"I am offering this poem to you, since I have nothing else to give." ~Jimmy Santiago Baca
“Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I’m bullshitting myself, morally speaking?”
– David Foster Wallace
“This fall I think you’re riding for—it’s a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn’t permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement’s designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn’t supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn’t supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started.”
– J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
“In my younger days, I would have taken this gin bottle and thrown it against the wall. Then smash the window open and cut myself with the shards. But, now I’m just going take a few steps back and go to bed. This is the science of getting older.”
“She stays lost in the middle of her own world somewhere. We can’t get in and she doesn’t come out.”
– Malorie Blackman; Noughts and Crosses
“Your head’s like mine, like all our heads; big enough to contain every god and devil there ever was. Big enough to hold the weight of oceans and the turning stars. Whole universes fit in there! But what do we choose to keep in this miraculous cabinet? Little broken things, sad trinkets that we play with over and over. The world turns our key and we play the same little tune again and again and we think that tune’s all we are.”
– Grant Morrison, The Invisibles, Vol. 1: Say You Want a Revolution
Words ... for the Time Being 