“I don't sleep that good anyway
If you've never heard the silence, it's a God awful sound.”

Kody, Matchbox 20 Recommended by Shay.

“I'm sorry 'bout the attitude I need to give when I'm with you
But no one else would take this shit from me
And I'm so terrified of no one else but me
I'm here all the time, I won't go away.”

Long Day, Matchbox 20 Recommended by Shay.

“It's me, and I can't get myself to go away
Oh God I shouldn't feel this way.”

Long Day, Matchbox 20 Recommended by Shay.

“Reach down your hand in your pocket
Pull out some hope for me
It's been a long day, always, ain't that right.”

Long Day, Matchbox 20 Recommended by Shay.

“Well I'm surprised that you'd believe
In any thing that comes from me
I didn't hear from you or from someone else.”

Long Day, Matchbox 20 Recommended by Shay.

“But I'm not crazy, I'm just a little unwell
I know, right now you can't tell
But stay awhile and maybe then you'll see
A different side of me.”

Unwell, Matchbox 20 Recommended by Brittany.

“Say hello
Well is it strange where you are
When you used to be kind of free.”

Apparations, Matthew Good Band Recommended by Shay.

“Good morning, don't cop out
You crawled from the cancer to land on your feet
Are you crazy to want this even for a while?
We're making this shit up, the reasons for being are easy to fake
You can't remember the others, they just kind of went away.”

Strange Days, Matthew Good Band Recommended by Shay.

“So you're driving, it's rush hour
The cars on the freeway are moving like slugs
When you drift off to wake up do you always hit the brakes?
We're done lying for a living, the strange days have come and you're gone
Either dead or dying, either dead or trying to go.”

Strange Days, Matthew Good Band Recommended by Shay.

“In this world it is very difficult to know what to do. One struggles to know good from evil, but really they're so often so very much alike. I always think those people fortunate who are content to stand, without question, by the Ten Commandments, knowing exactly how to conduct themselves and propped up by the hope of Paradise on the other. But we who answer Why to the crude Thou shalt not are like sailors on a wintry sea without a compass: reason and instinct say one thing, and convention says another; but the worst of it is that one's conscience has been reared on the Decalogue and fostered on hell-fire, and one's conscience has the last word. I daresay it's cowardly, but it's certainly discreet, to take it into consideration; it's like lobster salad: it's not immoral to eat it, but you will very likely have indigestion. One has to be very sure of oneself to go against the ordinary view of things; and if one isn't, perhaps it's better not to run any risks, but just to walk along the same secure old road as the common herd. It's not exhilarating, it's not brave, and it's rather dull; but it's eminently safe.”

Mrs. Craddock, W. Somerset Maugham

“Irony is a gift of the gods, the most subtle of all the modes of speech. It is an armour and a weapon; it is a philosophy and perpetual entertainment; it is food for the hungry of wit and drink to those thirsting for laughter. How much more elegant is it to slay your foe with the roses of irony than to massacre him with the axes of sarcasm or to belabour him with the bludgeons of invective. And the adept in irony enjoys its use when he alone is aware of his meaning, and he sniggers up his sleeve to see all and sundry, chained to their obtuseness, take him seriously.”

Mrs. Craddock, W. Somerset Maugham

“Nothing is more tedious than to talk with persons who treat your most ordinary remarks as startling paradoxes; and Edward suffered likewise from that passion for argument which is the bad talker's substitute for conversation. People who cannot talk are always proud of their dialectic; they want to modify your most obvious statements, and if you do no more than observe that the day is fine insist on arguing it out. Miss Ley's opinion on the subject was that no woman under forty was worth talking to at all, and a man only if he was an attentive listener.”

Mrs. Craddock, W. Somerset Maugham

“She found unexpected satisfaction in the half-forgotten masterpieces of the past, in poets not quite divine whom fashion had left on the side, int he playwrites, novelists and essayists whose remembrance lives only with the bookworm. It is a relief sometimes to look away from the bright sun of perfect achievement; and the writers who appealed to their age and not to posterity have by contrast a subtle charm. Undazzled by their splendour, one may discern more easily their individualities and the spirit of their time; they have pleasant qualities not always found among their betters, and there is even a certain pathos in their incomplete success.”

Mrs. Craddock, W. Somerset Maugham

“'I love you, Philip. I want to make up for all the harm I did you. I can't go on like this, it's not in human nature.'
He slipped out of the chair and left her in it.
'I'm very sorry, but it's too late.'
She gave a heart-rending sob.
'But why? How can you be so cruel?'
'I suppose it's because I loved you too much. I wore the passion out. The thought of anything of that sort horrifies me. I can't look at you now without thinking of Emil and Griffiths. One can't help these things. I suppose it's just nerves.'”

Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham

“He remembered how passionately he had loved her, and he wondered why now he was entirely indifferent to her. The change in him filled him with dull pain. It seemed to him that all he had suffered had been sheer waste. The touch of her hand had filled him with ecstasy; he had desired to enter into her soul so that he could share every thought with her and every feeling; he had suffered acutely because, when silence had fallen between them, a remark of hers showed how far their thoughts had traveled apart, and he had rebelled against the insurmountable wall which seemed to divide every personality from every other. He found it strangely tragic that he had loved her so madly and now loved her not at all.”

Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham

“He remembered the bitterness of his life at school, the humiliation which he had endured, the banter which had made him morbidly afraid of making himself ridiculous; and he remembered the loneliness he had felt since, faced with the world, the disillusion and the disappointment caused by the difference between what it promised and what it gave. But notwithstanding he was able to look at himself from the outside and smile with amusement.”

Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham

“It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are full of the fruitless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life.”

Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham

“Sometimes Philip thought of Mildred. He avoided deliberately the streets in which there was a chance of seeing her; but occasionally some feeling, perhaps curiosity, perhaps something deeper which he would not acknowledge, made him wander about Piccadilly and Regent Street during the hours when she might be expected to be there. He did not know then whether he wished to see her or dreaded it. Once he saw a back which reminded him of hers, and for a moment he thought it was she; it gave him a curious sensation: it was a strange sharp pain in his heart, there was fear in it and a sickening dismay; and when he hurried on and found that he was mistaken he did not know whether it was relief that he experienced or disappointment.”

Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham

“Packing up. The nagging worry of departure. Lost keys, unwritten labels, tissue paper lying on the floor. I hate it all. Even now, when I have done so much of it, when I live, as the saying goes, in my boxes. Even to-day when shutting drawers and flinging wide a hotel wardrobe, or the impersonal shelves of a furnished villa, is a methodical matter of routine, I am aware of a sadness, of a sense of loss. Here, I say, we have lived, we have been happy. This has been ours, however brief the time. Though two nights only have been spent beneath a roof, yet we leave something of ourselves behind. Nothing material, not a hair-pin on a dressing table, not an empty bottle of aspirin tablets, not a handkerchief beneath a pillow, but something indefinable, a moment of our lives, a thought, a mood.

This house sheltered us, we spoke, we loved within its walls. That was yesterday. To-day we pass on, we see it no more, and we are different, changed in some infinitesimal way. We can never be quite the same again. Even stopping for luncheon at a way-side in, and going to a dark, unfamiliar room to wash my hands, the handle of the door unknown to me, the wall-paper peeling in strips, a funny little cracked mirror above the basin, for this moment, it is mine, it belongs to me. We know one another. This is the present. There is no past and no future. Here I am washing my hands and the cracked mirror shows me to myself, suspended as it were in time; this is me, this moment will not pass.”

Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier

“'There's nothing wrong,' I said. 'It's just that, as an individual, I've failed in life.'
'So have we all,' he said, 'you, I, all the people here in the station buffet. We are every one of us failures. The secret of life is to recognise the fact early on, and become reconciled. Then it no longer matters.'”

The Scapegoat, Daphne du Maurier

“Wells stood over the woman studying her. She'd been shot through the forehead and had tilted forward leaving part of the back of her skull and a good bit of dried brainmatter stuck to the slat of the rocker behind her. She had a newspaper in her lap and she was wearing a cotton robe that was black with dried blood. It was cold in the room. Wells looked around. A second shot had marked a date on a calendar on the wall behind her that was three days hence. You could not help but notice. He looked around the rest of the room. He took a small camera from his jacket pocket and took a couple of pictures of the dead woman and put the camera back in his pocket again. Not what you had in mind at all, was it darling? he told her.”

No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy

“The master says it's a glorious thing to die for the Faith and Dad says it's a glorious thing to die for Ireland and I wonder if there's anyone in the world who would like us to live.”

Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt

“I'm not explaining this right. What happened was this. There were these beautiful feelings and loose little pleasures inside me. And this woman was something like an assembly line for my soul. I run these little pieces of myself through her and I come out complete. Now do you follow me?”

A Tree A Rock A Cloud, Carson McCullers

“You will not be remembered if you die now. You will be buried and mourned by a few, and what more can you ask for. But you feel so tremendously alone, because you fear that your blood is not strong or good and your friends are few and embattled too. But so what. That is the answer. So what so what so what so what so what so what so what. The world will spiral out from underneath you, and you will find nothing to hold on to because you are either too smart or too dumb to find God, and because what the fuck will Camus ever do for you? Just ideas. You are not an artist, you will not leave something behind. Maybe you are angry only because the way out is through love and you are horny and lonely. And she's dead, of course. Maybe this is the way it is for everybody, only you are weaker, or less lucky, or have seen something they all have not. You have seen that before you lies a great stretch of road, and it is windswept or blasted by the hot sun or covered in snow, or it is dirt or concrete or shrouded in darkness or bright and clear so you have to squint, but no matter what, it is utterly empty.”

Twelve, Nick McDonell

“In his corner of West London, and in his self-preoccupied daily round, it was easy for Clive to think of civilization as the sum of all the arts, along with design, cuisine, good wine, and the like. But now it appeared that this was what it really was--square miles of meager modern houses whose principle purpose was the support of TV aerials and dishes; factories producing worthless junk to be advertised on the televisions and, in dismal lots, lorries queuing to distribute it; and everywhere else, roads and the tyranny of traffic. It looked like a raucous dinner party the morning after. No one would have wished it this way, but no one had been asked. Nobody planned it, nobody wanted it, but most people had to live in it. To watch it mile after mile, who would have guessed that kindness or the imagination, that Purcell or Britten, Shakespeare or Milton, had ever existed? Occasionally, as the train gathered speed and they swung farther away from London, countryside appeared and with it the beginnings of beauty, or the memory of it, until seconds later it dissolved into a river straightened into a concreted sluice or a sudden agricultural wilderness without hedges or trees, and roads, new roads probing endlessly, shamelessly, as though all that mattered was to be elsewhere. As far as the welfare of every other living form on earth was concerned, the human project was not just a failure, it was a mistake from the very beginning.”

Amsterdam, Ian McEwan