The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac

All the aching muscles and the hunger in my belly were bad enough, and the surroundant dark rocks, the fact that there is nothing there to soothe you with kisses and soft words, but just to be sitting there meditating and praying for the world with another earnest young man—‘twere good enough to have been born just to die, as we all are. Something will come of it in the Milky Ways of eternity stretching in front of all our phantom unlaundered eyes, friends.

Like Life by Lorrie Moore

She knew there were only small joys in life - the big ones were too complicated to be joys when you got all through - and once you realized that, it took a lot of the pressure off.  You could put the pressure aside, like a child’s game, its box ripped to flaps at the corners.  You could stick it in some old closet and forget about it.

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

Then he suddenly saw clearly that he was leading a strange life, that he was doing many things that were only a game, that he was quite cheerful and sometimes experienced pleasure, but that real life was flowing past him and did not touch him. Like a player who plays with his ball, he played with business, with the people around him, watched them, derived amusement from them; but with his heart, with his real nature, he was not there.

The Earth Turned to Bring Us Closer by Eugenio Montejo

The earth turned to bring us closer,


it spun on itself and within us, 
and

finally joined us together in this dream


as written in the Symposium.
 Nights

passed by, snowfalls and solstices;
 time

passed in minutes and millennia.
 An ox

cart that was on its way to Nineveh
 arrived

in Nebraska.
 A rooster was singing some

distance from the world, 
in one of the

thousand pre–lives of our fathers.
 The

earth was spinning with its music
 carrying

us on board;
 it didn't stop turning a single

moment 
as if so much love, so much that's

miraculous 
was only an adagio written long

ago 
in the Symposium’s score.

Silas Marner by George Eliot

It’s like the night and the morning, and the sleeping and the waking, and the rain and the harvest—one goes and the other comes, and we know nothing how nor where. We may strive and scrat and fend, but it’s little we can do after all—the big things come and go with no striving or our’n—they do, that they do.

The Fiddler in the Subway by Gene Weingarten

Humor is designed to deliver joy to others, but there is something about it that permits—even demands—an emotional distance from your subject. Part of it is that humor often requires a bloodless hostility; laughs usually come at the expense of something or someone. And part of it involves the nature of humor itself—it exists, on the deepest level, as a perverse denial of pain and fear. No one has ever explained this more succinctly or ingeniously than Dave Barry did in a tiny essay he wrote for a newspaper magazine I edited in the 1980s. I had asked him to create a definition of “sense of humor.” He took three days. This is what he wrote: “A sense of humor is a measurement of the extent to which you realize that you are trapped in a world almost entirely devoid of reason. Laughter is how you release the anxiety you feel at this knowledge.”

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

That wasn’t it.  Something, someone, some spirit was pursuing all of us across the desert of life and was bound to catch us before we reached heaven.  Naturally, now that I look back on it, this is only death:  death will overtake us before heaven.  The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death.  But who wants to die?

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excrutiating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision. Few, if any, survive their teens. Most surrender to the vague but murderous pressure of adult conformity. It becomes easier to die and avoid conflicts than to maintain a constant battle with the superior forces of maturity.

Farewell Ungrateful Traitor by John Dryden

Farewell, ungrateful traitor! 


Farewell, my perjur'd swain! 


Let never injur'd woman 


Believe a man again. 


The pleasure of possessing 


Surpasses all expressing, 


But 'tis too short a blessing, 


And love too long a pain.

'Tis easy to deceive us 


In pity of your pain, 


But when we love, you leave us 


To rail at you in vain. 


Before we have descried it, 


There is no joy beside it, 


But she that once has tried it 


Will never love again.

The passion you pretended 


Was only to obtain, 


But once the charm is ended, 


The charmer you disdain. 


Your love by ours we measure 


Till we have lost our treasure, 


But dying is a pleasure 


When living is a pain.

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

Some of the best things are done by those with nowhere to turn, by those who don't have time, by those who truly understand the word helpless. They dispense with the calculation of risk and profit, they take no thought for the future, they're forced at spearpoint into the present tense. Thrown over a precipice, you fall or else you fly; you clutch at any hope, however unlikely; however—if I may use such an overworked word--miraculous. What we mean by that is, Against all odds. 

The Plague by Albert Camus

The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.

Chronicles by Bob Dylan

The thermometer was creeping up to about ten below. My breath froze in the air, but I didn’t feel the cold. I was heading for the fantastic lights. No doubt about it. Could it be that I was being deceived? Not likely. I don’t think I had enough imagination to be deceived; had no false hope, either. I’d come from a long ways off and had started from a long ways down. But now destiny was about to manifest itself. I felt like it was looking right at me and nobody else.

Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck

Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there's time, the Bastard Time. The end of life is now not so terribly far away—you can see it the way you see the finish line when you come into the stretch—and your mind says, “Have I worked enough?  Have I eaten enough?  Have I loved enough?” All of these, of course, are the foundation of man’s greatest curse, and perhaps his greatest glory. “What has my life meant so far, and what can it mean in the time left to me?”  And now we’re coming to the wicked, poisoned dart: “What have I contributed in the Great Ledger?  What am I worth?” And this isn’t vanity or ambition. Men seem to be born with a debt they can never pay no matter how hard they try. It piles up ahead of them. Man owes something to man. If he ignores the debt it poisons him, and if he tries to make payments the debt only increases, and the quality of his gift is the measure of the man.


The Stranger by Albert Camus

In the darkness of my mobile prison I could make out one by one, as if from the depths of my exhaustion, all the familiar sounds of a town I loved and of a certain time of day when I used to feel happy. The cries of the newspaper vendors in the already languid air, the last few birds in the square, the shouts of the sandwich sellers, the screech of the streetcars turning sharply through the upper town, and that hum in the sky before night engulfs the port: all this mapped out for me a route I knew so well before going to prison and which now I traveled blind. Yes, it was the hour when, a long time ago, I was perfectly content. What awaited me back then was always a night of easy, dreamless sleep. And yet something had changed, since it was back to my cell that I went to wait for the next day…as if familiar paths traced in summer skies could lead as easily to prison as to the sleep of the innocent. 

The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac

All the aching muscles and the hunger in my belly were bad enough, and the surroundant dark rocks, the fact that there is nothing there to soothe you with kisses and soft words, but just to be sitting there meditating and praying for the world with another earnest young man - ‘twere good enough to have been born just to die, as we all are.  Something will come of it in the Milky Ways of eternity stretching in front of all our phantom unlaundered eyes, friends.

The Journey by Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice —
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do —
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse

There are a good many people as the same kind as Harry. Many artists are of his kind. These persons all have two souls, two beings within them. There is God and the devil in them; the mother’s blood and the father’s; the capacity for happiness and the capacity for suffering; and in just such a state of enmity and entanglement towards and within each other as were the world and man in Harry….thus, like a precious, fleeting foam over the sea of suffering arise all those works of art, in which a single individual lifts himself for an hour so high above his personal destiny that his happiness shines like a star and appears to all who see it as something eternal and as a happiness of their own.

Do Not Stand At My Grave And Weep by Mary Elizabeth Frye

Do not stand at my grave and weep,

I am not there, I do not sleep.

I am in a thousand winds that blow,

I am the softly falling snow.

I am the gentle showers of rain,

I am the fields of ripening grain.

I am in the morning hush,

I am in the graceful rush

Of beautiful birds in circling flight,

I am the starshine of the night.

I am in the flowers that bloom,

I am in a quiet room.

I am in the birds that sing,

I am in each lovely thing.

Do not stand at my grave and cry,

I am not there. I do not die.

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was—I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that’s why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon.

Letters to A Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

Things aren’t all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

The sun and the moon had always shone; the rivers had always flowed and the bees had hummed, but in previous times all this had been nothing to Siddhartha but a fleeting and illusive veil before his eyes, regarded with distrust, condemned to be disregarded and ostracized from the thoughts because it was not reality, because reality lay on the other side of the visible. But now his eyes lingered on this side; he saw and recognized the visible and he sought his place in the world. He did not seek reality; his goal was not on any other side. The world was beautiful when looked at this way - without any seeking, so simple, so childlike.  The moon and the stars were beautiful, the brook, the shore, the forest and rock, the goat and the golden beetle, the flower and butterfly were beautiful.  It was beautiful and pleasant to go through the world like that, so childlike, so awakened, so concerned with the immediate, without any distrust. 

…All this had always been and he had never seen it; he was never present.  Now he was present and belonged to it.  Through his eyes he saw light and shadows; through his mind he was aware of moon and stars. 

The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck

It isn’t true that there’s a community of light, a bonfire of the world. Everyone carries his own, his lonely own. My light is out. There’s nothing blacker than a wick. It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.

Still I Rise by Maya Angelou

 

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops.
Weakened by my soulful cries.

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don't you take it awful hard
'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines
Diggin' in my own back yard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I'll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history's shame
I rise
Up from a past that's rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

Alice's Adventures In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

She would picture herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood: and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago; and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days.

To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway

How do you get through the nights if you can’t sleep? I guess you find out like you find out how it feels to lose your husband. I guess you find out all right. I guess you find out everything in this goddamned life.  I guess you do all right. I guess I’m probably finding out right now. You just go dead inside and everything is easy. You just get dead like most people are most of the time. I guess that’s how it is all right. I guess that’s just about what happens to you. Well, I’ve got a good start. I’ve got a good start if that’s what you have to do. I guess that’s what you have to do all right. I guess that’s it. I guess that’s what it comes to. All right. I got a good start then. I’m way ahead of everybody now.

The Love of the Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald

You’re expected to fling it around like in the old days. When they find out you’re hanging onto it they get discouraged. That’s what all this brave gloom is about—the only way to keep their self-respect is to be Hemingway characters. But underneath they hate you in a mournful way and you know it.

Like Life by Lorrie Moore

Once love had seemed like magic.  Now it seemed like tricks.  You had to learn the sleight-of-hand, the snarling dog, the Hail Marys and hoops of it!  Through all the muck of themselves, the times they had unobligated each other, the anger, the permitted absences, the loneliness grown dangerous, she had always returned to him.  He’d had faith in that - abracadabra!  But eventually the deadliness set in again.  Could you live in the dead excellence of a thing, the stupid mortar of a body the stubborn husk of love had crawled from?  Yes he thought. 

Graham Greene

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those, who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear, which is inherent in a human condition.

A Separate Peace by John Knowles

It seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart.

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

It was as though I'd learned suddenly to look around corners; images of past humiliations flickered through my head and I saw that they were more than separate experiences. They were me; they defined me. I was my experiences and my experiences were me, and no blind men, no matter how powerful the became, even if they conquered the world, could take that, or change one single itch, taunt, laugh, cry, scar, ache, rage or pain of it. They were blind, bat blind, moving only by the echoed sounds of their own voices. And because they were blind they would destroy themselves and I'd help them.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

            Sabina felt emptiness all around her.  What if that emptiness was the goal of all her betrayals?

            Naturally she had not realized it until now.  How could she have?  The goals we pursue are always veiled.  A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about.  The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is.  The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

When he heard music he no longer listened to the notes, but the silences in between. when he read a book he gave himself over entirely to commas and semicolons, to the space after the period and before the capital letter of the next sentence. He discovered the places in a room where silence gathered; the folds of curtain drapes, the deep bowls of the family silver. When people spoke to him, he heard less and less of what they were saying, and more and more of what they were not. He learned to decipher the meaning of certain silences, which is like solving a tough case without any clues, with only intuition. and no one could accuse him of not being prolific in his chosen métier. Daily, he turned out whole epics of silence. In the beginning it had been difficult. imagine the burden of keeping silent when your child asks you whether God exists, or the woman you love asks you if you love her back. At first he longed for the use of just two words: yes and no. But he knew that just to utter a single word would be to destroy the delicate fluency of silence. Even after they arrested him and burned all his manuscripts, which were all blank pages, he refused to speak. Not even a groan when they gave him a blow to the head, a boot tip in the groin. Only at the last possible moment, as he faced the firing squad, did the writer suddenly sense the possibility of error. As the rifles were pointed at his chest he wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard. He had thought the possibilities of human silence were endless. But as the bullets tore from the rifles, his body was riddled with the truth. And a small part of him laughed bitterly because, anyway, how could he have forgotten what he had always known: there's no match for the silence of God.

The Varieties of Scientific Experience by Carl Sagan

We kill each other, or threaten to kill each other, in part, I think, because we are afraid we might not ourselves know the truth, that someone else with a different doctrine might have a closer approximation to the truth. Our history is in part a battle to the death of inadequate myths. If I can't convince you, I must kill you. That will change your mind. You are a threat to my version of the truth, especially the truth about who I am and what my nature is. The thought that I may have dedicated my life to a lie, that I might have accepted a conventional wisdom that no longer, if it ever did, correspond to the external reality, that is a very painful realization. I will tend to resist it to the last...
If we are to understand another's belief, then we must also understand the deficiencies and inadequacies of our own. This is true whichever political or ideological or ethnic or cultural tradition we come from. In a complex universe, in a society undergoing unprecedented change, how can we find the truth if we are not willing to question everything and to give a fair hearing to everything? There is a worldwide closed-mindedness that imperils the species. It was always with us, but the risks weren't as grave, because weapons of mass destruction were not then available. 

Chronicles by Bob Dylan

Sometimes you know things have to change, are going to change, but you can only feel it - like in that song of Sam Cooke’s, “Change Is Gonna Come” - but you don’t know it in a purposeful way.  Little things foreshadow what’s coming, but you may not recognize them.  But then something immediate happens and you’re in another world, you jump into the unknown, have an instinctive understanding of it - you’re set free.  You don’t need to ask questions and you already know the score.  It seems like when that happens, it happens fast, like magic, but it’s really not like that.  It isn’t like some dull boom goes off and the moment has arrived - your eyes don’t spring open and suddenly you’re very quick and sure about something.  It’s more deliberate.  It’s more like you’ve been working in the light of day and then you see one day that it’s getting dark early, that it doesn’t matter where you are - it won’t do any good.  It’s a reflective thing.  Somebody holds the mirror up, unlocks the door - something jerks it open and you’re shoved in and your head has to go into a different place.  Sometimes it takes a certain somebody to make you realize it. 

Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert

Accustomed to the peaceful, she turned in reaction to the picturesque.  She loved the sea only for its storms, green foliage only when it was scattered amid ruins.  It was necessary for her to derive a sort of personal profit from things, she rejected as useless whatever did not minister to her heart’s immediate fulfillment - being of a sentimental rather than artistic temperament, in search of emotions, not of scenery.

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

The same thing happened over and over:

            I would catch sight of some flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn’t do at all.

            That’s one of the reasons I never wanted to get married.  The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from.  I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.

Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse

All of a sudden there was a human being, a living human being, to shatter the death that had come down over me like a glass case, and to put out a hand to me, a good and beautiful and warm hand. All of a sudden there were things that concerned me again, which I could think of with joy and eagerness. All of a sudden a door was thrown open through which life came in. Perhaps I could live once more and once more be a human being. My soul that had fallen asleep in the cold and nearly frozen breathed once more, and sleepily spread its weak tiny wings.

Man Without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut

But I replied that what made being alive almost worthwhile for me, besides music, was all the saints I met, who could be anywhere.  By saints I meant people who behaved decently in a strikingly indecent society. 

Letters to A Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

What is necessary, after all, is only this:  solitude, vast inner solitude.  To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours - that is what you must be able to attain.  To be solitary as you were when you were a child, when the grownups walked around involved with matters that seemed large and important because they looked so busy and because you didn’t understand a thing about what they were doing.

The Stranger by Albert Camus

So close to death, Maman must have felt free then and ready to live it all again.  Nobody, nobody had the right to cry over her.  And I felt ready to live it all again too.  As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.  Finding it so much like myself - so like a brother, really - I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again.  For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck

It has always seemed strange to me.  The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness and honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system.  And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success.  And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.

The Diary of Anne Frank

I don’t believe the war is simply the work of politicians and capitalists.  Oh no, the common man is every bit as guilty; otherwise, people and nations would have rebelled long ago!  There’s a destructive urge in people, the urge to rage, murder, and kill.  And until all of humanity, without exception, undergoes a metamorphosis, wars will continue to be waged, and everything that has been carefully built up, cultivated and grown will be cut down and destroyed, only to start all over again!

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

Is it not true, that slowly and through many deviations I changed from a man into a child?  From a thinker into an ordinary person?  And yet this path has been good and the bird in my breast has not died.  But what a path it has been!  I have had to experience so much stupidity, so many vices, so much error, so much nausea, disillusionment and sorrow, just in order to become a child again and begin anew.  But it was right that it should be so; my eyes and heart acclaim it.  I had to experience despair, I had to sink to the greatest depths, to thoughts of suicide, in order to experience grace, to hear Om again, to sleep deeply again and to awaken refreshed again…I had to sin in order to live again.  Whither will my path yet lead me?  This path is stupid, it goes in spirals, perhaps in circles, but whichever way it goes, I will follow it.

Letters to A Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been given to us, the ultimate, the final problem and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.

James Dean

In a certain sense I am fatalistic.  I don’t exactly know how to explain it, but I have a hunch there are some things in life that we just can’t avoid.  They’ll happen to us probably because we’re built that way - we simply attract our own fate…make our own destiny…I think I’m like the Aztecs in that respect too.  With their sense of doom, they tried to get the most out of life while life was good.  And I go along with them on that philosophy.  I don’t mean that ‘eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die’ idea, but something a lot deeper and more valuable.  I want to live as intensely as I can.  Be as useful and helpful to others as possible, for one thing.  But live for myself as well.  I want to feel things and experiences right down to their roots…enjoy the good in life, while it is good.

Catcher In the Rye by J.D. Salinger

You’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior.  You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know.  Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now.  Happily some of them kept records of their troubles.  You’ll learn from them - if you want to.  Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you.  It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement.  And it isn’t education.  It’s history.  It’s poetry.

The Pastures of Heaven by John Steinbeck

After the bare requisites to living and reproducing, man wants most to leave some record of himself, a proof, perhaps, that he has really existed.  He leaves his proof on wood, on stone or on the lives of other people.  This deep desire exists in everyone, from the boy who writes dirty words in a public toilet to the Buddha who etches his image in the race mind.  Life is so unreal.  I think that we seriously doubt that we exist and go about trying to prove that we do.

Man Walks Into a Room by Nicole Krauss

You’re a kid, it’s summer, you blink your eyes and years - years - have passed.  And you realize that you’ve become someone else, but that your heart is still caught in that lost kid.  That what you’re left with beating in your chest is a diminished thing, a shadow of what it was when you were a boy and running under the night sky you felt it was filled to bursting.