“There are those whose own vulgar normality is so apparent and stultifying that they strive to escape it. They affect flamboyant behaviour and claim originality according to the fashionable eccentricities of their time. They claim brains or talent or indifference to mores in desperate attempts to deny their own mediocrity.”

Katherine Dunn, Geek Love

“No matter how much you know, no matter how much you think, no matter how much you plot and you connive and you plan, you’re not superior to sex. It’s a very risky game. A man wouldn’t have two-thirds of the problems he has if he didn’t venture off to get fucked. It’s sex that disorders our normally ordered lives.”
— Philip Roth, The Dying Animal

“Such madness! When you’re twenty, love is like a fever, it makes you almost delirious. When it’s over you can hardly remember how it happened… Fire in the blood, how quickly it burns itself out.”
— Irène Némirovsky, Fire in the Blood

“I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one… . Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil… . There is no other story.”John Steinbeck, East of Eden

rather than love, than money, than faith, than fame, than fairness - give me truth.

into the wild

“How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?” 

— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

people so tired 

mutilated 

either by love or no love

Charles Bukowski

“I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.” 
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned 

" let every emotion be capable of becoming an intoxication to you. if what you eat fails to make you drunk, it is because you are not hungry enough.

-andré gide

"...but most of the time it was lovely. and we were alone and mixing up our souls ever more and ever more until it would be terribly hard to say goodbye."

jack kerouac

“Nothing broke my heart like the slow death of a shared joke that had once seemed genuinely funny.”
— Curtis Sittenfeld, Prep

“All this time Dahlia had been convinced that she was superior: the kind of person who can face shit, who can stare it down and name it and live with it and regularly feel around in her pocket for the sharp edges of it. But all this time it had just been piling up, accumulating like lint in the dryer filter of self. So now her mixed-metaphorical cup runneth over. With shit."

—Elisa Albert, The Book of Dahlia

“There is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time.”

—John Irving, A Widow for One Year