It is lucky that it is not windy today. Strange, how in some way one always has the impression of being fortunate, how some chance happening, perhaps infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to live. It is raining, but it is not windy. Or else, it is raining and is also windy: but you know that this evening it is your turn for the supplement of soup, so that even today you find the strength to reach the evening. Or it is raining, windy and you have the usual hunger, and then you think that if you really had to, if you really felt nothing in your heart but suffering and tedium – as sometimes happens, when you really seem to lie on the bottom – well, even in that case, at any moment you want you could always go and touch the electric wire-fence, or throw yourself under the shunting trains, and then it would stop raining.
Submitted on Fri, 2010-03-05 07:58 — Gabrielle
Link to full quote: Quote #2499 from Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi
She had waited until her husband and children were far away, and had driven into the snowy woods, and ended it. Just let it all go.
She had wanted the pain to stop. The heart-hurt. She slept her way into death, only waking when the Highway Patrol found her body.
She was cold, rigid, frozen, when they found her.
Someone like that, said the patrolwoman. You'd think she'd have everything to live for.
She tried to speak, to tell them that that was what made the pain unbearable but, like someone caught in a bad dream, she could not make herself heard. She screamed, and no sound came out. She watched as they took her body away.
She sat by the side of the road, in the snow, all bodiless and afraid, waiting for the happiness to start.
Submitted on Sat, 2010-02-27 01:52 — Gabrielle
Link to full quote: Quote #2493 from The Sandman: Endless Nights by Neil Gaiman
There's something about Sunday night that really makes you want to kill yourself. And that creepy '60 Minutes' watch that sounds like your whole life ticking away.
Submitted on Fri, 2010-02-26 11:44 — burgundybabe
Link to full quote: Quote #2479 from My So-Called Life [television show]
I'm just waiting on that dream
'cause the fast ones always ride for free.Submitted on Fri, 2010-02-26 10:18 — burgundybabe
Link to full quote: Quote #2473 from Bone China by Mother Love Bone
What chatty Madam Shpolyanski mentioned had conjured up Mira's image with unusual force. This was disturbing. Only in the detachment of an incurable complaint, in the sanity of near death, could one cope with this for a moment. In order to exist rationally, Pnin had taught himself . . . never to remember Mira Belochkin--not because . . . the evocation of a youthful love affair, banal and brief, threatened his peace of mind . . . but because, if one were quite sincere with oneself, no conscience, and hence no consciousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such things as Mira's death were possible. One had to forget--because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart, into the gentle heart one had heard beating under one's lips in the dusk of the past.
Submitted on Wed, 2010-01-20 19:45 — Gabrielle
Link to full quote: Quote #2446 from Pnin by Vladminir Nabokov
When you die
there are bales of hay
heaped high in space
mean while
with my tongue
I draw the black straw
out of you
mean while
with your tongue
you draw the black straw out of meSubmitted on Wed, 2010-01-20 19:39 — Gabrielle
Link to full quote: Quote #2445 from Mare and Newborn Foal by Jean Valentine
I trailed
your guts
a mile through snow
before my second bullet
stopped it all.
Believe me now,
there was a boy
who fed butterflies sugar water
and kept hurt birds
in boxes in his room.Submitted on Wed, 2009-12-30 18:36 — Gabrielle
Link to full quote: Quote #2439 from First Deer by Joseph Bruchac
Disdaining butterflies
as frivolous,
she puttered with caterpillars,
and wore a coarse kimono,
crinkled and loose at the neck.
...
And crouched in the garden,
tugging at her unpinned hair,
weevils queuing across her bare
and unbound feet.
Swift as wasps, the years.
Midge tick and maggot words
crowded her haiku
and lines on her skin turned her old,
thin as a spinster cricket.
...
Ha! She stoned imaginary butterflies,
and pinching dirt,
crawled to death's cocoon
dragging a moth to inspect
in the long afternoon.Submitted on Fri, 2009-12-25 16:57 — Gabrielle
Link to full quote: Quote #2422 from The Woman Who Loved Worms (From a Japanese Legend) by Colette Inez
In his suicide note, Kurt Cobain wrote, "It's better to burn out than to fade away." He was quoting a Neil Young song about Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols. When I was twenty-four, I interviewed John Lennon. I asked him about this sentiment, one that pervades rock and roll. He took strong, outraged exception to it. "It's better to fade away like an old soldier than to burn out, " he said. "I worship people who survive. I'll take the living and the healthy.""
Submitted on Fri, 2009-12-25 03:43 — Gabrielle
Link to full quote: Quote #2411 from Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction by David Sheff
When she shut herself up in her closet and starved herself to death, people were shocked. But starvation was in her voice all along. That was the poignancy of it. A sweet voice locked in a dark place, but focused entirely on the tiny strip of light coming under the door.
Submitted on Fri, 2009-10-16 12:20 — Gabrielle
Link to full quote: Quote #2386 from Veronica: A Novel by Mary Gaitskill
