"We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;"
— T.S. Eliot

"If you're looking for sympathy you'll find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary."
— David Sedaris (Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays)

"With that, the poignant charm vanished. Inside the fifth machine, all was rampant malignity. Deformed flowers thrust monstrous horned tusks and trumpets ending in blaring teeth through the crimson walls, rending them; the ravenous garden slavered over its prey and every brick was shown in the act of falling. Amid the violence of this transformation, the oblivion of the embrace went on. The awakened girl, in all her youthful loveliness, still clasped in the arms of a lover from whom all the flesh had fallen. He was a grinning skeleton."
— Angela Carter (The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman)

"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)

"Character is fate."
— Sylvia Plath

"Only the phoenix rises and does not descend. And everything changes. And nothing is truly lost."
— Neil Gaiman (The Sandman Vol. 10: The Wake)

"Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."
— William Shakespeare (The Tempest)

"Lord Polonius: What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet: Words, words, words.
Lord Polonius: What is the matter, my lord?
Hamlet: Between who?
Lord Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord."
— William Shakespeare (Hamlet)

"No, no, I am but shadow of myself:
You are deceived, my substance is not here;"
— William Shakespeare

"You cannot find peace by avoiding life."
— Virginia Woolf

"Different though the sexes are, they inter-mix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above. "
— Virginia Woolf

"For most of history, Anonymous was a woman."
— Virginia Woolf

"The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages."
— Virginia Woolf

"When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?"
— Virginia Woolf

"Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night."
— Edgar Allan Poe

"What Reason weaves, by Passion is undone."
— Alexander Poe

"I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity."
— Edgar Allan Poe