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“Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These were our young questions, and young answers were revealed. It leads to each other. We become ourselves.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Yet you could feel a vibration in the air, a sense of hastening. It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was. Now men had walked upon it, rubber treads on a pearl of the gods. Perhaps it was an awareness of time passing, the last summer of the decade. Sometimes I just wanted to raise my hands and stop. But stop what? Maybe just growing up.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Name one hero who was happy."
I considered. Heracles went mad and killed his family; Theseus lost his bride and father; Jason's children and new wife were murdered by his old; Bellerophon killed the Chimera but was crippled by the fall from Pegasus' back.
"You can't." He was sitting up now, leaning forward.
"I can't."
"I know. They never let you be famous AND happy." He lifted an eyebrow. "I'll tell you a secret."
"Tell me." I loved it when he was like this.
"I'm going to be the first." He took my palm and held it to his. "Swear it."
"Why me?"
"Because you're the reason. Swear it."
"I swear it," I said, lost in the high color of his cheeks, the flame in his eyes.
"I swear it," he echoed.
We sat like that a moment, hands touching. He grinned.
"I feel like I could eat the world raw.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“When he died, all things soft and beautiful and bright would be buried with him.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“In the darkness, two shadows, reaching through the hopeless, heavy dusk. Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood like a hundred golden urns pouring out of the sun.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“I might be better as an idea, you said, and it was hard not to agree - everyone is better in theory.”
― Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays

“I've had enemies so intense that it felt romantic, so mutual it felt like love.”
― Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays

“I alternate between deciding I deserve the world and deciding I deserve nothing.”
― Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays

“I’ve always liked men who look as if they’re from another time.”
― Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays

“There is an island where former versions of myself gallop around on all fours. Untouched, the island populates itself; the versions share what they’ve learned. They never run out of things to talk about by the fire that the latest version knows how to start. If Joseph Delmont came to the island intending to trap a tiger, he might find one. The version might go willingly, without a fight. The island feeds off itself. I wait to be discovered.”
― Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays

“I was so lonely I began regarding my broken heart as the most beautiful thing in my life. Soon after that, it was gone, too.”
― Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays

“I told you I was moved to tears by a speech a former president gave. It's not that I love politics or even the president--I just love to be convinced, to be guided into feeling exactly what the speaker wants me to feel. I give myself up to oration, to God, which is you when I let it be,”
― Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays

“With my eyes closed, I heard him say, I don't love you anymore...I could hear the words but I couldn't quite access them, couldn't quite accept that it was me living my life at that moment. Surely he was telling this to someone else, surely we would be together forever, the way we'd talked about. This was before I needed passion and wildness and to be on the verge of every emotion at once—I wanted safety and beauty, and he looked like Bob Dylan in the middle of the desert, and I thought that was what the love of my life could be.”
― Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays

“I'd been trying to turn my life into art, but I wasn't sure what form it should take. I played guitar with half-callused fingers, I found a discarded headboard on the side of the road and tied a hundred rope knots around it. I rented a studio so I could feel like an artist, and that worked for a while. I taped parts of essays to the wall in order to liberate them from my hard drive--to see them as whole. Rearranging them felt good, throwing them away felt even better. I was getting closer to saving only the most rapturous moments of my life. I disposed of memories until everything served me.”
― Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays

“I suppose most things in a person's life are good for a while, even if that doesn't last very long. Maybe that is why, even after something has gone wrong, we spend so much time trying to fix it. Because we remember when it wasn't broken.”
― Claire Legrand, Some Kind of Happiness

“I start to worry that I should be saying something. Most of the time I think I could be perfectly content without saying a single word, but no one else seems to function that way. There is so much talking in the world, and so much expectation to talk, even if you do not feel like talking. I find it overwhelming.”
― Claire Legrand, Some Kind of Happiness

“If I am a puzzle, this is the moment in which I find the first corner piece. There is still a lot of work to do; I still have a thousand pieces of myself to fit into place. But everyone knows you're supposed to find the corners first. They are the beginning.”
― Claire Legrand, Some Kind of Happiness

“I feel like we are playing the Quiet Game. When you're tired of playing and want to shout out all the words you've been keeping inside you, but you absolutely cannot lose. So instead you sit, and bite down on everything screaming inside you, and wait.”
― Claire Legrand, Some Kind of Happiness

“Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. I knew in my heart—this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then—that when I'd slept enough, I'd be okay. I'd be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I would have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Oh, sleep. Nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“It was proof that I had not always been completely alone in this world. But I think I was also holding on to the loss, to the emptiness of the house itself, as though to affirm that it was better to be alone than to be stuck with people who were supposed to love you, yet couldn’t.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“I did crave attention, but I refused to humiliate myself by asking for it.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“The notion of my future suddenly snapped into focus: it didn't exist yet.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind. Nor hath love's mind of any judgment taste; Wings and no eyes figure unheedy haste: And therefore is love said to be a child, Because in choice he is so oft beguil'd.”
― William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

“Doubt thou the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”
― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“You speak an infinite deal of nothing.”
― William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice