“Well fuck them
And fuck her
And fuck him
And fuck you
For not having the strength in your heart to pull through
I've had doubts, I've had fears
I've fucked up, I've had plans
Doesn't mean I should take my life with my own hands

But these words
They can't replace
The life you
The life you waste.”

Waste, Staind Recommended by Laura.

“If you sincerely desire a truly well-rounded education, you must study the extremists, the obscure and 'nutty'. You need the balance! Your poor brain is already being impregnated with middle-of-the-road crap, twenty-four hours a day, no matter what. Network TV, newspapers, radio, magazines at the supermarket...even if you never watch, read, listen, or leave your house, even if you are deaf and blind, the telepathic pressure alone of the uncountable normals surrounding you will insure that you are automatically well-grounded in consensus reality.”

High Weirdness By Mail, Rev. Ivan Stang

“Everyday you can see
Changes in her hair and smile
I can wait a million days
While her smile goes away

Sometimes I feel dizzy
By the slices in her hands
Secrets in her lipstick mouth
Shining on again.”

Roseblood, Mazzy Star Recommended by Doodle.

“Light up this cigarette
Tonight I will sleep with a gun in my mouth.”

Love To Hate, Hate To Me, Static Lullaby Recommended by Sibyl.

“A low man
will trade his shawl
for an ox
in the dead of winter,
looking at the breasts
of that dusky girl
as if they're glowing coals.”

The Gthsaptaat of Stavhana Hla, Hla Stavhana

“When you're depressed, there's no calendar. There are no dates, there's no minutes, there's nothing. You're just existing in this cold, ever-heavy atmosphere, like they put you inside a vial of mercury.”

On the Edge of Darkness, Rod Steiger

“I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents. Some you can see, misshapen and horrible, with huge heads or tiny bodies; some are born with no arms, no legs, some with three arms, some with tails or mouths in odd places. They are accidents and no one's fault, as used to be thought. Once they were considered the visible punishment for concealed sins.

And just as there are physical monsters, can there not be mental or psychic monsters born? The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?

Monsters are variations from the accepted normal to a greater or less degree. As a child may be born without an arm, so one may be born without kindness or the potential of conscience. A man who loses his arms in an accident has a great struggle to adjust himself to the lack, but one born without arms suffers only from people who find him strange. Having never had arms, he cannot miss them. Sometimes when we are little we imagine how it would be to have wings, but there is no reason to suppose it is the same feeling birds have. No, to a monster the norm must seem monstrous, since everyone is normal to himself. To the inner monster it must be even more obscure, since he has no visible thing to compare with others. To a man born without conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is foolish. You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous. ”

East Of Eden, John Steinbeck

“American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash - all of them - surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered with rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountains of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use. In this, if in no other way, we can see the wild and reckless exuberance of our production, and waste seems to be the index. Driving along I thought how in France or Italy every item of these throw-out things would have been saved and used for something. This is not said in criticism of one system or the other but I do wonder whether there will come a time when we can no longer afford our wastefulness - chemical wastes in the rivers, metal wastes everywhere, and atomic wastes buried deep in the earth or sunk in the sea. When an Indian village became too deep in its own filth, the inhabitants moved. And we have no place to which to move.”

Travels With Charley: In Search of America, John Steinbeck

“...there cannot 'be Being' without the eclipse, the inward contradiction of non-being. But non-being which, according to the mystics, 'is so that Being can be', presses on existence as does a vacuum on a membrane. Art brings vehement confirmation. At the heart of form lies a sadness, a trace of loss. A carving is the death of a stone.”

Grammars of Creation, George Steiner

“The cruelest lies are often told in silence. A man may have sat in a room for hours and not opened his teeth, and yet come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator. And how many loves have perished because, from pride, or spite, or diffidence, or that unmanly shame which withholds a man from daring to betray emotion, a lover, at the critical point of the relation, has but hung his head and held his tongue?”

Truth Of Intercourse, Robert Louis Stevenson

“It wasn't a suicide attempt, it was an escape from everything awful. When we cut, we're in control - we make our own pain, ans we can stop it whenever we want. Physical pain relieves mental anguish. For a brief moment, the pain of the cutting is the only thing in the cutter's mind, and when that stops and the other comes back, it's weaker. Drugs do that that too, and sex, but not like cutting. Nothing is like cutting.”

Crosses, Shelley Stoehr Recommended by Melissa.

“I feel the dread of this horrible place overpowering me. I am in fear, in awful fear, and there is no escape for me. I am encompassed about with terrors that I dare not think of.”

Dracula, Bram Stoker

“A doctor wrote her some XANAX; the drug seemed to make her dreams even more spectacular and emotionally unfamiliar, as though they were drawn from the stuff of someone else's life. Sleeping and waking, the notion of being lost, of having wandered out of the right life, kept turning up in different guises. She imagined mirrors in which she could not find herself.”

Outerbridge Reach, Robert Stone

“You can't act death. The fact of it is nothing to do with seeing it happen--it's not gasps and blood and falling about--that isn't what makes it death. It's just a man failing to reappear, that's all--now you see him, now you don't, that's the only thing that's real: here one minute and gone the next and never coming back--an exit, unobtrusive and unannounced, a disappearance gathering weight as it goes on, until, finally, it is heavy with death.”

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard

“Sometimes I dream of revolution, a bloody coup d'etat by the second rank - troupes of actors slaughtered by their understudies, magicians sawn in half by indefatigably smiling glamour girls, cricket teams wiped out by marauding bands of twelfth men - I dream of champions chopped down by rabbit-punching sparring partners while the eternal bridesmaids turn and rape the bridegrooms over the sausage rolls and parliamentary private secretaries plant bombs in the Minister's Humber - comedians die on provincial stages, robbed of their feeds by mutely triumphant stooges - And march - an army of assistants and deputies, the seconds-in-command, the runners-up, the right-hand men - storming the palace gates wherein the second son has already mounted the throne having committed regicide with a croquet mallet - stand-ins of the world stand up!”

The Real Inspector Hound, Tom Stoppard

“Writing can be a haunting, I said, and you said that was a cliché. I protested. There are few things you can say about writing, I ventured, that are not clichéd. When you laughed again, I persisted. There is something haunting about it, I said, perhaps because of that heightened sensibility, because you spend so much time listening for the words. You make a character from nothing, a few words, fragments of people you know or have seen from afar, and once they are up and walking they don't just come and go at your will; they begin to be demanding, appearing at awkward times, doing things you wouldn't have dreamed they could; they come upon you suddenly when you are asleep or making love. And I'm not talking about the sudden apparition of ideas for plots or new episodes -- that happens too -- I am talking about people who exist only in your head but who appear in your living room when you have temporarily forgotten they existed, when you have closed your study door on them. It's a kind of possession. You begin to feel you are being watched.”

Ghostwalk, Rebecca Stott

“I drew the blade across my wrist to see how it would feel.
I looked into the future, there was nothing to reveal.”

Round And Round, Strawbs

“It's too hot in the store and I want to roll up my sleeves, but the gashes on my arm are in straight lines, glaringly obvious to anyone who 'went through that phase' already. Clearly I did not fall down any stairs to get these scabbed over little trenches.”

One Ear to the Ground, Rosie Streetpixie

“But I felt an immense and aching solitude. I could no longer concentrate during those afternoon hours, which for years had been my working time, and the act of writing itself, becoming more and more difficult and exhausting, stalled, then finally ceased. ”

Darkness Visible, William Styron Recommended by Shay.

“Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self-to the mediating intellect-as to verge close to being beyond description. It thus remains nearly incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it in its extreme mode.”

Darkness Visible, William Styron Recommended by Shay.

“I felt a kind of numbness, an enervation, but more particularly an odd fragility--as if my body had actually become frail, hypersensitive and somehow disjointed and clumsy, lacking normal coordination. And soon I was in the throes of a pervasive hypochondria. ”

Darkness Visible, William Styron Recommended by Shay.

“In depression this faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come - not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. So the decision-making of daily life involves not, as in normal affairs, shifting from one annoying situation to another less annoying - or from discomfort to relative comfort, or from boredom to activity - but moving from pain to pain. One does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes. ”

Darkness Visible, William Styron Recommended by Shay.

“I wrote you a poem on my wrists. I used a razor as a pen and I signed my name in blood. But you wouldn't read it.”

Surviving [television movie]

“He decided in favor of life out of sheer spite and sheer malice.”

Perfume, Patrick Süskind

“We have just enough religion to make us hate but not enough to make us love one another.”

Thoughts On Various Subjects, Jonathan Swift