"[...] the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!' What did they call such young people in Goethe's Germany?"
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

"For all of my life I have needed more."
— Elizabeth Wurtzel (More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction)

"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph."
— Tom Wolfe (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test)

"How far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground? I mean, what is the reality of any feeling?"
— Virginia Woolf

"I must always forget how one word is able to pick out another, to manner another, until I have got something I might have said... but did not."
— Anne Sexton (The Complete Poems: Anne Sexton)

"Take your foot out of the graveyard,
they are busy being dead."
— Anne Sexton (The Complete Poems: Anne Sexton)

"With one long breath caught and held in his chest, he fought his sadness over his solitary life. Don't cry, you idiot! Live or die, but don't poison everything. "
— Saul Bellow (Herzog)

"All day I've built
a lifetime and now
the sun sinks to
undo it. "
— Anne Sexton (The Complete Poems: Anne Sexton)

"When the heavens are obscured to us, and nothing noble or heroic appears, but we are oppressed by imperfection and shortcoming on all hands, we are apt to suck our thumbs and decry our fates. As if nothing were to be done in cloudy weather, or, if heaven were not accessible by the upper road, men would not find out a lower... There are two ways to victory, - to strive bravely, or to yield. How much pain the last will save we have not yet learned."
— Henry David Thoreau

"Too many things are occurring for even a big heart to hold."
— W.B. Yeats, Dyland Thomas T.S. Eliot

"A human soul devoid of longing was a soul deformed, deprived of its highest good, sick unto death."
— Saul Bellow (Ravelstein)

"That's the story of my life rich or poor and mostly poor and truly poor."
— Jack Kerouac (The Dharma Bums)

"I suppose I do have one embarrassing passion- I want to know what it feels like to care about something passionately."
— Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession)

"We were not a hugging people. In terms of emotional comfort it was our belief that no amount of physical contact could match the healing powers of a well made cocktail."
— David Sedaris (Naked)

"If you're looking for sympathy you'll find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary."
— David Sedaris (Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays)

"I was born from nothing and to nothing I will return. And yet, when i say the word nothing, when i admit, at last, 'I am nothing,' i feel mysteriously like something again, ground zero, genesis, the pull of possibilities."
— Lauren Slater

"When the going gets weird the weird turn professional."
— Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72)

"THE EDGE, there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over"
— Hunter S. Thompson

"So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?"
— Hunter S. Thompson

"Music has always been a matter of Energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel. I have always needed Fuel. I am a serious consumer. On some nights I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio."
— Hunter S. Thompson

"I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. "
— Hunter S. Thompson

"It never got weird enough for me."
— Hunter S. Thompson

"America...just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable"
— Hunter S. Thompson

"When one has nothing left make ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)