“i saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story... 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.”

​

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“madness is too glamorous a term to convey what happens to most people who are losing their minds. that word is too exciting, too literary, too interesting in its connotations, to convey the boredom, the slowness, the dreariness, the dampness of depression… depression is pure dullness, tedium straight up. depression is, especially these days, an overused term to be sure, but never one associated with anything wild, anything about dancing all night with a lampshade on your head and then going home and killing yourself…the word madness allows its users to celebrate the pain of its sufferers, to forget that underneath all the acting-out and quests for fabulousness and fine poetry, there is a person in huge amounts of dull, ugly agony…remember that when you’re at the point at which you’re doing something as desperate and violent as sticking your head in an oven, it is only because the life that preceded this act felt even worse. think about living in depression from moment to moment, and know it is not worth any of the great art that comes as its by-product.”

​

Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
 

“when i’m sitting at the door of a tavern,
i, ishtar, the goddess,
am prostitute, mother, wife, divinity.
i am what people call life,
although you call it death.
i am what people call law,
although you call it deliquency.
i am what you seek
and what you find.
i am what you scattered
and the pieces you now gather up.”

​

Paolo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“one last thing before i quit

i never wanted any more

than i could fit into my head

i still remember every single word you said

and all the shit that somehow came along with it

still, there's one thing that comforts me

since i was always caged and now i'm free”

​

David Grohl, Monkey Wrench

“anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo.

what is vertigo? fear of falling? no, vertigo is something other than fear of falling.

it is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”
 

“for there is nothing heavier than compassion. not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.”

​

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“the room was a machine that measured my condition: how much of me remained, how much of me was no longer there. i was both perpetrator and witness, both actor and audience in a theater of one. i could follow the progress of my own dismemberment.

piece by piece, i could watch myself dissapear.”

​

Paul Auster, Moon Palace

“out beyond the ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
i’ll meet you there.

when the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.”

​

Rumi

“the wound is the place where light enters you.”

​

Rumi

​

“the only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.”

​

Chuck Palahniuk

“Be happy for this moment. This moment is our life.”

​

Ömer Hayyam