I want to express my being as fully as I can because I somewhere picked up the idea that i could justify my being alive that way.

Sylvia Plath

"Don’t stop to think, don’t interrupt the scream, exhale, release life’s rapture. Everything is blooming. Everything is flying. Everything is screaming, choking on its screams. Laughter. Running. Let-down hair. That is all there is to life."

“Gods,” Vladimir Nabokov

He’s shooting god up in his arm through a needle. And she’s putting cuts on her legs to bleed out the devil.

As Cities Burn 

so wrap up care in a cobweb and drop it down the well into that world inverted where left is always right, where the shadows are really the body, where we stay awake all night, where the heavens are shallow as the sea is now deep, and you love me.

Elizabeth Bishop : Insomnia

everyone is so afraid of getting blood on the living room floor.

Joanne Greenberg

“As a young woman, Maxine had tended to leap with open arms, like a wet-eyed, splayed out nincompoop, towards everyone she met, but she had quickly encountered enough snideness, selfishness, neediness, cruelty, rejection, and indifference to enable her to gradually develop the social crankiness that had by now become thick and insuperable as an old toenail.” —Kate Christensen, The Great Man

People had been working for so many years to make the world a safe, organized place. Nobody realized how boring it would become. With the whole world property-lined and speed-limited and zoned and taxed and regulated, with everyone tested and registered and addressed and recorded. Nobody had left much room for adventure, except maybe the kind you could buy. On a roller coaster. At a movie. Still, it would always be that kind of faux excitement. You know the dinosaurs aren’t going to eat the kids. The test audiences have outvoted any chance of even a major faux disaster. And because there’s no possibility of real disaster, real risk, we’re left with no chance for real salvation. Real elation. Real excitement. Joy. Discovery. Invention.  The laws that keep us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom.  Without access to true chaos, we’ll never have true peace.

• Chuck Palahniuk

"And yet, I found I could survive. I was alert, I felt the pain - the aching loss that radiated out from my chest, sending wracking waves of hurt through my limbs and my head - but it was manageable. I could live through it. It didn’t feel like the pain had weakend over time, rather that I’d grown strong enough to bear it."  - New Moon

"We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep — it’s as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we’re very fortunate, by time itself. There’s just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we’ve ever imagined, though everyone knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so."  - Michael Cunningham

“...not to be sentimental, as i sound, but why the hell are we conditioned into the smooth strawberry-and cream mother-goose-world, alice-in-wonderland-fable, only to be broken on the wheel as we grow older and become aware of ourselves as individuals with a dull responsibility in life?”

Sylvia Plath

the worst feeling in the world is the homesickness that comes over a man occasionally when he is at home.

Edgar Watson Howe

I had no interests. I had no idea how i was going to escape. at least the others had some taste for life. they seemed to understand something that i didn’t understand. Maybe i was lacking. it was possible. I often felt inferior. I just wanted to get away from them. but there was no place to go.- Charles Bukowski  

"I was anti-everything and everyone. I didn’t want people around me. This aversion was not some big crippling anxiety; merely a mature recognition of my own psychological vulnerability and my lack of suitability as a companion. Thoughts jostled for space in my crowded brain as I struggled to give them some order which might serve to motivate my listless life."  Irvine Welsh

“I have found God, but he is insufficient.” 

— Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer