"You cannot fold a flood and put it in a drawer, because the winds would find it out and tell your cedar floor."
— Emily Dickinson

"How nice--to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Mother Night)

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."
— Søren Kierkegaard

"In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."
— Albert Camus

"The coldest winter that I ever saw was the summer that I spent."
— Sleater-Kinney

"Be the change that you wish to see in the world."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind."
— Dr. Seuss

"Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is."
— Albert Camus

"That which does not kill us makes us stronger."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"If we all did the things we are capable of doing we would literally astound ourselves."
— Thomas A. Edison

"I felt a Cleaving in my Mind-
As if my Brain had split-
I tried to match it- Seam by Seam-
But could not make it fit."
— Emily Dickinson

"When it is dark enough, you can see the stars."
— Charles A. Beard

"Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all."
— Kurt Vonnegut (The Sirens of Titan)

"What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

"
— Langston Hughes (The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes)

""But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.

"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."

"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.

"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."
— Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass)

"Scar tissue has no character. It's not like skin. It doesn't show age or illness or pallor or tan. It has no pores, no hair, no wrinkles. It's like a slip cover. It shields and disguises what's beneath. That's why we grow it; we have something to hide. "
— Susanna Kaysen (Girl, Interrupted)

"Why did she do it? Nobody dared to ask. Because - what courage! Who had the courage to burn herself? Twenty aspirin, a little slit alongside the veins of the arm, maybe even a bad half hour standing on a roof: We've all had those. And somewhat more dangerous things, like putting a gun in your mouth. But you put it there, you taste it, it's cold and greasy, your finger is on the trigger, and you find that a whole world lies between this moment and the moment you've been planning, when you'll pull the trigger. That world defeats you. You put the gun back in the drawer. You'll have to find another way.

What was that moment like for her? The moment she lit the match. Had she already tried roofs and guns and aspirins? Or was it just an inspiration?

I had an inspiration once. I woke up one morning and I knew that today I had to swallow fifty aspirin. It was my task: my job for the day. I lined them up on my desk and took them one by one, counting. But it's not the same as what she did. I could have stopped, at ten, or at thirty. And I could have done what I did do, which was go onto the street and faint. Fifty aspirin is a lot of aspirin, but going onto the street and fainting is like putting the gun back in the drawer.

She lit the match."
— Susanna Kaysen (Girl, Interrupted)

"....he said it was interesting. He used the word 'textured'. He said 'smooth' is boring but 'textured' was interesting, and the scar meant that I was stronger than whatever had tried to hurt me."
— Jeannette Walls (The Glass Castle)

"One time I saw a tiny Joshua tree sapling growing not too far from the old tree. I wanted to dig it up and replant it near our house. I told Mom that I would protect it from the wind and water it every day so that it could grow nice and tall and straight. Mom frowned at me. "You'd be destroying what makes it special," she said. "It's the Joshua tree's struggle that gives it its beauty.""
— Jeannette Walls (The Glass Castle)

"I wondered if the fire had been out to get me. I wondered if all fire was related, like Dad said all humans were related, if the fire that had burned me that day while I cooked hot dogs was somehow connected o the fire I had flushed down the toilet and the fire burning at the hotel. I didn't have the answers to those questions, but what I did know was that I lived in a world that at any moment could erupt into fire. It was the sort of knowledge that kept you on your toes."
— Jeannette Walls (The Glass Castle)

"As long as I'm between home and the clinic I do all right. But out in the real world, I feel like prey. I slink around and can feel people looking at me. I feel their eyes boring into me. I feel what they're thinking: Watch her, she could go off anytime. But within the walls of my farmhouse, I climb out of the protective shell, my arms slowly rise like a phoenix, and I dance, wail, fly around the room and then collapse, crying, in front of my mirrors. I start to see in the mirror what it is I really look like, instead of what I was trained from the womb to see. I do not write about it. I do not talk about it. I do not know what I am doing. But just like a baby bird, I am blinking once-sealed eyes and unfolding damp wings. I cannot articulate the past. A part of me knows it's there, lurking, just behind what I can acknowledge, but it is not within sight. And I am keeping it that way. "
— Julie Gregory (Sickened: The Memoir of a Munchausen by Proxy Childhood)

"I start to see that I surround myself with broken people; more broken than me. Ah, yes, let me count your cracks. Let's see, one hundred, two... yes, you'll do nicely. A cracked companion makes me look more whole, gives me something outside myself to care for. When I'm with whole, healed people I feel my own cracks, the shatters, the insanities of dislocation in myself."
— Julie Gregory (Sickened: The Memoir of a Munchausen by Proxy Childhood)

"If only, if only," the woodpecker sighs,/ "The bark on the tree was as soft as the skies."/ While the wolf waits below, hungry and lonely,/ Crying to the moo-oo-oon,/ If only, If only."
— Louis Sachar (Holes)

"How strange it is that people of honest feelings and sensibility, who would not take advantage of a man born without arms or legs or eyes--how such people think nothing of abusing a man born with low intelligence. It infuriated me to remember that not too long ago I--like this little boy--had foolishly played the clown (177)."
— Daniel Keyes (Flowers for Algernon)

"People aren't either wicked or noble. They're like chef's salads, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict."
— Lemony Snicket (The Grim Grotto)

"We are so limited, you have to use the same word for loving Rosaleen as you do for loving Coke with peanuts. Isn't that a shame we don't have many more ways to say it?"
— Sue Monk Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees)

"When you understand," Brandy says, "that what you're telling is just a story. It isn't happening anymore. When you realize the story you're telling is just words, when you can just crumble up and throw your past in the trashcan," Brandy says, "then we'll figure out who you're going to be."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"The pearls weren't really white, they were a warm oyster beige, with little knots in between so if they broke, you only lost one. I wished my life could be like that, knotted up so that even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn't come apart."
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

"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)

"I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again."
— Sylvia Plath

"“I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here.”"
— Sylvia Plath

"I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"A word is dead when it's been said, some say. I say it just begins to live that day."
— Emily Dickinson