"What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire! I know the purity of pure despair, my shadow pinned against a sweating wall, that place among the rocks--is it a cave, or winding path? The edge is what I have."
— Theodore Roethke

"Love is mysterious and rad, like Steve Perry from Journey"
— Diablo Cody (Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper)

"I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls."
— Anaïs Nin

"It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious."
— Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)

"Girls got balls. They're just a little higher up, that's all."
— Joan Jett

"I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in."
— Virginia Woolf

"But for me, if we're talking about romance, cassettes wipe the floor with MP3s. This has nothing to do with superstition, or nostalgia. MP3s buzz straight to your brain. That's part of what I love about them. But the rhythm of the mix tape is the rhythm of romance, the analog hum of a physical connection between two sloppy human bodies. The cassette is full of tape hiss and room tone; it's full of wasted space, unnecessary noise. Compared to the go-go-go rhythm of an MP3, mix tapes are hopelessly inefficient. You go back to a cassette the way a detective sits and pours drinks for the elderly motel clerk who tells stories about the old days--you know you might be somewhat bored, but there might be a clue in there somewhere. And if there isn't, what the hell? It's not a bad time. You know you will waste time. You plan on it."
— Rob Sheffield (Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time)

"I am stuffing your mouth with your promises and watching you vomit them out upon my face."
— Anne Sexton

"The only truth is music"
— Jack Kerouac

"'Aw I don't wanta go to no such thing, I just wanta drink in alleys.'...
'But you'll miss all that, just for some old wine.'
'There's wisdom in wine, goddam it!' I yelled. 'Have a shot!'"
— Jack Kerouac (The Dharma Bums)

"We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"'It is fate that I am here,' George persisted, 'but you can call it Italy if it makes you less unhappy.'"
— E.M. Forster (A Room With a View)

"How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself."
— Anaïs Nin

"Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are."
— Anaïs Nin

"There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don't work."
— Anaïs Nin (Henry and June)

"Everything with me is either worship and passion or pity and understanding. I hate rarely, though when I hate, I hate murderously. For example now, I hate the bank and everything connected with it. I also hate Dutch paintings, penis-sucking, parties, and cold rainy weather. But I am much more preoccupied with loving."
— Anaïs Nin (Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love" - The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin)

"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."
— Anaïs Nin

"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."
— Anaïs Nin

"What we call our destiny is truly our character and that character can be altered. The knowledge that we are responsible for our actions and attitudes does not need to be discouraging, because it also means that we are free to change this destiny. One is not in bondage to the past, which has shaped our feelings, to race, inheritance, background. All this can be altered if we have the courage to examine how it formed us. We can alter the chemistry provided we have the courage to dissect the elements."
— Anaïs Nin

"I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don't know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness. In reality those who satisfy me are those who simply allow me to live with my ''idea of them."
— Anaïs Nin

"All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children.... I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can't build little white picket fences to keep the nightmares out."
— Anne Sexton

"Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man."
— Vladimir Nabokov

"It's so easy to laugh
It's so easy to hate
It takes guts to be gentle and kind
"
— Morrissey

"I was happy in the haze of a drunken hour, but heaven knows I'm miserable now."
— Morrissey

"A heartless hand on my shoulder
A push and it's over
Alabaster crashes down
Six months is a long time
Tried living in the real world
Instead of a shell
But before I began
I was bored before I even began"
— Morrissey

"6th grade. My dog, Katie, is hit by a car and killed. A mean girl during recess says it committed suicide because it didn't love me. I cry and swear revenge on mankind."
— Eugene Mirman (The Will to Whatevs: A Guide to Modern Life)

"Self-destruction would be a brief, almost autoerotic free-fall into a great velvet darkness"
— Mark Mirabello (The Cannibal Within)

"Here is my final point...About drugs, about alcohol, about pornography...What business is it of yours what I do, read, buy, see, or take into my body as long as I do not harm another human being on this planet? And for those who are having a little moral dilemma in your head about how to answer that question, I'll answer it for you. NONE of your fucking business. Take that to the bank, cash it, and go fucking on a vacation out of my life."
— Bill Hicks

"There is, in fact, an incredible freedom in having nothing left to lose."
— Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)