quotes, t~z




			t ~ z "Can you imagine how it is, to want to be neither inside nor outside, to want to be nowhere and disappear?" -Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club "If you are greedy, what is inside you is what makes you always hungry." -Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club "For unlike my mother, I did not believe I could be anything I wanted to be. I could only be me." -Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club "Every now and then things I lean on lose their meaning And I find myself careening Into places where I should not let me go. She has the power to go where no one else can find me And to silently remind me Of the happiness and the good times that I know." -James Taylor "Sad soul, take comfort, nor forget That sunrise never failed us yet." -Celia Thaxter "To know is nothing at all; to imagine is everything." -Anatole France Thibault "The simple lack of her is more to me than others' presence." -Edward Thomas "Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much of life. So, aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something." -Henry David Thoreau "Friends do not live in harmony merely, as some say, but in melody." -Henry David Thoreau "Have nothing in your house you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful." -Henry David Thoreau "How many a man has dated a new era in his life from reading a book!" -Henry David Thoreau "Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all." -Henry David Thoreau "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away." -Henry David Thoreau "The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it." -Henry David Thoreau "If one advances confidently in the direction of their dreams, and endeavors to lead a life which they have imagined, they will meet with success unexpected in common hours." -Henry David Thoreau "Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes." -Henry David Thoreau "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them." -Henry David Thoreau "The perception of beauty is a moral test." -Henry David Thoreau "The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them." -Henry David Thoreau "Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost." -Henry David Thoreau "As if you could kill time without injuring eternity." -Henry David Thoreau "I would not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well." -Henry David Thoreau "Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts, of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind." -Henry David Thoreau "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." -Henry David Thoreau "Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, so they take a thousand stitches today to save nine tomorrow." -Henry David Thoreau, Walden "The dog seems to be innately capable of understanding the small, magical, little importance of life that man has either overlooked or simply not taken the time to see." -James Thurber "If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons." -James Thurber "Do not look back in anger, or forward in fear, but around in awareness." -James Thurber "It is better to ask some of the questions than to know all the answers." -James Thurber "I always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific." -Lily Tomlin "I worry that the person who thought up Muzak may be thinking up something else." -Lily Tomlin "If love is the answer, could you rephrase the question?" -Lily Tomlin "People think it's all about misery and desperation and death and all that shit which is not to be ignored, but what they forget is the pleasure of it. Otherwise, we wouldn't do it. After all, we're not fucking stupid." -from Trainspotting "I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want to do and then advise them to do it." -Harry S. Truman "Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech." -Martin Fraquhar Tupper "Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest." -Mark Twain "Few things are harder to put up with than a good example." -Mark Twain "Wagner's music is better than it sounds." -Mark Twain "Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist but you have ceased to live." -Mark Twain "You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus." -Mark Twain "Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great." -Mark Twain "Grief can take care of itself; but to get the full value of joy, you must have somebody to share it with." -Mark Twain "We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it—and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again, and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore." -Mark Twain "Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life." -Mark Twain "My father was an amazing man. The older I got the smarter he got." -Mark Twain "April 1. This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three hundred and sixty-four." -Mark Twain "Satan hasn't a single salaried helper; the Opposition employs a million." -Mark Twain "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." -Mark Twain "Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society." -Mark Twain "When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained." -Mark Twain "Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to." -Mark Twain "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely...Broad, wholesome, charitable views cannot be acquired by vegetating in one's little corner of the earth." -Mark Twain "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So, throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." -Mark Twain "Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect." -Mark Twain "Ever consider what they must think of us? I mean, here we come back from a grocery store with the most amazing haul—chicken, pork, half a cow. They must think we're the greatest hunters on earth!" -Anne Tyler "Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self-solicitude is the enemy of well being." -John Updike "God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through." -Paul Valery "If you hear a voice within you saying, 'You are not a painter,' then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced." -Vincent Van Gogh "A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won't cross the street to vote in a national election." -Bill Vaughan "God is a comedian playing to an audience that is afraid to laugh." -Voltaire "I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." -Voltaire "It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong." -Voltaire "One great use of words is to hide our thoughts." -Voltaire "One owes respect to the Living. To the Dead, one owes only Truth." -Voltaire "Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause." -Voltaire "Now, now my good man, this is no time for making enemies." -Voltaire, on his deathbed, in response to a priest asking that he renounce Satan "Fear not those who argue but those who dodge." -Marie von Ebner Eschenbach "Laughing and crying is what a human being does when there's nothing else he can do." -Kurt Vonnegut "What is the purpose of life?...To be the eyes and ears and conscience of the Creator of The Universe, you fool." -Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Breakfast of Champions "Live by the [harmless untruths] that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy." -Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle "She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God is Doing..." -Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle "Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God." -Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle "People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order, so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say." -Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle "Tiger got to hunt, Bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder, 'Why, why, why?' Tiger got to sleep, Bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand." -Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle "In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in His cosmic loneliness. And God said, 'Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done.' And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close as mud as man sat up, looked around, and spoke. Man blinked 'What is the purpose of all this?' he asked politely. 'Everything must have a purpose?' asked God. 'Certainly,' said man. 'Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this,' said God. And He went away." -Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle "Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before...He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way." -Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle "The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can't." -Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake "I was feeling as I feel now, like whalers Herman Melville described, who didn't talk anymore. They had said absolutely everything they could ever say." -Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake "In real life, as in Grand Opera, arias only make hopeless situations worse." -Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake "Question: What is the white stuff in bird poop? Answer: That is bird poop, too." -Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake "I am eternally grateful...for my knack of finding in great book, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else may be going on." -Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake "We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!" -Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake "Reality is the leading cause of stress for those in touch with it." -Jane Wagner "Joy is not in things; it is in us." -Richard Wagner "No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow." -Alice Walker "Laughter is the brush that sweeps away the cobwebs of the heart." -Mort Walker "What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it." -Andy Warhol "The moment you label something, you take a step—I mean, you can never go back again to seeing it unlabelled." -Andy Warhol "Sometimes the little times you don't think are anything while they're happening turn out to be what marks a whole period of your life." -Andy Warhol "Everything I did in my life that was worthwhile, I caught hell for." -Chief Justice Earl Warren "If you want to lift yourself up, lift someone else up." -Booker T. Washington "I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed." -Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery "I learned the lesson that great men cultivate love, and that only little men cherish a spirit of hatred. I learned that assistance given to the weak makes the one who gives it strong; and that oppression of the unfortunate makes one weak." -Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery "True friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation." -George Washington "Show me a man with both feet on the ground, and I'll show you a man who can't put his pants on." -Arthur K. Watson "Things are never quite as scary when you have a best friend." -Bill Watterson "It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning." -Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes "The more a soul conforms to the sanity of others, the more does it become insane." -Mary Webb "The greatest right in the world is the right to be wrong." -Harry Weinberger "Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo." -H. G. Wells "Let your love be stronger than your anger. Learn to compromise, for it is better to bend a little than to break. Believe the best. People have a way of living up to your opinion of them. Remember that true friendship is the basis for any lasting relationship. The person you marry deserves the same courtesies and kindness you bestow on your friends." -Jane Wells, marriage advice from 1886 "I myself have never been able to find out what precisely feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat..." -Rebecca West, 1913 "The curve is more powerful than the sword." -Mae West "When I'm good, I'm very good, but when I'm bad, I'm better." -Mae West "That's the good thing about depression—you get your rest." -from When Harry Met Sally "We never really grow up, we only learn how to act in public." -Bryan White "The easiest way for your children to learn about money is for you not to have any." -Katherine Whitehorn "Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive." -Harold Whitman "O you whom I often and silently come where you are, that I may be with you, As I walk by your side, or sit near, or remain in the same room with you, Little you know the subtle electric fire that for your sake is playing within me." -Walt Whitman "To me, every hour of the light and dark is a miracle." -Walt Whitman "This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body..." -Walt Whitman "I celebrate myself, I sing myself, And every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I and this mystery here we stand, Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am. I believe in you, my soul." -Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself" "For all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: 'It might have been.'" -John Greenleaf Whittier "Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but she did it backwards and in high heels." -Faith Whittlesey "Let every man sing his own song in life." -John A. Widtsoe "You'll try to reveal what should remain hidden, you'll try to incite people to learn from the past and rebel, but they will refuse to believe you. They will not listen to you...You'll possess the truth, you already do; but it's the truth of a madman." -Elie Wiesel "Shared grief is nothing and it comes to nothing, sharing grief is nothing any animal is built to do." -Marianne Wiggins, John Dollar "They were always getting lost, those two, because they had one too many senses of direction." -Marianne Wiggins, John Dollar "To love is to accept that one might die another death before one dies one's own." -Marianne Wiggins, John Dollar "If I had a spell of magic I would make this enchantment for you a burgundy heart-shaped medallion with a window that you could look through so that when all the mirrors are angry with your faults, and all you must do you could peek through that heart-shaped medallion ...and see you from my point of view." -David Wilcox "So many gods, so many creeds, so many paths that wind and wind while just the art of being kind, is all the sad world needs." -Ella Wheeler Wilcox "Talk happiness. The world is sad enough without your woe. No path is wholly rough." -Ella Wheeler Wilcox "Whatever comes, this too shall pass away." -Ella Wheeler Wilcox "Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught." -Oscar Wilde "Only the shallow know themselves." -Oscar Wilde "If there is anything in the world more annoying than having people talk about you, it is certainly having no one talk about you." -Oscar Wilde "I am not young enough to know everything." -Oscar Wilde "Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known." -Oscar Wilde "Ultimately, the bond of companionship, whether in marriage or friendship, is conversation." -Oscar Wilde "An inordinate passion for pleasure is the secret of remaining young." -Oscar Wilde "We are all of us in the gutter, but some of us are looking up at the stars." -Oscar Wilde "Real friends stab you in the front." -Oscar Wilde "What is interesting about people in good society is the mask that each one of them wears, not the reality that lies behind the mask." -Oscar Wilde "What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing." -Oscar Wilde "There is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face." -Ben Williams "If you ask almost anyone, they'll tell you they are an outsider." -Bett Williams, Girl Walking Backwards "Puking is great bonding, holding your friend's head over the toilet seat is kind of an intimate act." -Bett Williams, Girl Walking Backwards "I fit everything I'd ever been into that gesture, all my desire, all my sadness, my thoughts on God, into that one image, the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen." -Bett Williams, Girl Walking Backwards "Such days stand apart from the rest, like the sky on the Fourth of July, a rare occasion of night swimming in a lighted pool, a day filled with light upon light. It's the Wheel of Fortune, a good day usually follows a horrible one. It goes the other way around, too, but why ruin a good day with thinking about how bad the next one is destined to be? All things good that we've ever done or thought are rewarded on the good days, as if the plants, the sidewalks, the sky, the strangers are all one thing saying thank-you to us." -Bett Williams, Girl Walking Backwards "It's the worst kind of abandonment, when someone lets you be an asshole." -Bett Williams, Girl Walking Backwards "Parents need to be protected from the truth of their children's lives." -Bett Williams, Girl Walking Backwards "I wonder if it's possible to ever really know a person. I think we decide who a person is in the first few seconds of seeing them. It's a pure moment of recognition, almost animal-like. Over time things get piled on that image, the stuff of personality, psychology, and then I think that maybe I never knew them at all. A maze begins, a process of getting to know them and you have to really love a person to walk it." -Bett Williams, Girl Walking Backwards "Sometimes you can like someone so much that you want to pretend nothing in your life happened before you met them. You say nothing about the past because you want the person to erase you and remake you into something completely new." -Bett Williams, Girl Walking Backwards "And the ones that know you so well are the ones that can swallow you whole." -Dar Williams "Sometimes life gives us lessons sent in ridiculous packaging." -Dar Williams "Well, the light that stopped the night felt like forgiveness to you As the garbage trucks came bustling through their rounds You stared at the pictures on your wall and all the postcards from your friends As you heard the birds and old familiar sounds And that's when you knew this world can't be saved, only discovered And you knew things could be different than before And you will not be alone anymore." -Dar Williams "I could cut you off with a shoulder of stone Smoke all night and leave the party alone Screw myself with an inscrutable pout But I just want you to come figure me out I don't want to be another mystery" -Dar Williams, "Another Mystery" "So I'll keep you wondering what time I'm arriving You'll drive me crazy with your backseat driving And I'll talk in my sleep, and you'll steal all the covers We'll argue it out, and we'll call ourselves lovers And I'll stay in my body, and you'll stay in your own Cause we know that we're born and we're dying alone" -Dar Williams, "In Love But Not At Peace" "Sometimes I see myself fine, sometimes I need a witness. And I like the whole truth, but there are nights I only need forgiveness." -Dar Williams, "My Friends" "Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand." -Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit "If you think nobody cares if you're alive, try missing a couple of car payments." -Earl Wilson "Nothing is quite so annoying as to have someone go right on talking when you are interrupting." -Earl Wilson "You are here to enable the world. You are here to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, and with a finer spirit of hope and acheivement. You are here to enrich the world." -Woodrow Wilson "Saddest of all are the women who were brought up to believe that self-sacrifice is the highest female virtue. They made the sacrifice, often willingly, and they are still waiting for the blessing." -Jeanette Winterson "When I am alone, and the experience, the emotion, the event, was mine and mine alone, how can I say for certain that I have not invented the entire episode, including the faithful memory of it?" -Jeanette Winterson "Why is the mind incapable of deciding its own subject matter? Why when we desperately want to think of one thing to we invariably think of another?" -Jeanette Winterson "You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the specters in books. You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me. You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself." -from With Honors "No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness." -Mary Wollstonecraft "You have babies to teach and to learn...You teach them to love dogs and sparrows and God. You learn to love the world all over again, the whole emerging world where a spider walking up a phone pole is a great big mystery. You teach them to be kind to others, you teach them to vote, you teach them a little respect for people they don't understand, and then by God's good grace you wind up teaching yourself the same lessons you learned as a kid or didn't learn or forgot, and then the world is just a little bit better for everyone. The world gets better...because you're willing to scrape out your blackened insides and fill yourself back up with the bright yellow goodness of a new pair of eyes, a second chance to stumble your way through this vale of tears we call life." -Monica Wood, My Only Story "Until this moment I had believed forgiveness to be a special virtue, a beneficence God expected of good people. But it wasn't that at all. Forgiveness was an instinct, a desperate impulse to stay connected to the people you needed, no matter what their betrayals." -Monica Wood, My Only Story "Despite the mountain of knowledge I have yet to acquire on the subject of human nature, I know one thing for sure: People who being sentences with 'You know me' don't know bingo about themselves." -Monica Wood, My Only Story "If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about other people." -Virginia Woolf "Then it was all over till 1999. What remained was a sense of the comfort which we get used to, of plenty light and colour...yet when it became established, one rather missed the sense of its being a relief and a respite, which one had had when it came back after the darkness." -Virginia Woolf, upon witnessing the total eclipse of the sun in 1927 "Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size." -Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own "Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top." -Virginia Woolf "There is no such thing in anyone's life as an unimportant day." -Alexander Woollcott "That best portion of a good man's life, His little, nameless, unremembered acts Of kindness and of love." -William Wordsworth "Thanks to the human heart by which we live, Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears, To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." -Wordsworth, "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality" "Black holes are where God divided by zero." -Steven Wright "I start to get the feeling that something is really wrong. Like all the drugs put together...can no longer combat whatever it is that was wrong with me in the first place. I feel like a defective model, like I came off the assembly line flat-out fucked and my parents should have taken me back for repairs before the warranty ran out." -Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation "I start to think there really is no cure for depression, that happiness is an ongoing battle, and I wonder if it isn't one I'll have to fight for as long as I live. I wonder if it's worth it." -Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation "...what I really need, what I'm really looking for, is not something I can articulate. It's nonverbal: I need love. I need the thing that happens when your brain shuts off and your heart turns on. And I know it's around me somewhere, but I just can't feel it." -Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation "That's the one thing I want to make clear about depression: It's got nothing at all to do with life. In the course of life, there is sadness and pain and sorrow, all of which, in their right time and season, are normal—unpleasant, but normal. Depression is in an altogether different zone because it involved a complete absence: absence of affect, absence of feeling, absence of response, absence of interest. The pain you feel in the course of a major clinical depression is an attempt on nature's part (nature, after all, abhors a vacuum) to fill up the empty space. But for all intents and purposes, the deeply depressed are just the walking, waking dead." -Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation "...if you ask anyone in the throes of depression how he got there, to pin down the turning point, he'll never know. There is a classic moment in The Sun Also Rises when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt, and all he can say in response is, 'Gradually and then suddenly.' When someone asks how I lost my mind, that is all I can say too." -Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation "That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful." -Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation "Homesickness is just a state of mind for me. I'm always missing someone or someplace or something, I'm always trying to get back to some imaginary somewhere. My life has been one long longing." -Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation "No one who had never been depressed like me could imagine that the pain could 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 "Nothing in my life ever seemed to fade away or take its rightful place among the pantheon of experiences that constituted my eighteen years. It was all still with me, the storage space in my brain crammed with vivid memories, packed and piled like photographs and old dresses in my grandmother's bureau. I wasn't just the madwoman in the attic—I was the attic itself. The past was all over me, all under me, all inside me." -Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation "That's the thing about depression: A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight. But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it's impossible to ever see the end. The fog is like a cage without a key." -Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation "...whatever my gifts, the pieces of good buried inside and under so much that I feel is bad, is wrong, is twisted, are less clear than the ability to hit a ball with a bat and break the scoreboard or do a triple pirouette in the air on ice. My gifts are for life itself, for an unfortunately astute understanding of all the cruelty and pain in the world." -Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation "I know I can do so much more than this, I know that I could be a life force, could love with a heart full of soul, could feel with the power that flies men to the moon. I know that if I could just get out from under this depression, there is so much I could do besides cry in front of the TV on a Saturday night." -Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation "I wonder if any of them can tell from just looking at me that all I am is the sum total of my pain, a raw woundedness so extreme that it might be terminal. It might be terminal velocity, the speed of the sound of a girl falling down to a place from where she can't be retrieved. What if I am stuck down here for good?" -Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation "Sometimes, I get so consumed by depression that it is hard to believe that the whole world doesn't stop and suffer with me." -Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation "What do you do with pain so bad it has no redeeming value? It cannot even be alchemized into art, into words, into something you can chalk up to an interesting experience because the pain itself, its intensity, is so great that there is no way to objectify it or push it outside or find its beauty within. That is the pain I'm feeling now. It's so bad, it's useless. The only lesson I will ever derive from this pain is how bad pain can be." -Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation "You know you've completely descended into madness when the matter of shampoo has ascended to philosophical heights." -Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation "Years of depression have robbed me of that—well, that give, that elasticity that everyone else calls perspective." -Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation "You have your shit and I have mine—let's just hold hands while we wade through our separate piles" -Amy Yurk, The Kind of Love that Saves You "At times, things still seem so peripheral around me; when I turn to look at something, it jerks out of my line of sight. I can't always bring the world into focus. I know life is going on: Cars are being washed, people are going to work, houses are being built, other babies are being born, but it isn't always possible to reconcile myself to the reality of these happening. It's the strangest sensation of disconnection, as if I'm existing on a slightly separate plane from the rest of the world." -Amy Yurk, The Kind of Love that Saves You "...if you believe in those you love, they'll be there, right around the bend, ready to help catch you if you fall." -Amy Yurk, The Kind of Love that Saves You "So, when Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden, if you go for all these fairy tales, that 'evil' woman convinced the man to eat the apple, but the apple came from the Tree of Knowledge. And the punishment that was then handed down, the woman gets to bleed and the guy's got to go to work, is the result of a man desiring, because his woman suggested that it would be a good idea, that he get all the knowledge that was supposedly the property and domain of God. So, that right away sets up Christianity as an anti-intellectual religion. You never want to be that smart. If you're a woman, it's going to be running down your leg, and if you're a guy, you're going to be in the salt mines for the rest of your life. So, just be a dumb fuck and you'll all go to heaven. That's the subtext of Christianity." -Frank Zappa "If you asked me what I came into this world to do, I will tell you: I came to live out loud." -Emile Zola	new unknown & proverbs a~d e~j k~o p~s t~z