“I start to feel like I can’t maintain the facade any longer, that I may just start to show through. And I wish I knew what was wrong. Maybe something about how stupid my whole life is. I don’t know. Why does the rest of the world put up with the hypocrisy, the need to put a happy face on sorrow, the need to keep on keeping on?... I don’t know the answer, I know only that I can’t. I don't want any more vicissitudes, I don't want any more of this try, try again stuff. I just want out. I’ve had it. I am so tired. I am twenty and I am already exhausted.”
--Elizabeth Wurtzel (American Author and Actress)
"If only they could have taken her mind along
to the dry cleaner's and emptied the pockets
and steamed and cleansed it and reblocked it
and brought it back with them in the morning.
If only..."
--Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
"If they give you ruled paper, write the other way."
--Juan Ramòn Jiménez
"This is the Lord God, a parentless, childless being, a cosmic orphan, literally the only one of his kind. Such a one has no alternative but to borrow, yet nothing that he borrows will ever quite fit. Herein lies the deep psychological peculiarity, the uncanniness, the elusive weirdness of the Lord God."
--God: A Biography, Jack Miles
"...while a genuine critic must obey the rules of mental decency, and clothe his personal idiosyncracies in collectively acceptable generalities, an authentic ignoramus remains quite indecently free to speak as he feels."
--six nonlectures, e. e. cummings
"Hey, don't knock masturbation. It's sex with someone I love!"
--Woody Allen
"Life was like a complicated math equation, a juggling of many factors, and if you missed just one or fucked up a tiny bit, then everything went to shit."
--from A World Without Ducks by Lycanthrope
"During the '60s, I think, most people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don't think they've ever remembered. I think that once you see emotions from a certain angle you can never think of them as real again."
--from The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
"They haven't got Brains, any of them,
only grey fluff that's blown into their heads by mistake, and they don't Think."
--Eeyore, from The House at Pooh Corner
"Sometimes you have to believe that all English speakers should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane."
--Richard Lederer
(You can find the rest of his essays here)
"There is considerable hypocrisy in conventionalism. Any thinking person is aware of this paradox; but in dealing with conventional people it is advantageous to treat them as though they were not hypocrites. It isn't a question of faithfulness to your own concepts; it is a matter of compromise so that you can remain and indivdual without the constant threat of conventional pressures."
--Willie-Jay, a 'super-intelligent' prisoner in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood
"They say they don't know when but a day is gonna come.
When there won't be a moon and there won't be a sun.
It will just go black. It will just go back
to the way it was before.”
--Conor Oberst(American singer-songwriter)
“Depression is nourished by a lifetime of ungrieved and unforgiven hurts”
--Penelope Sweet