"Whenever she thought she could not feel more alone the universe peeled back another layer of darkness."
— Janet Fitch (Paint It Black)

"here, here is my dark world. you carry it for a change. im out"
— Janet Fitch

"they say drugs are not the answer but really what is the question?"
— Janet Fitch (Paint It Black)

"this was the wonderful thing about strangers. they were big blank pieces of paper, you could draw watever you like on their impresionable surfaces"
— Janet Fitch (Paint It Black)

"I understood why she did it. At that moment I knew why people tagged graffiti on the walls of neat little houses and scratched the paint on new cars and beat up well-tended children. It was only natural to want to destroy something you could never have."
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

"how rite that the body changed over time becoming a gallery of scars, a canvas experiance, a testament to life and ones capacity to endure it"
— Janet Fitch (Paint It Black)

"what was the point in creating something that was so futile and so precious? everything beautiful was like that. a little bit of the true world. beauty said there was something more than just one fucking thing after another. time could rest for a moment, stop and that senseless motion. people thot beauty was bullshit, just a bandaide slapped over the abyss, but they couldnt be more wrong. beauty mattered, it was the only thing that fed you when everything turned to shit. "
— Janet Fitch (Paint It Black)

"These people picked you up and played with you and then left you lying in the rain"
— Janet Fitch (Paint It Black)

"Kindness was the last thing she needed. She had to stay in the icy place, the numb place, and their warmth threatened to melt her just when she needed the cold."
— Janet Fitch (Paint It Black)

"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything. "
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)

"The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That's the only lasting thing you can create."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Choke)

"What I want is to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"Today is the sort of day where the sun only comes up to humiliate you."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"No matter how much you think you love somebody, you'll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"A girl calls and asks, "Does it hurt very much to die?"
Well, sweetheart, I tell her, yes, but it hurts a lot more to keep living."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor)

"Most times, it's just a lot easier not to let the world know what's wrong."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"Although I was able to maintain a pleasant expression, I was mentally throwing up in her face."
— Augusten Burroughs

"I told myself, 'All I want is a normal life'. But was that true? I wasn't so sure. Because there was a part of me that enjoyed hating school, and the drama of not going, the potential consequences whatever they were. I was intrigued by the unknown. I was even slightly thrilled that my mother was such a mess. Had I become addicted to crisis? I traced my finger along the windowsill. 'Want something normal, want something normal, want something normal', I told myself."
— Augusten Burroughs (Running with Scissors: A Memoir)

""Think of your head as an unsafe neighborhood; don't go there alone."
"
— Augusten Burroughs, Dry

"In the end we had the pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained, oddly shaped emptinesses mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn't name."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"You never get over it, but you get to where it doesn't bother you so much."
— Jeffrey Eugenides

"We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the version of the world they really believed in..."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words.
I don't believe in "sadness", "joy", or "regret".
Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that is oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)

"And I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinking."
— Bob Dylan

"Some people seem to fade away but then when they are truly gone, it's like they didn't fade away at all."
— Bob Dylan (Chronicles: Volume One)

"All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie."
— Bob Dylan

"A million faces at my feet but all I see are dark eyes."
— Bob Dylan

"When you asked me how I was doing, was that some kind of joke"
— Bob Dylan

"There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts."
— Neil Gaiman (Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders)

"He stared up at the stars: and it seemed to him then that they were dancers, stately and graceful, perfomrming a dance almost infinite in its complexity. He imagined he could see the very faces of the stars; pale, they were, and smiling gently, as if they had spent so much time above the world, watching the scrambling and the joy and the pain of the people below them, that they could not help being amused every time another little human believed itself the center of its world, as each of us does."
— Neil Gaiman (Stardust)