“That night I watch his eyes go flat, absolutely under my reign, while his body over me is sodden with joy. I have a squalid sense of victory over him. I do not desire him, all this now is patience on my part; an animal loneliness and also a kind of whoredom. Next, thinks a whore. Next, think I.

Clearly the fever in this unlovely affair is the vulgarity. The calm found only in bed after the act. A bad calm, full of knowledge that this sweet exhaustion is momentary, that in the daytime our ugly tempers will muck all that went before. But the fight is unfair; I am superior even though I seem to lose. I allow him to win as soon as I feel his stark, desperate love. For I am sure the only tender moments in his life are with me. Underneath his dreadful breeding, inside the heart of this merchant there is a soft man, seen only by me, his first love.

This flesh bath is growing tepid. I begin to smell him. Horrid preoccupation with new details of him, smells, gestures. Even as I use him night after night, the judgment of him continues. The decline brings nastiness but I savour it. Survival is an ugly struggle. Success is in one more tentacle to make me more fit in this complicated world. I am an octopus swimming off in a new direction, quickly, so that my arms will not pull me to pieces inside the trap.

Watching him eat, I really must leave the table. Terrible mixing of foods in his mouth, eating with such concentration. That which makes him exciting in bed oddly enough makes him intolerable in common life. Real gluttony. How vulgar this insistence on doing only what he is doing, as though he has killed the rest of his life. He gorges himself, is made nervous and sick by his appetite. He cannot accept more than what he can hear or touch. There is so much more, but he is afraid.

He washes, washes before and after love, keeping busy, shutting out the afterward, which for me is the only reality. What I do with him, what he considers the real present, I think of as a lapse in me, longing for the solid creaking plane above me ploughing through an abstract beautiful sky, arriving nowhere, but having been everywhere.

It's true I needed him to fill in the blank. But to love him would never hurt me because I never valued him. My investment was small, worth a piece of skin only organ deep. I can cut him out as one can cut the genitals of a man. As one can never cut off the real, slow sadness of thought.”

Sicily Enough, Claire Rabe

“Jump out of bed as soon as you hear the alarm clock!
You may also find it useful spending five minutes each
morning saying to yourself: 'everyday in every way I
am getting better and better.' perhaps it is a good idea
to start a new day with the right frame of mind.”

'OK COMPUTER' CD cover, Radiohead

“Limb by limb and tooth by tooth
tearing up inside of me
everyday every hour wish that I was bullet proof.”

Bulletproof... I Wish I Was, Radiohead

“I don't care if it hurts,
I want to have control.
I want a perfect body,
I want a perfect soul.
I want you to notice,
when I'm not around.
You're so fucking special,
I wish I was special.”

Creep, Radiohead

“Shell smashed, juices flowing
wings twitch, legs are going,
don't get sentimental, it always ends up drivel.
One day, I'm gonna grow wings,
a chemical reaction,
hysterical and useless
hysterical and

let down and hanging around,
crushed like a bug in the ground.
Let down and hanging around.”

Let Down, Radiohead Recommended by david.

“A heart that's full up like a landfill
A job that slowly kills you
Bruises that won't heal.”

No Surprises, Radiohead Recommended by david.

“I want to
I want to be someone else or I'll explode
Floating upon this surface for the birds
The birds
The birds

You want me?
Fucking, well come and find me
I'll be waiting
With a gun and a pack of sandwiches

And nothing
Nothing
Nothing
Nothing

You want me?
Well, come on and break the door down
You want me?
Fucking come on and break the door down

I'm ready.”

Talk Show Host, Radiohead

“Where do we go from here?
The words are coming out all weird
Where are you now, when I need you.”

The Bends, Radiohead Recommended by holly.

“I keep the wolf from the door
But he calls me up, calls me on the phone
Tells me all the ways that he's gonna mess me up.”

Wolf At the Door (It Girl. Rag Doll.), Radiohead Recommended by Shay.

“Courage doesn't always roar. sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, 'I will try again tomorrow.'”

Mary Anne Radmacher-Hershey

“'Then why are you going there?'

'Because I haven't tried it before. That's all there is left to try. It's somewhere to go. Just to keep moving... You know,' he added suddenly, 'I don't think it will be any use. But there's nothing to do in the East except sit under some hedge and wait to die. I don't think I mind it much now, the dying. I know it would be a lot easier. Only I think it's a sin to sit down and let your life go without making a try for it.'”

Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand

“If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater the effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders -- what would you tell him to do?

I...don't know. What...could he do? What would you tell him?

To shrug.”

Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand

“The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide -- as, I think, he will. Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips, and guns -- or dollars. Take your choice -- there is no other -- and your time is running out.”

Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand

“I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. Particularly when one can't see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window - no, I don't feel how small I am - but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.”

The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

“No, you can't ruin an architect by proving that he's a bad architect. But you can ruin him because he's an atheist, or because somebody sued him, or because he slept with some woman, or because he pulls wings off bottleflies. You'll say it doesn't make sense? Of course it doesn't. That's why it works. Reason can be fought with reason. How are you going to fight the unreasonable? The trouble with you, my dear, and with most people, is that you don't have sufficient respect for the senseless. The senseless is the major factor in our lives. You have no chance if it is your enemy. But if you can make it become your ally -- ah, my dear!”

The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

“So, you people made a martyr out of me, after all. And that is the one thing I've tried all my life not to be. It's so graceless, being a martyr. It's honoring your adversaries too much. But I'll tell you this, Alvah - I'll tell it to you, because I couldn't find a less appropriate person to hear it: nothing that you do to me - or to him - will be worse than what I'll do to myself. If you think I can't take the Stoddard Temple, wait till you see what I can take.”

The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

“The question isn't 'who is going to let me'; it's 'who is going to stop me.'”

The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

“There are two things we must get rid of early in life: a feeling of personal superiority and an exaggerated reverence for the sexual act.”

The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

“There will be days when a bus driver snaps at you as you enter a bus, and he'll be only asking for a dime, but that won't be what you'll hear; you'll hear that you're nothing, that he's laughing at you, that it's written on your forehead, that thing they hate you for.”

The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

“There's nothing as significant as a human face. Nor as eloquent. We can never really know another person, except by our first glance at him. Because, in that glance, we know everything. Even though we're not always wise enough to unravel the knowledge.”

The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

“There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.”

The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, Ayn Rand

“A chronic lack of pleasure, of any enjoyable, rewarding or stimulating experiences, produces a slow, gradual, day-by-day erosion of man's emotional vitality, which he may ignore or repress, but which is recorded by the relentless computer of his subconscious mechanism that registers an ebbing flow, then a trickle, then a few last drops of fuel--until the day when his inner motor stops and he wonders desperately why he has no desire to go on, unable to find any definable cause of his hopeless, chronic sense of exhaustion.”

The Voice Of Reason, Ayn Rand

“The weight of the frame bit into my shoulders; the points of the spears clawed at me; the grass sliced my feet; the breeze tore at my skin - I was one large, exposed nerve. I was so completely open and vulnerable and yet, at the same time I felt trapped, caged.”

Arrin Reddog Takes Kavadi, Arin RedDog

“Things always seem to end before they start.”

Hello It's Me, Lou Reed Recommended by James.

“Oh it's such a perfect day
I'm glad I spent it with you
Oh such a perfect day
You just keep me hanging on
You just keep me hanging on.”

Perfect Day, Lou Reed Recommended by Sophie.