On the future

The future, it seemed, was turning out to be one damned thing after another.

- Stephen Baxter, Manifold: Time

On self hatred

Goddam the black night
with all its foul temptations
I've become what I always hated
when I was with you there

- Death Cab For Cutie, We Looked Like Giants

On loneliness

Until then I had always thought of loneliness as something negative - an absence of company, and, of course, something temporary... that day I has learned that it was much more. It was something which could press and oppress, could distort the ordinary, and play tricks with the mind. Something which lurked inimically all around, stretching the nerves and twanging them with alarms, never letting one forget that there was no one to help, no one to care. It showed one as an atom adrift in vastness, and it waited all the time its chance to frighten and frighten horribly - that was what loneliness was really trying to do; and that was what one must never let it do...

- John Wyndham, The Day Of The Triffids

On giving up

Well everyday a prayer goes on its knees
I will quit the whites, the wine and the weed
falls to its belly
and crawls towards New York

- The Wave Pictures, Just Like A Drummer

On an important cause

"And you want us to help you, eh? Join this people's army of yours?"

"Of course!"

"What's in it for us, then?'

"Everything," the Marquess said "Forever."

- Exchange between Mallory and the Marquess of Hastings,
William Gibson & Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine

On sleep

Sleep, that knits up the ravell'd sleeve of care...

- Macbeth

On the passing of time

Dying all day in thousands of little ways
Dancing alone and drinking a lot
Closing the clubs and
Haunting the cabarets
Looking for what?
Another five years off your life

- The Magnetic Fields, If You Don't Cry

On the meaning of you're done

And you better not be angry
and you'd better not be sad
you'd better just enjoy
the luxury of sympathy
if thats a luxury you have

and you know no private bad
you know that that's the meaning of you're done
in a world that's not so bad
in a world that time is killing in the sun

- Built To Spill, Velvet Waltz

On memories

Cowboy does not intend that the memory should ever die. There are memories that live for him as his present reality does not, and he shines them daily, like the finish of a fine new car, to keep them bright.

- Walter Jon Williams, Hardwired

On drugs

Dope comes in just two dosages: too much and not enough.

- P.J. O'Rouke, Tune In, Turn On, Go To The Office Late On Monday