Literary Therapy: 11 Quotes To Make You Feel Better

“I came,” [Oedipa] said, “hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy.”
“Cherish it!” cried Hilarius, fiercely. “What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by its little tentacle, don’t let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.”
-Thomas Pynchon, The Crying Of Lot 49

“Something is going on, but it makes no sense; it’s like finishing the half-empty bottle of Calvados because there’s no room in the valise.”
-Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Could one delude oneself through a life? Yes, he knew. Probably that was the only way.”
-Tao Lin, “Sincerity”, Bed

“Still, Henry Darger and Vincent Van Gogh were her heroes. Darger had been a janitor for sixty-seven years, and Van Gogh unable to earn money in his lifetime, or to do anything else than just paint and live with coal miners and see prostitutes and lick turpentine from his brushes. In the end, Darger would’ve been just a creepy janitor, and Van Gogh, a redhead who enjoyed a prostitute, if no one had canonized their work.”
-Ali Liebegott, Cha-Ching!

“I do everything halfway,
a thing of which adults disapprove,
but things done halfway
are deceptive, and in a class of
their own – for instance,
the sun is really twice its size.”
-Richard Hell, “Untitled”, Hot and Cold

“One of the most destructive forces in the world is love. For the following reason: The world is a conglomeration of objects, no, of events and the approachings of events towards objects, therefore of becoming stases static stagnant, of all that is unreal. You get in the world, you get your daily life your routine doesn’t matter if you’re rich poor legal illegal, you begin to believe what doesn’t change is real, and love comes along and shows all these unchangeable for ever fixtures to be flimsy paper bits. Love can tear anything to shreds.”
-Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts In High School

“You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?”
-Anne Carson, “The Glass Essay”, Glass, Irony and God

“I drank some coffee and my outlook improved immensely. I was ready to write some poems and, I don’t know, get drunk, run around, take my shirt off and get kicked out of someplace. You know, live a little.”
-Michelle Tea, Valencia

“And so what does it really matter what anybody does. The newspapers are full of what anybody does and anybody knows what anybody does but the thing that is important is the intensity of anybody’s existence.”
-Gertrude Stein, “Portraits and Repetition”, Lectures in America

“He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden’s secret. Drop him out a window and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden’s secret. Ripeness was all.”
-Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“The beauty of things must be that they end.”
-Jack Kerouac, Tristessa