The room is full of the incandescence you poured into me. The room will explode when I sit at the side of your bed and you talk to me. I don’t hear your words: your voice reverberates against my body like another kind of caress, another kind of penetration. I have no power over your voice. It comes straight from you into me. I could stuff my ears and it would find it’s way into my blood and make it rise."

Anaïs Nin, Henry and June

Isn’t it funny how you can ache just 

from the deadly drone of 

existence?

— CHARLES BUKOWSKI

And it occurred to me that in this new millennial life of instant and ubiquitous connection, you don’t in fact communicate so much as leave messages for one another, these odd improvisational performances, often sorry bits and samplings of ourselves that can’t help but seem out of context. And then when you do finally reach someone, everyone’s so out of practice or too hopeful or else embittered that you wonder if it would be better not to attempt contact at all.” 

 —Chang-rae Lee, Aloft

“And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight - isn’t that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and that you’re less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn’t it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you’ve experienced before? You see things more clearly and you know that you’re seeing them more clearly. And it comes to you that this is what it means to love life, this is all that anybody who talks seriously about God is ever talking about. Moments like this.”

Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

“Love is just a lie. Love is a story they tell you about so you don’t get smart and kill yourself while you still have the chance. Love is a way for people to hang on, it’s a God complex, it’s something for you to hope for and pray for and it’s just another wish to waste on your ever-growing mass of birthday candles. Love is either a series of chemical reactions in the brain or it’s an addiction or it’s just something people made up in an effort to reason out their pointless, disappearing lives.”

"There are moments when one has to choose between living one’s own life, fully, entirely, completely ― or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands."

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“It is a curious thing, but as one travels the world getting older and older, it appears that happiness is easier to get used to than despair. The second time you have a root beer float, for instance, your happiness at sipping the delicious concoction may not be quite as enormous as when you first had a root beer float, and the twelfth time your happiness may be still less enormous, until root beer floats begin to offer you very little happiness at all, because you have become used to the taste of vanilla ice cream and root beer mixed together. However, the second time you find a thumbtack in your root beer float, your despair is much greater than the first time, when you dismissed the thumbtack as a freak accident rather than part of the scheme of a soda jerk, a phrase which here means “ice cream shop employee who is trying to injure your tongue,” and by the twelfth time you find a thumbtack, your despair is even greater still, until you can hardly utter the phrase “root beer float” without bursting into tears. It is almost as if happiness is an acquired taste, like coconut cordial or ceviche, to which you can eventually become accustomed, but despair is something surprising each time you encounter it.” Lemony Snicket

“You couldn’t pretend you had lost nothing… you had to begin there, not let your blood freeze over. If your heart turned away at this, it would turn away at something greater, then more and more until your heart stayed averted, immobile, your imagination redistributed away from the world and back only toward the bad maps of yourself, the sour pools of your own pulse, your own tiny, mean, and pointless wants.”
— Lorrie Moore, “If Only Bert Were Here”

“It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies— it seeped in with every draught in the house; people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it.”

— Zadie Smith, On Beauty