, smacked whomever they despised, kissed strangers, revealed themselves? Keep a cloak, that was fine, the thing to do; present a disguise, the outside you, the one you want people to believe.”

The Ice Queen, Alice Hoffman

“This is what I know, the one and only thing. The best way to die is while you're living. Even for someone like me. You'd laugh to know how long it's taken for me to figure that out, when all I had to do was cross over the mountains. When I walk to my car in the parking lot on winter nights, I have often noticed bats, a black cloud in the darkening sky. They bring me comfort. They make me feel you're not so far away. To think, I used to be afraid. I used to run and hide. Now I stand and look upward. I don't mind what the weather is; the cold has never bothered me. I hope what I'm seeing is the ever after. I hope it's you.”

The Ice Queen, Alice Hoffman

“What is the difference between love and obsession? Didn't both make you stay up all night, wandering the streets, a victim of your own imagination, your own heartbeat? Didn't you fall into both, headfirst into quicksand? Wasn't every man in love a fool and every woman a slave?

Love was like rain: it turned to ice, or it disappeared. Now you saw it, now you couldn't find it no matter how hard you might search. Love evaporated; obsession was realer; it hurt, like a pin in your bottom, a stone in your shoe. It didn't go away in the blink of an eye. A morning phone call filled with regret. A letter that said, Dear you, good-bye from me. Obsession tasted like something familiar. Something you'd known your whole life. It settled and lurked; it stayed with you.”

The Ice Queen, Alice Hoffman

“I was born with the devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing. ...I was born with the Evil One standing as my sponsor beside the bed where I was ushered into the world, and he has been with me since.”

Dr. H. H. Holmes

“Think of all the women you know who will not allow themselves to be seen without makeup. I often wonder how they feel about themselves at night when they are climbing into bed with intimate partners. Are they overwhelmed with secret shame that someone sees them as they really are? Or do they sleep with rage that who they really are can be celebrated or cared for only in secret?”

Communion, bell hooks

“'Do you want to get well?' they'll ask. You'll shrug and look at the scale, wondering how off it is, whether it will lie and tell them you weigh three pounds more than you actually do. You will be obliged to correct it, on principle, to save your soul, and for your pains you will find yourself with a new address, Eating Disorders Unit, Eighth Floor, having confirmed their suspicions, be cause who, with a pulse of forty-three and a systolic pressure careening in vertical swoops, gives a flying fuck if the scale is three pounds off? An anoretic, that's who. Does she care if she's dying? Hell, no.”

Wasted, Marya Hornbacher

“...if I eat this apple sandwich in precisely twenty bites, no more no less, then I will be happy.”

Wasted, Marya Hornbacher

“A strange equation, and an altogether too-common belief: One's worth is exponentially increased with one's incremental disappearance.”

Wasted, Marya Hornbacher

“An eating disorder is not usually a phase, and it is not necessarily indicative of madness. It is quite maddening, granted, not only for the loved ones of the eating disordered person, but also for the person herself. It is, at the most basic level, a bundle of contradictions: a desire for power that strips you of all power. A gesture of strength that divests you of strength. A wish to prove that you need nothing, that you have no human hungers, which turns on itself and becomes a searing need for the hunger itself. It is an attempt to find an identity, but ultimately it strips you of any sense of yourself, save the sorry identity of 'sick'. It is a grotesque mockery of cultural standards of beauty that ends up mocking no one more than you. It is a protest against cultural stereotypes of women that in the end makes you seem the weakest, the most needy and neurotic of all women. It is the thing you believe is keeping you safe, alive, contained - and in the end, of course, you find it is doing quite the opposite. These contradictions begin to split a person in two. Body and mind fall apart from each other, and it is in this fissure that an eating disorder may flourish, in the silence that surrounds this confusion that an eating disorder may fester and thrive.”

Wasted, Marya Hornbacher

“And so I went through the looking glass, stepped into the netherworld, where up is down and food is greed, where convex mirrors cover the walls, where death is honor and flesh is weak. It is ever so easy to go. Harder to find your way back.”

Wasted, Marya Hornbacher

“And when, after fifteen years of bingeing, barfing, starving, needles and tubes and terror and rage, and medical crises and personal failure and loss after loss - when, after all this, you are in your early twenties and staring down a vastly abbreviated life expectancy, and the eating disorder still takes up half your body, half your brain, with its invisible eroding force, when you have spent the majority of your life sick, when you do not yet know what it means to be 'well,' or 'normal,' when you doubt that those words even have meaning anymore, there are still no answers. You will die young, and you have no way to make sense of that fact.
You have this: You are thin.”

Wasted, Marya Hornbacher