I still think that human beings, even our beautiful and wretched souls, are just biology, are just a series of chemical and physical reactions that one day stop, and so do we, and that is that. But I’m looking forward to this blank peace, this oblivion, this nothing, this not being me anymore. Or at least, this is what I tell myself. I tell my myself I really want to die, and it never occurs to me until the last possible moment that what I really want is to be saved.

— Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel

Never say you know the last word about any human heart. — Henry James

I get this ache… And I, I thought it was for sex, but it’s to tear everything to fucking pieces.

— Ginger Fitzgerald

I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love’s not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I’ll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time.

— Sylvia Plath

I usually get myself into situations that cause sparks. I mean I’m a girl that likes the storms. I love feeling alive, I love walking out in the cold in my bare feet and feeling the ice on my toes.

— Tori Amos

Every addiction is just a way to treat this same problem. Drugs or overeating or alcohol or sex, it is all just another way to find peace. To escape what we know. Our education. Our bite of the apple. Language is just our way to explain away the wonder and glory of the world. To deconstruct. To dismiss. People can’t deal with how beautiful the world really is. How it can’t be explained and understood.

— Survivor, Chuck Palahniuk

People hide their truest natures. I understood that; I even applauded it. What sort of world would it be if people bled all over the sidewalks, if they wept under trees, smacked whomever they despised, kissed strangers, revealed themselves? Keep a cloak, that was fine, the thing to do; present a disguise, the outside you, the one you want people to believe.

— The Ice Queen, Alice Hoffman

I don’t like it when people are too pretty. They have to have character. Something a bit fucked up about them.

— Ryan McGinley