It’s pathetic how we can’t live with the things we can’t understand. How we need everything labeled and explained and deconstructed.

— Chuck Palahniuk

“A self-destructive man feels completely alienated, utterly alone. He’s an outsider to the human community. He thinks to himself, “I must be insane.” What he fails to realize is that society has, just as he does, a vested interest in considerable losses and catastrophes. These wars, famines, floods and quakes meet well-defined needs. Man wants chaos. In fact, he’s gotta have it. Depression, strife, riots, murder, all this dread. We’re irresistibly drawn to that almost orgiastic state created out of death and destruction. It’s in all of us. We revel in it. Sure, the media tries to put a sad face on these things, painting them up as great human tragedies. But we all know the function of the media has never been to eliminate the evils of the world, no. Their job is to persuade us to accept those evils and get used to living with them. The powers that be want us to be passive observers.” - Waking Life

So who’s next to climb the wall of success, just to see how good the top truly gets. Chasing lies disguised as going somewhere only to arrive and realize it’s really no where. That’s even if you get there in the first place, what an incredible let down we’re bound to face when we substitute purpose for cheap counterfeit, too busy trying to succeed in life that we forget to live it. - Time to Leave by John Reuben

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realizes an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

— Virginia Woolf

the darkness squeezes you inside yourself, you get cut off from the outside world, the imagination takes over...nothing to do but stare into the big black hole at the center of your own sorry soul.

— THE GHOST SOLDIERS

A man who wants to die feels angry and full of life and desperate and bored and exhausted, all at the same time; he wants to fight everyone, and he wants to curl up in a ball and hide in a cupboard somewhere. He wants to say sorry to everyone, and he wants them to know just how badly they’ve all let him down.

— NICK HORNBY

A little while ago, not much more than a few days ago, I was a child who went about in a world of colors, of hard and tangible forms. Everything was mysterious and something was hidden, guessing what it was was a game for me. If you knew how terrible it is to know suddenly, as if a bolt of lightning elucidated the earth. Now I live in a painful planet, transparent as ice; but it is as if I had learned everything at once in seconds.

— Frida Kahlo

She thought about her life and how lost she’d felt for most of it. She thought about the way that all truths she’d been taught to consider valuable invariably conflicted with the world as it was actually lived. How could a person be so utterly lost, yet remain living?

— ALL FAMILIES ARE PSYCHOTIC, DOUGLAS COUPLAND

I was never young. Whoever I was then is dead. I’ve always figured it that you die each day and each day is a box, you see, all numbered and neat; but never go back and lift the lids, because you’ve died a couple thousand times in your life, and that’s a lot of corpses, each dead in a different way, each with a worse expression. Each of those days is a different you, somebody you don’t know or understand or want to understand.

— “NO PARTICULAR NIGHT OR MORNING,” BY RAY BRADBURY

So, what’s your addiction? The pain, the emptiness, the high?
Maybe we all just want to feel alive.
So cut up your arms, restrict all your food, and take hit after hit after hit.