Hadlee > Hadlee's Quotes

“Do you remember the sight we saw, my soul,
that soft summer morning
round a turning in the path,
the disgusting carcass on a bed scattered with stones,
its legs in the air like a woman in need
burning its wedding poisons
like a fountain with its rhythmic sobs,
I could hear it clearly flowing with a long murmuring sound,
but I touch my body in vain to find the wound.
I am the vampire of my own heart,
one of the great outcasts condemned to eternal laughter
who can no longer smile.
Am I dead?
I must be dead.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“What a cruel irony it is, that we get to choose our thoughts but not our feelings.”
― Justin Wetch, Bending The Universe

“And all we feared inside the night / shows true in morning's biased light.”
― Garth VonBuchholz

“I wish I could see butterflies burst from cocoons
Without tempering my amazement
Knowing all beauty eventually dies.”
― Justin Wetch, Bending The Universe

“I often wonder and imagine
What lies just beyond the fringe
Of the human experience;
What is it that we do not see?”
― Justin Wetch, Bending The Universe

“I look up upon a sparsely starred abyss
Having wandered to this street corner
In the middle of the night
Watching the cars and people go by
Wondering
If this deep, black nothingness
Is the sum total of being human.”
― Justin Wetch, Bending The Universe

“I’ve always hated it when authors seem to find joy
In killing my favorite characters.
With gleaming eyes they toy
With turmoil in every chapter.

Just when they’ve got you attached
To the character’s quirks and flaws
To their words and their demons
Just when you’ve fallen in love
With the character’s identity—
With a cruel turn of the lip
The author smirks and kills them off
And at our gasped pleas, merely scoffs.

But the author was God
And my favorite character was you
And I still can’t believe
You’re gone.”
― Justin Wetch, Bending The Universe

“Real life is just another stage.
Just another stage where I have to look and act
Like I have everything put together;
everything neat, perfect, and in order,
when in reality I’m slowly dying,
Slowly decaying, screaming and clawing,
at this little box I’ve been put into, 
Trying desperately to escape.”
― Justin Wetch, Bending The Universe

“Reason to live, they repeat like a pop song,
The bones of a beloved emperor, and I, the
motionless chariot
trying to drag them home with forced hope.”
― Robin Sinclair, Letters to My Lover From Behind Asylum Walls

“Time is the cruelest of physicians, healing
All wounds, but always slowly, looping
A surgical needle through the mind’s flesh, experiencing
Torment again over again, repeating
Until anesthetics bring an end to feeling.”
― Justin Wetch

“Maybe tranquility is the dirt under my nails. I know it's there but I never feel like digging it out.”
― Casey Renee Kiser, Gutter Kisses and a Hug on Garbage Day

“No misery
ever so beautiful
than the one
this mind creates.”
― Vivid Darkness

“With a ring around the rosary
And a pocket full of crosses
Ashes to ashes
They'll all fall down”
― Matthew Fitzpatrick, Monsters & Men: An Anthology

“Amidst a crowd of strangers,
I still remain unknown
to myself.”
― Vivid Darkness

“Sleepless nights
Spent looking at the ceiling
Searching in those etched patterns
For some sort of adhesive
To glue together the broken pieces
Of a soul crushed
By the weight of the fact that
Life is profoundly sad.”
― Justin Wetch, Bending The Universe

“Love is the poetry of the stars
The wind is the breath of the earth
To never become who you are
Or to change at all, which is worse?”
― Justin Wetch, Bending The Universe

“We are a handful of dust in God’s image
Before we return again to dusty grave
Life isn’t a war, it’s a scrimmage
A hyphen between two dates.”
― Justin Wetch, Bending The Universe

“In vain I try to jump into the photo
To create again a time so simple
That a piece of paper might encapsulate it
From the erosive winds and waves of time
Which bring even the greatest of loves to a grave of dust.”
― Justin Wetch, Bending The Universe

“The stars stare back
In that deep,
Soul-shattering blackness
And from the depths of existence
Comes a cruel, icy wind
Raising the hairs
On the back of your neck
And suddenly it feels
Like you’re walking a tightrope
Over that endless abyss
On one sad, fraying, thin
Violin string.”
― Justin Wetch, Bending The Universe

“There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.--Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember'd!”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“It's not my responsibility to be beautiful. I'm not alive for that purpose. My existence is not about how desirable you find me.”
― Warsan Shire

“Finally, she mused that human existence is as brief as the life of autumn grass, so what was there to fear from taking chances with your life?”
― Mo Yan, Red Sorghum

“La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu'il n'existe pas."

("The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.")”
― Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen

“There are only two worlds - your world, which is the real world, and other worlds, the fantasy. Worlds like this are worlds of the human imagination: their reality, or lack of reality, is not important. What is important is that they are there. these worlds provide an alternative. Provide an escape. Provide a threat. Provide a dream, and power; provide refuge, and pain. They give your world meaning. They do not exist; and thus they are all that matters. ”
― Neil Gaiman, The Books of Magic

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”
― Primo Levi

“It is good to be a cynic — it is better to be a contented cat — and it is best not to exist at all.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Collected Essays 5: Philosophy, Autobiography and Miscellany

“A Man Said to the Universe

A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”
― Stephen Crane, War Is Kind and Other Poems

“Some people seem to fade away but then when they are truly gone, it's like they didn't fade away at all.”
― Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One

“Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious. They are the questions with no answers. A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limit of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being