I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live, Oskar. Because if I were able to live my life again, I would do things differently. I would change my life. I would kiss my piano teacher, even if he laughed at me. I would jump with Mary on the bed, even if I made a fool of myself. I would send out ugly photographs, thousands of them.

Somewhere someone is thinking of you. Someone is calling you an angel. This person is using celestial colors to paint your image. Someone is making you into a vision so beautiful that it can only live in the mind. Someone is thinking of the way your breath escapes your lips when you are touched. How your eyes close and your jaw tightens with concentration as you give pleasure a home. These thoughts are saving a life somewhere right now. In some airless apartment on a dark, urine stained, whore lined street, someone is calling out to you silently and you are answering without even being there. So crystalline. So pure. Such life saving power when you smile. You will never know how you have cauterized my wounds. So sad that we will never touch. How it hurts me to know that I will never be able to give you everything I have.

Suffering only hurts because you fear it. Suffering only hurts because you complain about it. It pursues you only because you flee from it. You must not flee, you must not complain, you must not fear. You must love. You know all this yourself, you know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvation, and a single happiness, and that is called loving. Well then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. Taste how sweet it is in its essence, give yourself to it, do not meet it with aversion. It is only your aversion that hurts, nothing else. Sorrow is not sorrow, death is not death if you do not make them so! Suffering is magnificent music - the moment you give ear to it. But you never listen to it; you always have a different, private, stubborn music and melody in your ear which you will not relinquish and with which the music of suffering will not harmonize. Listen to me! Listen to me, and remember: suffering is nothing, suffering is illusion. Only you yourself create it, only you cause yourself pain!

Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.

A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river
but then he’s still left
with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away
but then he’s

still left with his hands.

I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can't be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older, as you see the people in your life break one by one. You wonder when your turn is going to be, or if it's already happened.

This is one of those feelings that everyone has felt but that we don't have a word for. It's the numb, weightless sensation you feel at the moment you realize all the remaining years of your life have just changed for the worst.

Anyway, the fascinating thing was that I read in National Geographic that there are more people alive now than have died in all of human history. In other words, if everyone wanted to play Hamlet at once, they couldn’t, because there aren’t enough skulls.

Being with him made my brain quiet.

I’m thinking of Anna, I would give everything never to think about her again, I can only hold on to the things I want to lose.

Just for future reference, don't use words like "love" anymore. It's a very sensitive word and it wears out quickly. Romeo barely says it, but John Hinckley filled up a whole journal with it. To put it into your terms, it's a currency that's easily devalued. Pretty soon you're saying it whenever you hang up the phone or whenever you leave. It turns into an apology. Then it's an excuse. Some assholes want it to be a bulletproof vest: don't hate me; I love you. But mostly it just means--more. More, more--give me something more. A couple of years from now, when you're on your own completely, if you really fall in love, if it really comes to that--and I pity you if it does--you have to look right down into the black of her eyes, right down into the emptiness in there and feel everything, absolutely everything she needs and you have to be willing to drown in it, Kevin. You'd have to want to be crushed, buried alive. Because that's what real love feels like--choking. They used to bury some women in their wedding dresses, you know. I thought it was because all those husbands were too cheap to spring for another gown, but now it makes sense: love is your first foot in the grave. That's why the second most abused word is "forever".

If I'd been someone else in a different world I'd've done something different, but I was myself, and the world was the world, so I was silent.

It’s the tragedy of loving, you can’t love anything more than something you miss.

It was worst at night. I started inventing things, and then I couldn't stop, like beavers, which I know about. People think they cut down trees so they can build dams, but in reality it's because their teeth never stop growing, and if they didn't constantly file them down by cutting through all of those trees, their teeth would start to grow into their own faces, which would kill them. That's how my brain was.

This is how it has always been with me. Give me something good, I'll destroy it. Love me, I'll destroy you. I have never felt deserving of anything in my life. I have never felt as if I were worth the diseased space I occupy. This feeling has inhabited everything I've ever done, seen or had anything do with, and it has infected every relationship I have ever had with everyone I've ever known. I don't understand it. I don't understand why it's here.

And even if somebody else has it much worse, that doesn't really change the fact that you have what you have.

I start to get the feeling that something is really wrong. Like all the drugs put together…can no longer combat whatever it is that was wrong with me in the first place. I feel like a defective model, like I came off the assembly line flat-out fucked and my parents should have taken me back for repairs before the warranty ran out.

"You have a beautiful mouth," I said. "I'd like to crawl in it and die."

I was so scared to give up depression, fearing that somehow the worst part of me was actually all of me.

When I was a kid I looked for a look. You know, the look of the obsessed, in photographs and in sound. I’d play the same record 600 times. The artists I loved, I voided them of their sexual orientation, their names, birth date, they became simply, a heart beat. Mine. I spent every hour dreaming. Every hour searching. I’d talk to those photographs, dead people in photographs that made eye contact with me. Art is life and death, and it doesn’t matter which.