Part of one of my favourite poems The Four Zoas:

‘What is the price of Experience? do men buy it for a song?
Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price
Of all that a man hath, his house, his wife, his children.
Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy,
And in the wither’d field where the farmer plows for bread in vain.

William Blake

The Warrior of the Light is a believer.

Because he believes in miracles, miracles begin to happen. Because he is sure that his thoughts can change his life, his life begins to change. Because he is certain that he will find love, love appears.

-Paulo Coelho
Warrior of the Light: A Manual

Any plan that trusted success on the human desire to exploit others and deny the truth about one's self was sure to succeed.

The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters, G. W. Dahlquist, p. 493 (Penguin Viking Version)

The Butterfly Cabinet by Bernie McGill

"You're in your own light madam." I asked her to explain the strange expression. "You're in the way of yourself" she said "working in your own shadow." My whole life spent in the way of myself: working in my own shade, not able to crawl out from underneath it, obliterating with my own being what I have been striving so hard to try to achieve.

"From this experience I understood the danger of focusing only on what isn't there. What if I came to the end of my life and realized that I'd spent every day watching for a man who would never come to me? What an unbearable sorrow it would be, to realize I'd never really tasted the things I'd eaten, or seen the places I'd been, because I'd thought of nothing but the Chairman even while my life was drifting away from me. And yet if I drew my thoughts back from him, what life would I have? I would be like a dancer who had practiced since childhood for a performance she would never give."

--Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon:
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot,
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again,
Though lovers be lost love shall not
And death shall have no dominion.
Dylan Thomas

"If God exists, he will be generous with those creatures who chose to leave this earth early, and he might even apologize for having made us spend time here."

--Veronika Decides to Die by Paulo Coelho

"There was a storm that lowered itself over a city and it drenched the buildings and made the streets shine beneath the lamps. The streets became hypnotic. The colors popped from the stop signs and the fire hydrants. The rain pushed the trash and the people inside for cover. They knew the rain was never going to stop. The rain cleaned the air so all I could smell was you. The rain smacked across the roofs and all I could hear was you. The rain came in tight clouds, hovering in and caressing the sky. It was only going to rain forever. What it means to love you. It is the end of the seasons, the end of the earth. It is impossible. It flutters through my fingers, harder to hold than air. It falls across the rocks, rattles the leaves, melts the ice and the snow. It is the tiniest tip of the skyscrapers in the cities and the running gutters and the parks. That is what it means to love you. It is the end of loneliness. The loneliness that haunts me. That returns when you are in the bathroom, when you go to the store, when you look away. You carry my stomach with you and leave me with a hole when you are gone. The loneliness is in my walls, in my skin. I can’t wash it out. You pour over me. You drown me. I wait on you for my breath. Nobody could ever die for you the way that I die for you. The only thing worse than loving you is not loving you, and that is what it means."

--What it Means to Love You by Stephen Elliot

For those who are lost,there will always be cities that feel like home. Places where lonely people can live in exile of their own lives-far from anything that was ever imagined for them. Athens has long been a place where lonely people go.

Everything Beautiful Began After by Simon Van Booy

"He felt as if he were sinking helplessly into the cushions and the papers and the bodies of his children like a man in quicksand. When the funnies were finished at last he struggled to his feet, quietly gasping, and stood for several minutes in the middle of the carpet, making tight fists in his pocket to restrain himself from doing what suddenly seemed the only thing in the world he really and truly wanted to do: picking up a chair and throwing it through the picture window.

What the hell kind of life was this? What in God's name was the point or the meaning or the purpose of a life like this?"

--Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

"He slept on the train, riding with his head fallen back on the dusty plush and his Times sliding from his lap; and he stood for a long time over scalding cups of coffee in the echoing tan vault of Grand Central, allowing himself to be late for work. How small and neat and comically serious the other men looked, with their grey-flecked crew cuts and their button down collars and their brisk hurrying feet! There were endless desperate swarms of them, hurrying through the station and the streets, and an hour from now they would all be still. The waiting midtown office buildings would swallow them up and contain them, so that to stand in one tower looking across the canyon to another would be to inspect a great silent insectarium displaying hundreds of tiny pink men in white shirts, forever shifting papers and frowning into telephones, acting out their passionate little dumb show under the supreme indifference of the rolling spring clouds."

-- Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

I want to live with all my memories. Even if they're bad memories. Even if they're memories that only hurt me...that I'd rather forget. If I keep them and keep trying, without running away, then someday I'll be strong enough that those memories can't defeat me. I believe that because I want to think there's no such thing as a memory that's okay to forget.

~Furuba~

But the worst part - the worst part of the whole weekend, if not of his life to date - was the way April was looking at him. He had never seen such a stare of pitying bor***m in her eyes.

It haunted him all night, while he slept alone; it was still there in the morning, when he swallowed his coffee and backed down the driveway in the crumpled old Ford. And riding to work, one of the youngest and healthiest passengers on the train, he sat with the look of a man condemned to a very slow, painless death. He felt middle-aged.

-- Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

“I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.”

-- A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

"Sometimes days and nights, light and dark, just run together into a thick soup and time moves while standing still. My first days at Reed are this way, clouded in a mind-numbing depression, unable to move, conquered by a complete stillness. The world could stop and I would float off into space and never notice."

-- A life without consequences by Stephen Elliot