Joseph Patterson

“I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“Do you shovel to survive, or survive to shovel?”
― Kōbō Abe, The Woman in the Dunes