"Yet for all the depression no one ever quit. When someone quit, we couldn't believe it. 'I'm becoming a rafting instructor on the Colorado River,' they said. 'I'm touring college towns with my garage band.' We were dumbfounded. It was like they were from another planet. Where had they found the derring-do? What would they do about car payments? We got together for going away drinks on their final day and tried to hide our envy while reminding ourselves that we still had the freedom and luxury to shop indiscriminately."
— Joshua Ferris (Then We Came to the End)

"For weeks Tyrone thought he was going to die any minute, and there were also times when he was afraid he wasnt going to die."
— Hubert Selby Jr. (Requiem for a Dream)

"I went down to the river,
I set down on the bank.
I tried to think but couldn't,
So I jumped in and sank."
— Langston Hughes

"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats."
— H. L. Mencken

"You told me, if something is not used it is meaningless, and took my temperature, which I had thought to save for a more difficult day. In the mirror, every night, the same face, a bit more threadbare, a dress worn too long. The moon was out in the cold, along with the restless, dissatisfied wind that seemed to change the location of the sycamores. I expected reproaches because I had mentioned the word love, but you only accused me of stealing your pencil, and sadness disappeared with sense. You made a ceremony out of holding your head in your hands because, you said, it could not be contained in itself."
— Rosmarie Waldrop

"I felt the kind of desperation, I think, that cancels the possibility of empathy...that makes you unkind."
— Sue Miller (While I Was Gone)

"In the final analysis, with Rene she had been an apprentice to love, she had loved him only to learn how to give herself, enslaved and surfeited, to Sir Stephen."
— Pauline Réage