Happy Birthday, Salvador Dali.

The Tower, 1934

"[W]hen you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape"

Federico García Lorca

From: Crank

From "Okay, Over the Last Few Years"

"As for Dad, well, truth be told, his love
of drugs surpassed his love of family."

Crank
Ellen Hopkins

From: That Summer

"...Sometimes the people you choose to believe are wrong."

"He loved you," I told her. "He still does, I think."

"He doesn't love me," she said, crossing her arms against her chest. "He might still love me as I was at fifteen, when I didn't know any better. When I trusted everyone. I'm not that person anymore." She started walking, holding aside the branches so I could get through. "He's just a boy, Haven. He was the first to really hurt me, but he's just a boy. There were a lot of them."

"Not like him," I said softly, although I knew that after today I'd never see him, or that summer at the beach, the same way.

"Maybe not," she said as we came to the car. "But maybe that isn't so bad. You can't love anyone that way more than once in a lifetime. It's too hard and it hurts too much when it ends. The first boy is always the hardest to get over, Haven. It's just the way the world works."

Sarah Dessen

From: "Karma Chameleon"

"Every day is like a survival.
You're my lover, not my rival."

Karma Chameleon
Culture Club

From: Crank

Not My Type

No shirt
hot bod.
His, that is.
So why did
I break out in
a sweat.

No shoes
barefoot,
bare chest, with
a bare, baby face
to make the
angels sing.

Nothing
but ragged
cut-offs,
hugging a
tawny six-pack,
and a smile.

No pin-up
pretty boy
could touch
a smile that
zapped every cell.
He was definitely

not my type.

Ellen Hopkins

From: Someone Like You

“…I deserved better. I deserved I love yous and kiwi fruits and flowers and warriors coming to my door, besotted with love. I deserved pictures of my face in a million expressions, and the warmth of a baby’s kick under my hand. I deserved to grow, and to change, to become all the girls I could ever be over the course of my life, each one better than the last.”

Sarah Dessen

From: "A Quick Trip Through My Adolescence"

"...I would rather write like a dancer shaking my ass to boogaloo inside my head, and perhaps reach only readers who like to use books to shake their asses, than to be or write for the man cloistered in a closet somewhere reading Aeschylus while this stupefying world careens crazily past his waxy windows toward its last raving sooty feedback pirouette."

Lester Bangs