“This is how a daughter honors her mother. It is shou so deep it is in your bones. The pain of the flesh is nothing. The pain you must forget. Because sometimes that is the only way to remember what is in your bones. You must peel off your skin, and that of your mother, and her mother before her. Until there is nothing. No scar, no skin, no flesh.”

The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan

“Beauty is terror.
Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.
And what could be more terrifying and beautiful,
to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely?
To throw off the chains of being for an instant,
to shatter the accident of our mortal selves?”

The Secret History, Donna Tartt

“I think that when you want things so badly, it shows on your body...”

The Chelsea Whistle, Michelle Tea

“And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I'm dying
Are the best I've ever had.”

Mad World, Tears For Fears

“And I find it kinda funny
I find it kinda sad
The dreams in which I'm dying
Are the best I've ever had
I find it hard to tell you
I find it hard to take
When people run in circles
It's a very, very mad world mad world.”

Mad World, Tears For Fears Recommended by ronan.

“When I am dead and over me bright April
Shakes out her rain-drenched hair,
Though you should lean above me broken-hearted,
I shall not care.

I shall have peace, as leafy trees are peaceful
When rain bends down the bough;
And I shall be more silent and cold-hearted
Than you are now.”

I Shall Not Care, Sara Teasdale

“My soul is a broken field
plowed by pain.”

The Broken Field, Sara Teasdale

“So scared that all my feelings
They up and leave me
I got so city girl on you
I go so crazy I don't know what to do.”

City Girl, Tegan and Sara Recommended by Shay.

“I flip on the television
And watch sad movies
And look for sad sick people like me
You call me up, and let me know that
That my sick guilt is so unwelcome.”

I Hear Noises, Tegan and Sara

“I won't scream in my head
And let it isolate me.”

I Won't Be Left, Tegan and Sara Recommended by Shay.

“I wake up exhausted - it's not morning
And it's back to sleep to re-dream me.”

Wake Up Exhausted, Tegan and Sara

“And the taste of dried-up hopes in my mouth
And a landscape of merry and desperate drought
Once I knew myself, and with knowing came love
I would know love again if I had faith enough
But too far is next spring and her jubilant shout
So angels, inside is the only way out.”

Drought, Vienna Teng Recommended by Shay.

“Fear is the brightest of signs
The shape of the boundary you leave behind
So sing all your questions to sleep
The answers are out there in the drowning deep.”

Harbour, Vienna Teng Recommended by Shay.

“In unending storms, we search for space to breathe
How our hearts are worn - we've come so far
In this desert storm, how we blossom and we cease
Tell your story now, we have so much to know
Shine with all the untold, hold the light given unto you
Find the love to unfold in this broken world.”

Shine, Vienna Teng Recommended by Shay.

“She turns out the light,
Anticipating night falling tenderly around her
And watches the dusk - the words won't come
She carries the act so convincingly
The fact is sometimes she believes it
That she can be happy the way things are,
Be happy with the things she's done .”

The Tower, Vienna Teng Recommended by Shay.

“For I dipped into the Future, far as
human eye could see;
Saw the vision of the world, and all
the wonder that would be.”

Locksley Hall, Lord Alfred Tennyson

“Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.”

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, Lord Alfred Tennyson

“'I am half sick of shadows,' said the Lady of Shallott.”

The Lady Of Shallott, Lord Alfred Tennyson

“What were her thoughts when he left her? She remained for hours after he was gone, the sunshine pouring into the room, and Rebecca sitting alone on the bed’s edge. The drawers were all opened and their contents scattered about--dresses and feathers, scarfs and trinkets, a heap of tumbled vanities lying in a wreck. Her hair was falling over her shoulders; her gown was torn where Rawdon had wrenched the brilliants out of it. She heard him go downstairs a few minutes after he left her, and the door slamming and closing on him. She knew he would never come back. He was gone forever. Would he kill himself?--she thought--not until after he had met Lord Steyne. She thought of her long past life, and all the dismal incidents of it. Ah, how dreary it seemed, how miserable, lonely and profitless! Should she take laudanum, and end it, to have done with all hopes, schemes, debts, and triumphs? The French maid found her in this position--sitting in the midst of her miserable ruins with clasped hands and dry eyes. The woman was her accomplice and in Steyne’s pay. 'Mon Dieu, madame, what has happened?' she asked.

What had happened? Was she guilty or not? She said not, but who could tell what was truth which came from those lips, or if that corrupt heart was in this case pure?

All her lies and her schemes, an her selfishness and her wiles, all her wit and genius had come to this bankruptcy.”

Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray

“I'm living but I'm feeling numb.
Can see it in my stare.
I wear a mask so falsely numb and I don't know who I am.”

Tarantula, This Mortal Coil

“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Do not go gentle into that good night, Dylan Thomas

“I see the boys of summer in their ruin
Lay the gold tithings barren,
Setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils;
There in their heat the winter floods
Of frozen loves they fetch their girls,
And drown the cargoed apples in their tides.

These boys of light are curdlers in their folly,
Sour the boiling honey;
The jacks of frost they finger in the hives;
There in the sun the frigid threads
Of doubt and dark they feed their nerves;
the signal moon is zero in their voids.”

I See The Boys Of Summer, Dylan Thomas

“The furies are at home in the mirror; it is their address. Even the clearest water, if deep enough can drown. Never think to surprise them. Your face approaching ever so friendly is the white flag they ignore. There is no truce with the furies. A mirror's temperature is always at zero. It is ice in the veins. Its camera is an X-ray. It is a chalice held out to you in silent communion, where gaspingly you partake of a shifting identity never your own.”

Reflections, R.S. Thomas

“Hallucinations are bad enough. But after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing.But nobody can handle that other trip - the possibility that any freak with $1.98 can walk into the Circus - Circus and suddenly appear in the sky over downtown Las Vegas twelve times the size of God, howling anything that comes into his head. No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted.”

Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson

“'I shared a dark suspicion,' Kemp says, 'that the life we were leading was a lost cause, we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles — a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other — that kept me going.'”

The Rum Diary, Hunter S. Thompson