"In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"WINE comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That's all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and sigh."
— William Butler Yeats

"You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet."
— Franz Kafka

"I am a cage, in search of a bird."
— Franz Kafka

"I am in chains. Don't touch my chains."
— Franz Kafka

"“To believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men—that is genius.” "
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."
— Thomas Mann

"I thought about it for awhile, hiding it from the rest of my mind. But I didn't ruin my birthday by secretly thinking about it too hard"
— Richard Brautigan (Trout Fishing in America)

"I saw thousands of pumpkins last night
come floating in on the tide,
bumping up against the rocks and
rolling up on the beaches;
it must be Halloween in the sea"
— Richard Brautigan (The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster)

"Your Catfish Friend

If I were to live my life
in catfish forms
in scaffolds of skin and whiskers
at the bottom of a pond
and you were to come by
one evening
when the moon was shining
down into my dark home
and stand there at the edge
of my affection
and think, “It's beautiful
here by this pond. I wish
somebody loved me,”
I'd love you and be your catfish
friend and drive such lonely
thoughts from your mind
and suddenly you would be
at peace,
and ask yourself, “I wonder
if there are any catfish
in this pond? It seems like
a perfect place for them."
— Richard Brautigan (The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster)

"The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster

When you take your pill
it's like a mine disaster.
I think of all the people
lost inside you."
— Richard Brautigan (The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster)

"Gee, You're so Beautiful That It's Starting to Rain

Oh, Marcia,
I want your long blonde beauty
to be taught in high school,
so kids will learn that God
lives like music in the skin
and sounds like a sunshine harpsicord.
I want high school report cards
to look like this:

Playing with Gentle Glass Things
A

Computer Magic
A

Writing Letters to Those You Love
A

Finding out about Fish
A

Marcia's Long Blonde Beauty
A+!
"
— Richard Brautigan (The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster)

"A sense of humor...is superior to any religion so far devised."
— Tom Robbins (Jitterbug Perfume)

"We are our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves."
— Tom Robbins

"There is no such thing as a weird human being, It's just that some people require more understanding than others."
— Tom Robbins

"Oh God, are there so many of them in our land! Students who can’t be happy until they’ve graduated, servicemen who can’t be happy until they are discharged, single folks who can’t be happy until they’ve found a mate, workers who can’t be happy until they’ve retired, adolescents who aren’t happy until they’re grown, ill people who aren’t happy until they’re well, failures who aren’t happy until they succeed, restless who can’t wait until they get out of town, and in most cases, vice versa, people waiting, waiting for the world to begin."
— Tom Robbins

"Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself; I am large -- I contain multitudes."
— Walt Whitman

"I have always been a romantic; one of those who believes that a woman in pink circus tights holds all the secrets of the world."
— Tom Robbins

"Three of the four elements are shared by all creatures, but fire was a gift to humans alone. Smoking cigarettes is as intimate as we can become with fire without immediate excruciation. Every smoker is an embodiment of Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods and bringing it on back home. We smoke to capture the power of the sun, to pacify Hell, to identify with the primordial spark, to feed on them arrow of the volcano. It's not the tobacco we're after but the fire. When we smoke, we are performing a version of the fire dance, a ritual as ancient as lightning."
— Tom Robbins (Still Life with Woodpecker)

"The only authority I respect is the one that causes butterflies to fly south in fall and north in springtime."
— Tom Robbins (Another Roadside Attraction)

"Eating a raw oyster is like french kissing a mermaid."
— Tom Robbins

"Serious reading is hardly a social activity and every halfway serious reader is perpetually subject to a form of coitus interruptus. Family members or friends who lack the desire, the courage, or the opportunity to burst in on you when there's some indication that you could be sexually entwined will seldom hesitate to interject themselves between you and a page, even though the act of reading is often as intimate and intense as a full-fledged carnal embrace."
— Tom Robbins

"Ability is what you're capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it. "
— Raymond Chandler

"There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself."
— Raymond Chandler (Long Goodbye)

"Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon."
— Raymond Chandler

"Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent"
— Victor Hugo

"Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet."
— Victor Hugo

"Sometimes I sensed that the books I read in rapid succession had set up some sort of murmur among themselves, transforming my head into an orchestra pit where different musical instruments sounded out, and I would realize that I could endure this life because of these musicales going on in my head."
— Orhan Pamuk (The New Life)

"So he lent her books. After all, one of life's best pleasures is reading a book of perfect beauty; more pleasurable still is rereading that book; most pleasurable of all is lending it to the person one loves: Now she is reading or has just read the scene with the mirrors; she who is so lovely is drinking in that loveliness I've drunk."
— William T. Vollmann

"The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn't have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you're fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you're reading a whole new book."
— Ursula K. Le Guin

"Light is the left hand of darkness
and darkness the right hand of light.
Two are one, life and death, lying
together like lovers in kemmer,
like hands joined together,
like the end and the way."
— Ursula K. Le Guin (The Left Hand of Darkness)

"We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel...is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become."
— Ursula K. Le Guin

"Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing."
— Philip Roth

"There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in."
— Leonard Cohen

"I don't believe in an interventionist God
But I know, darling, that you do
But if I did I would kneel down and ask Him
Not to intervene when it came to you
Not to touch a hair on your head
To leave you as you are
And if He felt He had to direct you
Then direct you into my arms

Into my arms, O Lord
Into my arms, O Lord
Into my arms, O Lord
Into my arms

And I don't believe in the existence of angels
But looking at you I wonder if that's true
But if I did I would summon them together
And ask them to watch over you
To each burn a candle for you
To make bright and clear your path
And to walk, like Christ, in grace and love
And guide you into my arms

Into my arms, O Lord
Into my arms, O Lord
Into my arms, O Lord
Into my arms

And I believe in Love
And I know that you do too
And I believe in some kind of path
That we can walk down, me and you
So keep your candlew burning
And make her journey bright and pure
That she will keep returning
Always and evermore

Into my arms, O Lord
Into my arms, O Lord
Into my arms, O Lord
Into my arms

"
— Nick Cave (Complete Lyrics)

"And I'll dance with you in Vienna,
I'll be wearing a river's disguise.
The hyacinth wild on my shoulder
my mouth on the dew of your thighs.
And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook,
with the photographs there and the moss.
And I'll yield to the flood of your beauty,
my cheap violin and my cross.

 "Take This Waltz", a
 translation by Leonard Cohen of
 the poem "Little Viennese Waltz"
 by Federico García Lorca.
"
— Leonard Cohen (Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs)

"In streams of light I clearly saw
The dust you seldom see,
Out of which the Nameless makes
A Name for one like me...
All busy in the sunlight
The flecks did float and dance,
And I was tumbled up with them
In formless circumstance."
— Leonard Cohen

"Undertow"

"I set out one night
When the tide was low
There were signs in the sky
But I did not know
I'd be caught in the grip
Of the undertow
Ditched on a beach
Where the sea hates to go
With a child in my arms
And a chill in my soul
And my heart the shape
Of a begging bowl"
— Leonard Cohen

"I've often lost myself,
in order to find the burn that keeps everything awake"
— Federico García Lorca

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be."
— Douglas Adams

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be some kind of library."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"I work all day, and get half drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
– The good not used, the love not given, time
Torn off unused – nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never:
But at the total emptiness forever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says no rational being
Can fear a thing it cannot feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear – no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no-one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house."
— Philip Larkin (Collected Poems)

"In everyone there sleeps
A sense of life lived according to love.
To some it means the difference they could make
By loving others, but across most it sweeps,
As all they might have done had they been loved.
That nothing cures."
— Philip Larkin

"I came from a real tough neighborhood. In the library the sign says 'shut the fuck up!'"
— Rodney Dangerfield

"Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead. "
— Charles Bukowski

"If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is."
— Charles Bukowski (Factotum)

"there is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock"
— Charles Bukowski (Love Is a Dog from Hell: Poems, 1974-1977)