“You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”

A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara.

She is my hope and for that she is dangerous, unequivocally, but she is also alive, unreservedly. It took this long for me to finally understand.

Alone With You in the Ether, Olivie Blake.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m just waiting for something that will never happen,” he said. “Like I’m just existing from day to day but will never really matter. I get up in the morning because I have to, because I have to do something or I’m just wasting space, or because if I don’t answer the phone my dad will be alone. But it’s an effort, it takes work. I have to tell myself, every day, get up. Get up, do this, move like this, talk to people, be normal, try to be social, be nice, be patient. On the inside I just feel like, I don’t know, nothing. Like I’m just an algorithm that someone put in place.”

Alone With You in the Ether, Olivie Blake.

"That’s the truth. I didn’t kill Gabriel. He killed me. All I did was pull the trigger."

-The Silent Patient, Alex Michaelides.

Here I am, a bundle of past recollections and future dreams, knotted up in a reasonably attractive bundle of flesh. I remember what this flesh has gone through; I dream of what it may go through.

The unabridged journal of 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.

The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

"I wonder what level of crazy I’ve reached and how much further I could go, how many more steps until I become a woman who boards up the windows to live uninterrupted in the filth of her past."

My Dark Vanessa, Kate Elizabeth Russell

“He didn’t see the problem in loving her that way, with a savagery that felt as ancient as his sorrows, until he realized that he could no longer recall a life without her. It was as if the older versions of him had been erased and could no longer exist. He realized that his relationship with time, whatever it was before, was now forever altered.”

Alone With You in the Ether, Olivie Blake.

"Yes it does, he doesn’t want to be the person she hides from, he wants to be the person she hides with. These are distinct, doesn’t she realize? Does she have any idea how difficult he finds it to exist with other people? And then here she is, this mystery, this puzzle, does she even know how much he loves her unpredictability, her twists and turns? She thinks her brain is some sort of problem? Fine, good, he loves problems."

Alone With You in the Ether, Olivie Blake.

"It was more like there was a sliver of space between him and the outside world and she had unassumingly filled it, less like a piece fitting into the vacancy of another and more like liquid being poured into a cup."

-Alone With You in the Ether, Olivie Blake.

"It had become hard for me to continue to believe in love’s promise when everywhere I turned the enchantment of power or the terror of fear overshadowed the will to love."

All About Love, Bell hooks

God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of "parties" with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in it's appalling self-consciousness, is horrible and overpowering.

The unabridged journal of Sylvia Plath

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I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love's not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time...

- The unabridged journal of Sylvia Plath

"Your future self will always see what your present self is blind to. This is the problem with mortality, which is in fact a problem of time."

-Alone With You in the Ether, Olivie Blake.

"If you remember me, then I don't care if everyone else forgets."

Kafka on the shore, Haruki Murakami