1. Songs: Ohia - Goodnight Lover
These days are obvious to you
Budgetive
How selfless for time to conclude
What would be the day
For leaving
To work its charm on you

"Xena, the sun is setting. I have to bring you back to life."
"No. Not if it means condemning the souls of the 40,000 who burned at Higuchi."

2. VAST - I Don't Have Anything
What can I buy to make
The sky turn blue again?
Where can I go to feel
Like I'm alive again?
Show me the places where
I can forget your name

This is the place
you would rather not know about,
this is the place that will inhabit you,
this is the place you cannot imagine,
this is the place that will finally defeat you

where the word why shrivels and empties
itself. This is famine.
    — Margaret Atwood, "Notes Towards a Poem that Can Never Be Written"

3. The Decemberists - Engine Driver
And I am a writer, writer of fictions
I am the heart that you call home
And I've written pages upon pages
Trying to rid you from my bones
...
And if you don't love me, let me go

How can I grieve you when you won't go away?

4. Tegan and Sara - And Darling (This Thing That Breaks My Heart)
Creep up and tell me that you
You love me more each time you
Look into my eyes, I feel like
I know you don't mean to be mean
I'm sure you know the same for me

Two kinds of people walk here:
those who think they have love
and those who think they are without it.

I am neither one nor the other.
    — Margaret Atwood, "Georgia Beach"

5. Ben Folds Five - Evaporated
Don't you know I'm numb, man?
No, I can't feel a thing at all
'Cause it's all smiles and business these days
And I'm indifferent to the loss
I've faith that there's a soul somewhere
That's leading me around
I wonder if she knows which way is down

It's a problem, what to do
with yourself after you're dead.
Then there's before.
    — Margaret Atwood, "Blue Dwarfs"

6. Goldfrapp - Eat Yourself
Who will I be when I'm with you again?
Silver jet in the sky
You are the pain
Got a song, got to sing
For life

The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer.
That you are here—that life exists, and identity;
That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.
    — Walt Whitman, "O Me! O Life!"

7. Patrick Wolf - Godrevy Point
Good Lord, it was a beautiful day
For untangling, unraveling my heavy heart away
To forgive and forget myself
And my enemies, my bruises washed away
Today, was the day, I first said,
"I belong."

Know the personal,
yet keep to the impersonal:
accept the world as it is.
If you accept the world,
the Tao will be luminous inside you
and you will return to your primal self.
    — Lao Ma, Tao Te Ching, Chap. 28 (trans. Stephen Mitchell)

8. Dar Williams - This Is Not The House That Pain Built
I remember myself, that's the work that I do
On a spring night when the snow is melting
You'll see two sets of footprints walking
And look at all the stars, and turn around
And walk home, slowly walk home

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
    — W. H. Auden, "The More Loving One"

9. Rosie Thomas - You and Me
You and me, me and you
There couldn't be a better two
To be blessed and know the meaning of true love
And if you leave me, I'll feel scared
Fall apart, feel unprepared
But I dare to make it through all on my own