Lauren

“People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in the ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“Do you hate people?”

“I don't hate them...I just feel better when they're not around.”
― Charles Bukowski, Barfly

“You never come back, not all the way. Always there is an odd distance between you and the people you love and the people you meet, a barrier thin as the glass of a mirror, you never come all the way out of the mirror; you stand, for the rest of your life, with one foot in this world and no one in another, where everything is upside down and backward and sad.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche