“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

“Life is not a movie. Good guys lose. Everybody lies. And love does not conquer all.”

Swimming With Sharks [movie]

“Pain of mind is worse than pain of body.”

Sententiae, Publilius Syrus Recommended by Kathy.

“4000 hungry children
Leave us per hour from starvation
While billions are spent on bombs
Creating death showers.”

Boom, System of A Down Recommended by Jenn.

“I don't think you trust,
In, my, self righteous suicide,
I, cry, when angels deserve to die, Die.”

Chop Suey, System of a Down Recommended by Rosie.

“By plucking her petals, you do not gather the beauty of the flower.”

Rabindrath Tagore

“When I stand before thee at the day's end, thou shalt see
my scars and know that I had my wounds and also my healing.”

Rabindrath Tagore Recommended by Hailey.

“Sweet Ma tried to shape my mind, pounding it like dumpling dough. And the more she tried, the more I became like my mother, so she said. I was greedy, she warned, and could not fill my heart with enough pleasure, my stomach with enough contentment, my body with enough sleep. I was like a rice basket with a rat hole at the bottom, and thus could not be satisfied and overflow, nor could I be filled. I would never know the full depth and breadth of love, beauty, or happiness. She said it like a curse.

Because of her criticism, I acted as if I were even more deficient in feeling, particularly toward her. I found that a blank face and a bland heart were the very things that made Sweet Ma's eyebrows bulge to bursting. My reasoning was this: How could I be wounded when I didn't care? In time, I felt I was growing stronger and stronger. My legs no longer buckled, and I learned to hide from pain. I hid my deepest feelings so well I forgot where I had placed them.”

Saving Fish From Drowning, Amy Tan

“..I gorged myself... I forced spoonful after spoonful down my throat..later.. sat hunched.. retching back into the ice cream container.... wondering why it was eating something good could make me feel so terrible, while vomiting something terrible could make me feel so good.”

The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan

“I almost aborted (my daughter), though. When I found out I was pregnant, I was furious. ...referred to (it) as my 'growing resentment' and I dragged M. down to the clinic so he would have to suffer through his too.”

The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan

“That is the way it is with a wound. The wound begins to close in on itself to protect what is hurting so much. And once it is closed, you no longer see what is underneath, what started the pain.”

The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan

“The next night, I lay straight on the bed next to him.... still didn't touch me ...the next night I took off my gown... He was scared and turned his face. He had no desire for me, but it was his fear that made me think he had no desire for any women. .. After more months had passed (his mom said) My son says he’s planted enough seeds for thousands of grandchildren. .. It must be you doing something wrong....she confined me to the bed so that her grandchildren's seeds would not spill out so easily.”

The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan