"Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears - it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear. But for many of my neurological patients, music is even more - it can provide access, even when no medication can, to movement, to speech, to life. For them, music is not a luxury, but a necessity."
— Oliver W. Sacks

"My religion is nature. That’s what arouses those feelings of wonder and mysticism and gratitude in me. "
— Oliver W. Sacks

"Life seemed nearest to acceptable at four a.m."
— Wally Lamb

"But what are our stories if not the mirrors we hold up to our fears?"
— Wally Lamb (I Know This Much Is True)

"It was a matter of perspective, I began to see.
The whole world was crazy; I'd flattered myself by assuming I was a semifinalist."
-- Dolores Price"
— Wally Lamb (She's Come Undone)

"He's splitting me open, I thought. He'll break me and then I'll die."
— Wally Lamb (She's Come Undone)

"Love is like breathing, you take it in and let it out."
— Wally Lamb (She's Come Undone)

"Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."
— E.L. Doctorow

"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: "I'll go take a hot bath."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"I felt wise and cynical as all hell."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defensless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"I am too pure for you or anyone"
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"I am God, la de dah."
— Anne Sexton (The Complete Poems: Anne Sexton)

"Anne, I don't want to live. . . . Now listen, life is lovely, but I Can't Live It. I can't even explain. I know how silly it sounds . . . but if you knew how it Felt. To be alive, yes, alive, but not be able to live it. Ay that's the rub. I am like a stone that lives . . . locked outside of all that's real. . . . Anne, do you know of such things, can you hear???? I wish, or think I wish, that I were dying of something for then I could be brave, but to be not dying, and yet . . . and yet to [be] behind a wall, watching everyone fit in where I can't, to talk behind a gray foggy wall, to live but to not reach or to reach wrong . . . to do it all wrong . . . believe me, (can you?) . . . what's wrong. I want to belong. I'm like a jew who ends up in the wrong country. I'm not a part. I'm not a member. I'm frozen."
— Anne Sexton (Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters)

"Depression is boring, I think
and I would do better to make
some soup and light up the cave."
— Anne Sexton

"Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard."
— Anne Sexton

"As for me, I am a watercolor.
I wash off."
— Anne Sexton

"God owns heaven but He craves the earth." "
— Anne Sexton

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

"I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck."
— Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

"What does it feel like to be alive?
Living, you stand under a waterfall. You leave the sleeping shore deliberately; you shed your dusty clothes, pick your barefoot way over the high, slippery rocks, hold your breath, choose your footing, and step into the waterfall. The hard water pelts your skull, bangs in bits on your shoulders and arms. The strong water dashes down beside you and you feel it along your calves and thighs rising roughly backup, up to the roiling surface, full of bubbles that slide up your skin or break on you at full speed. Can you breathe here? Here where the force is the greatest and only the strength of your neck holds the river out of your face. Yes, you can breathe even here. You could learn to live like this. And you can, if you concentrate, even look out at the peaceful far bank where you try to raise your arms. What a racket in your ears, what a scattershot pummeling!
It is time pounding at you, time. Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit."
— Annie Dillard (An American Childhood)

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

"Don't call yourself a secret
unless you mean to keep it."
— Leonard Cohen (Selected Poems 1956-1968)

"There is a war between the ones who say there is a war and the ones who say there isn't."
— Leonard Cohen

"How bitter were
the Prozac pills
of the last
few hundred mornings"
— Leonard Cohen (Book of Longing)

""You live your life as if it's real.......a thousand kisses deep""
— Leonard Cohen

"The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world."
— Leonard Cohen

"Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance me to the end of love "
— Leonard Cohen

"By approaching my problems with "What might make things a little better?" rather than "What is the solution?" I avoid setting myself up for certain frustration. My experience has shown me that I am not going to solve anything in one stroke; at best I am only going to chip away at it."
— Hugh Prather (I Touch the Earth, the Earth Touches Me)

"perfectionism is a slow death. if everything were to turn out just like i would want it to, just like i would plan for it to, then i would never experience anything new; my life would be an endless repetition of stale successes. when i make a mistake i experience something unexpected.... when i have listened to my mistakes i have grown."
— Hugh Prather

""If the desire to write is not accompanied by actual writing, then the desire is not to write""
— Hugh Prather (Notes to Myself)

"No matter what we talk about, we are talking about ourselves"
— Hugh Prather (I Touch the Earth, the Earth Touches Me)

"The Death of Allegory

I am wondering what became of all those tall abstractions
that used to pose, robed and statuesque, in paintings
and parade about on the pages of the Renaissance
displaying their capital letters like license plates.


Truth cantering on a powerful horse,
Chastity, eyes downcast, fluttering with veils.
Each one was marble come to life, a thought in a coat,
Courtesy bowing with one hand always extended,


Villainy sharpening an instrument behind a wall,
Reason with her crown and Constancy alert behind a helm.
They are all retired now, consigned to a Florida for tropes.
Justice is there standing by an open refrigerator.


Valor lies in bed listening to the rain.
Even Death has nothing to do but mend his cloak and hood,
and all their props are locked away in a warehouse,
hourglasses, globes, blindfolds and shackles.


Even if you called them back, there are no places left
for them to go, no Garden of Mirth or Bower of Bliss.
The Valley of Forgiveness is lined with condominiums
and chain saws are howling in the Forest of Despair.


Here on the table near the window is a vase of peonies
and next to it black binoculars and a money clip,
exactly the kind of thing we now prefer,
objects that sit quietly on a line in lower case,


themselves and nothing more, a wheelbarrow,
an empty mailbox, a razor blade resting in a glass ashtray.
As for the others, the great ideas on horseback
and the long-haired virtues in embroidered gowns,


it looks as though they have traveled down
that road you see on the final page of storybooks,
the one that winds up a green hillside and disappears
into an unseen valley where everyone must be fast asleep."
— Billy Collins

"All they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with a rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means."
— Billy Collins

"It seems only yesterday that I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I would shine. But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life, I skin my knees. I bleed.

I know that sounds sad, but I like the whole concept!"
— Billy Collins

"The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper."
— Billy Collins

"life is a loaded gun
that looks right at you with a yellow eye."
— Billy Collins

"Vade Mecum

I want the scissors to be sharp
and the table perfectly level
when you cut me out of my life
and paste me in that book you always carry."
— Billy Collins (Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems)

"If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that it is poetry."
— Emily Dickinson

"I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there's a pair of us?
Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one's name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!"
— Emily Dickinson

"Because death could not stop for me I kindly stop for him."
— Emily Dickinson

"The dearest ones of time, the strongest friends of the soul--BOOKS."
— Emily Dickinson

"Truth is so rare, it is delightful to tell it."
— Emily Dickinson

"Beauty is not caused. It is."
— Emily Dickinson

"I died for beauty but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.

He questioned softly why I failed?
"For beauty," I replied.
"And I for truth, the two are one;
We brethren are," he said.

And so, as kinsmen met a night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names."
— Emily Dickinson

"There is no figate like a book,
to take us lands away;
Nor any coursers like a page,
of prancing poetry.

This traverse may the poorest take,
without opress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot,
that bears a human soul."
— Emily Dickinson