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“The craggy lines that made up the character in his face now seemed like scars of defeat, inflicted on him over time.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Elephant Tree

“Well, I said, if the past don't get you, the fucking future sure will.”
― Nick Cave, The Sick Bag Song

“But something about the static truth of numbers hurt my brain. Numbers felt sharp. Words felt elastic and springy. Language had an unpredictable, quicksilver quality, saying one thing but meaning something else, varying from place to place but maintaining (against all evidence) that it was the same language. Thinking about words was ticklish and amusing. It was also easy, as if they fit into slots and patterns prepared for them in my mind. Numbers on the other hand, bounced right out of my mind.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Cambridge

“If she’d been smart enough to say, Your money is tempting but wow are you strange; I am too but let me just add that something does not feel right here. Something feels aggressively odd on a next-level realm I had not previously imagined, in terms of foreboding discomfort.”
― Alissa Nutting, Made for Love

“Fate would have it that the timing of your birth determines your measure of luck. You’re either born lucky or you’re not, though the only way to know for sure is to test it. The problem with that is most people find out they’re not lucky at the worst possible moment, usually in the throes of death or arrest.”
― Tanya Thompson, Red Russia

“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

“Indecisive? Uncertain? Worried? Let the rolling ivory tumble your burdens away. $2.50 per pair.”
― Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man: This book will change your life.

“Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s. ”
― Anaïs Nin

“I'm no longer a child and I still want to be, to live with the pirates. Because I want to live forever in wonder. The difference between me as a child and me as an adult is this and only this: when I was a child, I longed to travel into, to live in wonder. Now, I know, as much as I can know anything, that to travel into wonder is to be wonder. So it matters little whether I travel by plane, by rowboat, or by book. Or, by dream. I do not see, for there is no I to see. That is what the pirates know. There is only seeing and, in order to go to see, one must be a pirate.”
― Kathy Acker

“Something in the way he fastened his eyes on me, it was like he had something for me.

But here’s the thing: I couldn’t believe the fast jolt it gave me. He wasn’t the type to set me going, but there was something. Something in the way he stood there, like a king, manicured hand curling around the edge of the bar like it was the arm of his throne, watching everything, appraising.

And knowing something about me, knowing it.

Who could guess, really, how much he might know about me.

So sure, I gave him my best walk, half class, half pay-broad. If you can twist those two tightly, fellas don’t know what hit ‘em. They can’t peg you. It gets them—the smart ones—going. Spinning hard trying to fix you. You’re like the best parts of their grammar school sweetheart and their first whore all in one sizzling package.”
― Megan Abbott, Queenpin

“What's bred in the bones, when you have bones, comes through. And they looked at her, watched her, wanted to squirt her full of baby juice.”
― Katherine Dunn, Geek Love

“No one who had never been depressed like me could imagine that the pain would get so bad that death became a star to hitch up to, a fantasy of peace someday which seemed better than any life with all this noise in my head.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man's brains out of his hair. That is my job.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Remove the comma, replace the comma, remove the comma, replace the comma...”
― R.D. Ronald

“Bernard was to remember this moment for the rest of his life. As they drank from their water bottles he was struck by the recently concluded war not as a historical, geopolitical fact but as a multiplicity, a near-infinity of private sorrows, as a boundless grief minutely subdivided without diminishment among individuals who covered the continent like dust, like spores whose separate identities would remain unknown, and whose totality showed more sadness than anyone could ever begin to comprehend; a weight borne in silence by hundreds of thousands, millions, like the woman in black for a husband and two brothers, each grief a particular, intricate, keening love story that might have been otherwise. It seemed as though he had never thought about the war before, not about its cost. He had been so busy with the details of his work, of doing it well, and his widest view had been of war aims, of winning, of statistical deaths, statistical destruction, and of post-war reconstruction. For the first time he sensed the scale of the catastrophe in terms of feeling; all those unique and solitary deaths, all that consequent sorrow, unique and solitary too, which had no place in conferences, headlines, history, and which had quietly retired to houses, kitchens, unshared beds, and anguished memories. This came upon Bernard by a pine tree in the Languedoc in 1946 not as an observation he could share with June but as a deep apprehension, a recognition of a truth that dismayed him into silence and, later, a question: what possible good could come of a Europe covered in this dust, these spores, when forgetting would be inhuman and dangerous, and remembering a constant torture?”
― Ian McEwan, Black Dogs

“Сообразите, что весь ужас в том, что у него уже не собачье, а именно человеческое сердце.”
― Булгаков М.А., Собачье сердце

“Everything in the universe is everything else. A man is a killer is a saint is a monkey is a cockroach is a goldfish is a whale, and the Devil is just the angel who asked for More.”
― Craig Clevenger, Dermaphoria

“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself -- that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“the world is the mirror of myself dying.”
― Henry Miller, Black Spring

“You don't want to stir things up by questioning the specialists.And it's terribly difficult to end something that's already been established.You interfere and you're out of a job.No, worse yet, you might be sent to a forced labor camp for ideological deviation.Even if everyone were against it, no one would say it out loud.That's why nothing changes.”
― Koushun Takami