"You are half-deliberately, half desperately cutting off your grip on creative life. You cannot love, even if you knew how to begin to love. Every thought is a devil, a hell--if you could do a lot of things over again, how differently you would do them. The world bangs door after door in your face, numbly, bitterly. You have forgotten the secret you knew, once--once of being joyous, of laughing, of opening doors."
--Sylvia Plath--"The Journals of Sylvia Plath"

"Look at that ugly dead mask here and do not forget it. It is a chalk mask with dead dry poison behind it, like the death angel. It is what I was this fall, and what I never want to be again. The pouting disconsolate mouth, the flat, bored, numb, expressionless eyes: symptoms of the foul decay within."
--Sylvia Plath-- "The Journals of Sylvia Plath"

"We only begin to live when we concieve life as a tragedy."
--W.B. Yeats

"It is easy to slip into a parallel universe. There are so many of them: worlds of the insane, the criminal, the crippled, the dying, perhaps of the dead as well. These worlds exist alongside this world and resemble it, but are not in it....Most people pass over incrementally, making a series of perforations in the membrane between here and there until an opening exists. And who can resist an opening? In the parallel universe the laws of physics are suspended. What goes up does not necessarily come down; a body at rest does not tend to stay at rest; and not every action can be counted on to provoke an equal and opposite reaction. Time, too, is different. It may run in circles, flow backward, skip about from now to then. The very arrangement of molecules is fluid: Tables can be clocks; faces, flowers. These are facts you find out later, though. Another odd feature of the parallel universe is that although it is invisible from this side, once you are in it you can easily see the world you came from. Sometimes the world you came from looks huge and menacing, quivering, alluring, a-spin and shining in it's orbit. Either way, it can't be discounted. Every window on Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco."
--Susanna Kaysen--"Girl, Interrupted" (the book..not the movie)

"There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about eachother, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction--every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and excitement at about a million miles an hour."
--Sylvia Plath--"The Bell Jar"

"With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life. And when it is gone, it is dead. But you can't start over with each new second, you have to judge by what is dead. It's like quicksand...hopeless from the start. A story, a picture, can renew sensation a little, but not enough, not enough. Nothing is real except the present, and already I feel the weight of centuries smothering me. Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don't want to die."
--Sylvia Plath--"The Journals of Sylvia Plath"

"...Fifteen thousand years...of what? We're still nothing but animals."
--Eddie Cohen--"The Journals of Sylvia Plath" (a friend of Plath's)

"Reality leaves a lot to the imagination."
--John Lennon

"Let's face it: I'm scared, scared and frozen. First, I guess I'm afraid for myself...the old primitive urge for survival. It's getting so I live every moment with terrible intensity. It all flowed over me with a screaming ache of pain...remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I've taken for granted. When you feel that this may be good-bye, the last time, it hits you harder."
--Sylvia Plath

"There is so much hurt in this game of searching for a mate, of testing, trying. And you realize suddenly that you forgot it was a game, and turn away in tears."
--Sylvia Plath

"I can't decieve myself out of the bare stark realization that no matter how enthusiastic you are, no matter how sure that character is fate, nothing is real, past or future. And if you have no past or future, which, after all, is all that the present is made of, why then you may as well dispose of the empty shell of present and commit suicide.
--Sylvia Plath--"The Journals of Sylvia Plath"

"What avail are good looks? To grab temporary security? What avail are brains? Merely to say "I have seen; I have comprehended?" I hate myself for having to sit here and be torn between I know not what within me. Here I am, a bundle of past recollections and future dreams, knotted up in a reasonably attractive bundle of flesh."
--Sylvia Plath

"And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter--they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship--but the loneliness of the soul in it's appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering."
--Sylvia Plath--"The Journals of Sylvia Plath"

"I desire the things which will destroy me in the end."
--Sylvia Plath

"We wish the sun could make us young and beautiful, we wish our clothes could glisten and ripple against our skins, most of all, we wish that everyone we knew could be brightened simply by our looking at them."
--Susanna Kaysen--"Girl, Interrupted"

"Suicide is a form of murder--premeditated murder. It isn't something you do the first time you think of doing it. It takes getting used to. And you need the means, the oppurtunity, the motive. A succesful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind. It's important to cultivate detachment. One way to do this is to practice imagining yourself dead, or in the process of dying. If there's a window, you must imagine your body falling out of the window. If there's a knife, you must imagine the knife piercing your skin. If there's a train coming, you must imagine your torso flattened under it's wheels. These exercises are necessary to achieving the proper distance. The motive is paramount. Without a strong movtive, you're sunk. My motives are weak: an American-history paper I didn't want to write and the question I'd asked months earlier, Why not kill myself? Dead, I wouldn't have to write the paper. Nor would I have to keep debating the question. The debate was wearing me out. Once you've posed that question, it won't go away. I think many people kill themselves simlply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't. Anything I thought or did was immediately drawn into the debate. Made a stupid remark--why not kill myself? Missed the bus--better put an end to it all. Even the good got in there. I liked that movie--maybe I shouldn't kill myself. Actually it was only part of myself I wanted to kill: the part that wanted to kill herself, that dragged me into the suicide debate and made every window, kitchen implement, and subway station a rehearsal for tragedy. I didn't figure this out, though, until after I'd swallowed the fifty aspirin."
--Susanna Kaysen--"Girl, Interrupted"

"Life is a series of choices, to make the right ones only means you could deal with the consequences."
--Missy Noll

"Heroes are just ordinary people who do extraordinary things in extraordinary times."
--U-571 (the movie)

"She speaks, her mouth opens and sounds come out."
--Carrie 2

"Live fast, die young."
--James Dean

"Dream as if you'll live forever--Live as if you'll die today."
--James Dean

To me God and Satan are just two words, like Marilyn Manson."
--Marilyn Manson

"To the person in the Bell Jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream."
--Sylvia Plath

"If I tried to kill myself would you sharpen the knife or would you bite the bullet before it hit my head? If I was hanging by a moment would you cut the rope or give me pills until I choked?"
--Missy Noll "I'm the living cliche"

"I think you wanna poop Daisy....I think it's been days..."
--Angelina Jolie "Lisa Rowe" in Girl, Interrupted

"Bawk Bawk Bawk Bawk..."
--Angelina Jolie "Lisa Rowe" in Girl, Interrupted

"The worst part isn't that you love him, it's that he will never care."
--Matt Sunday

"Nothing was or wasn't. Everything was an illusion and reality..."
--Nate Wallace

The feathers fell softly down his long, straight brown hair. His war paint burns in my mind. Holding a spear and a blue jay at his side, he spoke: "I am the skeleton lurking in your closet: I am the drip that never leaves your faucet: I am the jackal that feeds on your garbage: I am the scarecrow that guards my people's harvest: I am the fox protecting his family: I am the wolf in the shadows that you never see: I am the coyote that tricks you into self-pain: I am the hole in your umbrella that shows you the rain." He disappeared, then the prophet's words and I became one, and the blue jay flew into me and we became one. As I woke from my vision, I had a new purpose. I found that my spirit had transformed from larvae and my wings broke through the cocoon as light shined on my wings for the first time, opening my eyes forever."
--Nate Wallace

"The blue jay is gone to whisper to me of what we have lost--not to remind me that it's just forgotten...Life still thrives on the fruit that is rotten."
--Nate Wallace

"She was the one...I know that now...But I pushed her away..."
--Silent Bob (Chasing Amy)

"A happy person is not a person in a certain set of circumstances, but rather a person with a certain set of attitudes."
--Hugh Downs

"That best portion of a good man's life, His little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love."
--William Wordsworth

Most people are about as happy as they make their minds up to be."
--Abraham Lincoln