"silence is golden"
— Mary Corcoran

"Very early in my life it was too late."
— Marguerite Duras (The Lover)

"She had lived her early years as though she were waiting for something she might, but never did, become."
— Marguerite Duras (The Ravishing of Lol Stein)

"Kiss me and you'll know how important I am."
— Sylvia Plath

"I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between."
— Sylvia Plath (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)

"If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days."
— 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)

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

"The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"I am supposed to be having the time of my life."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing."
— Sylvia Plath

"Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing."
— Sylvia Plath

"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)

"Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"Is there no way out of the mind?"
— Sylvia Plath

"A black-sharded lady keeps me in a parrot cage."
— Sylvia Plath

"There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"Whenever I talk to anyone I care about, I am always seeking approval. There is always a pleading lilt in my voice that demands love. Even the people I work with, the ones I am supposed to have a professional relationship with, all business, get pulled into my need. I can't help it. I want to be adored."
— Elizabeth Wurtzel

"That's the thing about depression: A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight. But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it's impossible to ever see the end."
— Elizabeth Wurtzel

"But he does insist on a conversation. Goddamn it! Why can't people just do what I want them to do and be gone? It's a worldwide conspiracy to make me be polite when I don't want to be."
— Elizabeth Wurtzel

"“I feel like a defective model, like I came off the assembly line flat-out fucked and my parents should have taken me back for repairs before the warranty ran out.”"
— Elizabeth Wurtzel

"I become one of those people who walks alone in the dark at night while others sleep or watch Mary Tyler Moore reruns or pull all-nighters to finish up some paper that's due first thing tomorrow. I always carry lots of stuff with me wherever I roam, always weighted down with books, with cassettes, with pens and paper, just in case I get the urge to sit down somewhere, and oh, I don't know, read something or write my masterpiece. I want all my important possessions, my worldly goods, with me at all times. I want to hold what little sense of home I have left with me always."
— Elizabeth Wurtzel

"That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful."
— Elizabeth Wurtzel

"homesickness is just a state of mind for me. i'm always missing someone or someplace or something, i'm always trying to get back to some imaginary somewhere. my life has been one long longing."
— Elizabeth Wurtzel (Prozac Nation)

"Madness is too glamorous a term to convey what happens to most people who are losing their minds. That word is too exciting, too literary, too interesting in its connotations, to convey the boredom, the slowness, the dreariness, the dampness of depression…depression is pure dullness, tedium straight up. Depression is, especially these days, an overused term to be sure, but never one associated with anything wild, anything about dancing all night with a lampshade on your head and then going home and killing yourself…The word madness allows its users to celebrate the pain of its sufferers, to forget that underneath all the acting-out and quests for fabulousness and fine poetry, there is a person in huge amounts of dull, ugly agony...Remember that when you’re at the point at which you’re doing something as desperate and violent as sticking your head in an oven, it is only because the life that preceded this act felt even worse. Think about living in depression from moment to moment, and know it is not worth any of the great art that comes as its by-product."
— Elizabeth Wurtzel (Prozac Nation)

"The moment in The Bell Jar when Esther Greenwood realizes after thirty days in the same black turtleneck that she never wants to wash her hair again, that the repeated necessity of the act is too much trouble, that she wants to do it once and be done with it, seems like the book's true epiphany. You know you've completely descended into madness when the matter of shampoo has ascended into philosophical heights. "
— Elizabeth Wurtzel (Prozac Nation)

"Just as our parents quieted us when we were noisy by putting us in front of the television set, maybe we're now learning to quiet our own adult noise with Prozac. "
— Elizabeth Wurtzel (Prozac Nation)

"Do you hate people?

I don't hate them...I just feel better when they're not around."
— Charles Bukowski (The Movie: Barfly)

"Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead."
— Louisa May Alcott

"She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain."
— Louisa May Alcott (Work: A Story of Experience)

"I want to do something splendid…
Something heroic or wonderful that won’t be forgotten after I’m dead…
I think I shall write books."
— Louisa May Alcott

"If we are all alive ten years hence, let's meet, and see how many of us have got our wishes, or how much nearer we are then than now."
— Louisa May Alcott (Little Women)

"Life is like college; may I graduate and earn some honors."
— Louisa May Alcott

"I've got the key to my castle in the air, but whether I can unlock the door remains to be seen."
— Louisa May Alcott (Little Women)

"But the spirit of Eve is strong in all her daughters."
— Louisa May Alcott (Rose in Bloom)

"She is too fond of books, and it has addled her brain."
— Louise May Alcott

"I am not afraid of storms, for I have learned how to sail my ship."
— Louisa May Alcott

"The power of finding beauty in the humblest things makes home happy and life lovely."
— Louisa May Alcott

"My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them."
— Jack Kerouac

"Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don't be sorry."
— Jack Kerouac

"One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple."
— Jack Kerouac (The Dharma Bums)

"I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion."
— Jack Kerouac

"beautiful insane
in the rain"
— Jack Kerouac (The Subterraneans)

"But, outside of being a sweet little girl, she was awfully dumb and capable of doing horrible things."
— Jack Kerouac

"Finding Nirvana is like locating silence."
— Jack Kerouac (The Dharma Bums)

"I'm writing this book because we're all going to die."
— Jack Kerouac

"The page is long, blank, and full of truth. When I am through with it, it shall probably be long, full, and empty with words."
— Jack Kerouac (Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings)

"Ah, life is a gate, a way, a path to Paradise anyway, why not live for fun and joy and love or some sort of girl by a fireside, why not go to your desire and LAUGH..."
— Jack Kerouac

"...and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear?"
— Jack Kerouac

""As I grew older I became a drunk. Why? Because I like ecstasy of the mind.""
— Jack Kerouac