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“I am more sensitive than other people. Things that other people would not notice awaken a distinct echo in me, and in such moments of lucidity, when I look at myself, I see that I am alone, all alone, all alone.”
― Henri Barbusse, The Inferno / Under Fire / Light

“People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

“We can express our feelings regarding the world around us either by poetic or by descriptive means. I prefer to express myself metaphorically. Let me stress: metaphorically, not symbolically. A symbol contains within itself a definite meaning, certain intellectual formula, while metaphor is an image. An image possessing the same distinguishing features as the world it represents. An image �� as opposed to a symbol �� is indefinite in meaning. One cannot speak of the infinite world by applying tools that are definite and finite. We can analyse the formula that constitutes a symbol, while metaphor is a being-within-itself, it's a monomial. It falls apart at any attempt of touching it.”
― Andrei Tarkovsky

“What is art? (...) Like a declaration of love: the consciousness of our dependence on each other. A confession. An unconscious act that none the less reflects the true meaning of life—love and sacrifice.”
― Andrei Tarkovsky

“I live in my dreams �� that's what you sense. Other people live in dreams, but not in their own. That's the difference.”
― Herman Hesse, Demian

“Because the world is so full of death and horror, I try again and again to console my heart and pick the flowers that grow in the midst of hell.”
― Herman Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
― Rumi

“Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.”
― Marcel Proust, The Captive / The Fugitive

“The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.”
― Marcel Proust

“Love, like life, is much stranger and far more complicated than one is brought up to believe.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.”
― Anne Sexton

“When the immense drugged universe explodes
In a cascade of unendurable colour
And leaves us gasping naked,
This is no more than the ectasy of chaos:
Hold fast, with both hands, to that royal love
Which alone, as we know certainly, restores
Fragmentation into true being.

Ecstasy of Chaos”
― Robert Graves, Poems 1965-1968

“Daydreaming subverts the world.”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“And you know, I agree to everything:
I will condemn, I will forget, I will give comfort to the enemy,
Darkness will be light and sin lovely.”
― Anna Akhmatova, The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova

“The great lovers will always be unhappy, because for them love is great and so they ask of their beloved the same intensity of thought that they have for her �� otherwise they feel betrayed.”
― Cesare Pavese

“From someone who doesn't want to share your destiny, you should neither accept a cigarette”
― Cesare Pavese, This Business of Living: Diaries, 1935-1950

“I've shed my own skin and merged into the fog.”
― Alexander Trocchi, Young Adam

“My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“It makes me angry sometimes, it's a visceral thing--how you come to despise your own words in your ears not because they aren't genuine, but because they are; because you've said them so many times, your 'principles,' your 'ideals'--and so damned little in the world has changed because of them.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Black Water

“Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Blonde

“My manner of thinking, so you say, cannot be approved. Do you suppose I care? A poor fool indeed is he who adopts a manner of thinking for others! ”
― Marquis de Sade

“Sometimes we have the absolute certainty there's something inside us that's so hideous and monstrous that if we ever search it out we won't be able to stand looking at it. But it's when we're willing to come face to face with that demon that we face the angel.”
― Hubert Selby Jr.

“I have outlasted all desire,
My dreams and I have grown apart;
My grief alone is left entire,
The gleamings of an empty heart.

The storms of ruthless dispensation
Have struck my flowery garland numb,
I live in lonely desolation
And wonder when my end will come.

Thus on a naked tree-limb, blasted
By tardy winter's whistling chill,
A single leaf which has outlasted
Its season will be trembling still.”
― Alexander Pushkin

“My past is everything I failed to be.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself; the heartbreaking beauty

Will remain when there is no heart to break for it.”
― Robinson Jeffers

“We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party

“April is the cruelest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

“How helpless they all looked in the ugliness of sleep. A third of life spent unconscious and corpselike. And some, the great majority, stumbled through their waking hours scarcely more awake, helpless in the face of destiny. They stumbled down a dark alley toward their deaths. They sent exploring feelers into the light and met fire and writhed back again into the darkness of their blind groping.”
― William Lindsay Gresham, Nightmare Alley

“The rest of them drink something else: they drink promises. They drink hope. And I've got it to hand them.”
― William Lindsay Gresham, Nightmare Alley

“The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.”
― Dorothy Parker