#diction

Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living. You said I killed you--haunt me then. The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe--I know that ghosts have wandered the earth. Be with me always--take any form--drive me mad. Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! It is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul! ↗

— Emily Brontë

#haunting #heathcliff #love #malediction #restlessness

He was lovable the way a child is lovable, and he was capable of returning love with a childlike purity. If love is nevertheless excluded from his work, it's because he never quite felt that he deserved to receive it. He was a lifelong prisoner on the island of himself. What looked like gentle contours from a distance were in fact sheer cliffs. Sometimes only a little of him was crazy, sometimes nearly all of him, but, as an adult, he was never entirely not crazy. What he'd seen of his id while trying to escape his island prison by way of drugs and alcohol, only to find himself even more imprisoned by addiction, seems never to have ceased to be corrosive of his belief in his lovability. Even after he got clean, even decades after his late-adolescent suicide attempt, even after his slow and heroic construction of a life for himself, he felt undeserving. And this feeling was intertwined, ultimately to the point of indistinguishability, with the thought of suicide, which was the one sure way out of his imprisonment; surer than addiction, surer than fiction, and surer, finally, than love. ↗

— Jonathan Franzen

#david-foster-wallace #desperation #love #mental-illness #self-confidence

Have you ever gotten to a point where you looked at your own life, thought "Fu** this," and reached for the economy-sized Valium? Ah, suicide. So dark and seductive. ↗

— Rebecca O'Donnell

#addiction #hope #memoir #suicide #life

Sitting on the train I watch the scenery speeding by, notice a cobweb in the top corner of the window, undulating with a gentle breeze I can’t feel. I lean back in my seat and take my book out of the carrier bag. Turning it over in my hand, it feels warm. It feels how I want to feel; full of knowledge, full of the future. The time I’ve spent staying in bed smoking dope I’ve been hibernating, recuperating and gaining strength. I’m weak socially, but being away from other drug users has made me resilient. It’s allowed my mind and body to heal and mend. As if the winter is over, I’ve come out stronger now. I’m on my own. I have the choice of what to do with my life. I’m going to stay clean. I’m going to be the woman I can be. ↗

— Christine Lewry

#drugs #heroin #parenting-teens #true-stories-drugs #true-story

I'm an alien in my own world, a writer without words, a musician without a piano, a magician without a wand. I am fooled by infinite words that rush in my blood, yet imprisoned by the very thoughts of silence. I'm a gray green fallow leaf on trees and abandoned on the streets, a never-ending spring season and an eternal autumn. I'm the golden of the sun and the silver of the moon, the fog of dawn and the amber of dusk. I'm the white and the red flag , the obedient and the rebel. I am the coward in the brave, and the child in the man. I am, but a writer. ↗

— Nema Al-Araby

#suffering #writer #musician

Having a moment of clarity was one thing; I'd had moments like that before. It had to be followed with a dedicated push of daily exercise. It's a trite axiom, but practice DOES make perfect. If you want to be a strong swimmer or an accomplished musician, you have to practice. It's the same with sobriety, though the stakes are higher. If you don't practice your program every day, you're putting yourself in a position where you could fly out of the orbit one more time. ↗

— Anthony Kiedis

#musician

Greek was very much a live language, and a language still unconscious of grammar, not, like ours, dominated by definitions and trained upon dictionaries. ↗

— Gilbert Murray

#dictionaries #dominated #grammar #greek #language

A great memory does not make a mind, any more than a dictionary is a piece of literature. ↗

— John Henry Newman

#dictionary #does #great #literature #make

I'm fascinated by the ways in which people express themselves, because their responses are often counter to what they're actually feeling. Like when they're frightened, they tend to freeze. When they're angry, it doesn't always come out as volume. There are wonderful contradictions in the way that people express their emotions. ↗

— Edward Norton

#always #angry #because #come #contradictions

Look up the word role in the dictionary and you'll see it means playing a part. That's why I call myself a real model. ↗

— Shaquille O'Neal

#dictionary #i #look #means #model