Driving might be the thing most opposite of dancing.

All quotes by author Miranda July

"What a terrible mistake to let go of something wonderful for something real."

"Some people need a red carpet rolled out in front of them in order to walk forward into friendship. They can't see the tiny outstretched hands all around them, everywhere, like leaves on trees."

"People tend to stick to their own size group because it's easier on the neck. Unless they are romantically involved, in which case the size difference is sexy. It means: I am willing to go the distance for you."

"Are you angry? Punch a pillow. Was it satisfying? Not hardly. These days people are too angry for punching. What you might try is stabbing. Take an old pillow and lay it on the front lawn. Stab it with a big pointy knife. Again and again and again. Stab hard enough for the point of the knife to go into the ground. Stab until the pillow is gone and you are just stabbing the earth again and again, as if you want to kill it for continuing to spin, as if you are getting revenge for having to live on this planet day after day, alone."

"Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person's face as you pass on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street, and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you. There are as much for you as they are for other people. Remember this when you wake up in the morning and think you have nothing."

"If there were a map of the solar system, but instead of stars it showed people and their degrees of separation, my star would be the one you had to travel the most light-years from to get to his. You would die getting to him."

"Sometimes I would make left turns all the way around a block, and when I returned to the original intersection, I would feel disappointed to find all the drivers were new. It wasn't like a square dance, where you miraculously end up with your original partner, laughing and feeling giddily relieved to find him after dancing with everyone else in the world. Instead, they swung around and kept on going, some people were at work by now, or halfway to the airport. In fact, driving might be the thing most opposite of dancing."

"That day I carried the dream around like a full glass of water, moving gracefully so I would not lose any of it."

"He seemed to be waiting for me to move forward. Weren't we all."

"I looked at other couples and wondered how they could be so calm about it. They held hands as if they weren't even holding hands. When Steve and I held hands, I had to keep looking down to marvel at it. There was my hand, the same hand I've always had - oh, but look! What is it holding? It's holding Steve's hand! Who is Steve? My three-dimensional boyfriend. Each day I wondered what would happen next. What happens when you stop wanting, when you are happy. I supposed I would go on being happy forever."

"This person realizes that staying home means blowing off everyone this person has ever known. But the desire to stay in is very strong. This person wants to run a bath and then read in bed."

Floating is a fine thing.

She grabs her magazines, she packs her things, and she goes. She leaves the pictures hanging on the wall, she burns all her notes and she knows she's been here too few years to feel this old.

It is like substituting coffee for sleep, or drugs for people, or gods for personal responsibility, or disappearances for new beginnings (or even fair endings), or lies for love, or words for kisses, or something for nothing and nothing for something and it never ends and it is always always flat. And in the end, this is what it is like ...

I will remember these things, turn them over and over again in my mind -- and they will make me smile, quietly, somewhere deep inside my chest.

Floating is a fine thing, but hitting your head on the ceiling repeatedly -- it really starts to hurt after a while.

Because it was getting dark, and because the streets were crowded, I bumped into googolplex people. Who were they? Where were they going? What were they looking for? I wanted to hear their heartbeats, and I wanted them to hear mine.

"You can only become truly accomplished at something you love. Don't make money your goal. Instead, pursue the things you love doing, and do them so well that people can't take their eyes off you."
--Maya Angelou

"A cynical young person is almost the saddest sight to see because it means that he or she has gone from knowing nothing to believing in nothing."
--Maya Angelou

Things change.

Things change the way you feel. And things change.

To know you like your tongue knows the back of your teeth. That's all I want.

Everything you like, I will find some reason to dislike and if we find we like the same thing, I will insist that you like it less than me or for the wrong reasons, like you don’t really understand the things you like. Because that makes me feel better about who I am. What I am.

I was wondering if you had a second. To talk about anything at all.

You can be as logical, rational and objective as you want, it's not going to change the way you feel. Put it this way; you telling me that lunch is in an hour doesn't make me less hungry.

It all just happens.

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
--Rainer Maria Rilke

The battle of head versus heart is excruciating. Which is the right one to follow? My head which is trying to protect my heart? Or my heart, my heart that is falling hopelessly, leading me into a dead end, walking me head first into a brick wall?

"So we build walls instead of bridges and all that crap because somewhere along the way it was decided that it was far worse to let someone in and have them hurt you, than it is to not let anyone in at all."
--Kim Wagner

"It's very tempting when you really want to be with someone to settle for much, much less -- even a vague pathetic facsimile of less -- than you would have ever imagined. Remember always what you set out to get and please don't settle for less. These guys exist because there are a lot of women out there who allow them to."
--Greg Behrendt, 'He's Just Not That Into You'

"One of the mixed blessings about being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before."
--Joan Didion, 'Goodbye to All That'

"This is what the things can teach us: to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly."
--Rainer Maria Rilke

Good days. Bad days. They just happen. It all just happens.

"You owe it to us all to get on with what you’re good at."
--W.H. Auden

He will be there every day to ask, "What are you looking for?" And will you answer? And will it matter?

The problem with doing everything is that you have no time for doing nothing.

“It takes courage to grow up and turn out to be who you really are.”
--E.E. Cummings

Only boring people get bored.

You had caught my leaping heart in your hand like a fish.

She is the sum of you and your dreams. You tug at yellow ribbons in her hair, but she is solid. As for you, you are watercolor; you wash off. You walk gracefully, unmarked by your voyage. Still, that unnameable lust returns.

"Your heart has never been broken. You’ve never done anything unforgivable or hurt anyone beyond reparation. Everyone you’ve ever loved you’ve treated like gold. "
--George Saunders, 'Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz'

I was out there calling you in my head. And then you appeared! What a team we are.

Someone is interested in you. Keep your eyes open.

"That’s love: Two lonely persons keep each other safe and touch each other and talk to each other."
--Rainer Maria Rilke

"Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love."
--Rainer Maria Rilke

It took me nearly a year to get here. It wasn’t so hard to cross that street after all, it all depends on who’s waiting for you on the other side.

Even when my life gets crazy, you are my first thought in the morning, my last thought at night and the only person I ever wanted to belong to.

The house was full of dancing creatures, not male and female but both, two lovers in one body. The books downstairs were reciting their poetry to each other, rubbing together, whispering through leather covers. Wine was flowing through the water pipes. You had caught my leaping heart in your hand like a fish.

"I keep thinking, 'Now those men think I'm purely decorative, and they're fools for not knowing better' -- and I love being rather unfathomable. You are the only person on earth, Lover, who has ever known and loved all of me -- Men love me 'cause I'm pretty -- and they're always afraid of mental wickedness -- and some men love me 'cause I'm clever, and they're always afraid of my prettiness -- One or two have ever loved me 'cause I'm lovable, and then, of course, I was acting. But you just do, darling -- and I do -- so very, very much."
--Zelda to F. Scott Fitzgerald, May 1919

You make me feel like a moth that's reached the moon.

You and me, we're clever. People, on the other hand, are stupid.

One day, you will be given back every pen you've ever lost.

If nothing else, one day you can look someone straight in the eyes and say, "But I lived through it. And it made me who I am today."

It does not count if you believe in yourself when it's easy to believe in yourself. It does not count if you believe the world can be a better place when the future looks bright. It does not count if you think you're going to make it when the finish line is right in front of you. It counts when it's hard to believe in yourself, when it looks like the world's going to end and you've still got a long way to go. That's when it counts. That's when it matters the most.

Which is why you make me feel like a moth that's reached the moon.

You'll be as shocked as I was to discover that their last words weren't, "Did everybody like me? Did I like the right music? Were enough people attracted to me? How did people feel about my decisions? You don't think I upset anyone do you?"

I hope they make you happy. That's what I'll say.

I won't keep circling the ocean forever, hoping I'll spot your island on the horizon, uncolonised and flying an old, tattered flag. You on the shore with the sand between your toes.

If you enjoy the title of your job more than your job, you're in the wrong job.

I can barely tell the difference between what is real and what I believe.

All quotes by author Nicole Krauss

"After that day when I saw the elephant, I let myself see more and believe more. It was a game I played with myself. When I told Alma the things I saw she would laugh and tell me she loved my imagination. For her I changed pebbles into diamonds, shoes into mirrors, I changed glass into water, I gave her wings and pulled birds from her ears and in her pockets she found feathers, I asked a pear to become a pineapple, a pineapple to become a lightbulb, a lightbulb to become the moon, and the moon to become a coin I flipped for her love, both sides were heads: I knew I couldn't lose. And now, at the end of my life, I can barely tell the difference between what is real and what I believe. For example, this letter in my hand--I can feel it between my fingers. The paper is smooth, except in the creases. I can unfold it, and fold it again. As certain as I am sitting here now, this letter exists. And yet. In my heart, I know my hand is empty."
--'The History of Love'

"Holding hands, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together."

My brother and I used to play a game. I'd point to a chair. "THIS IS NOT A CHAIR," I'd say. Bird would point to the table. "THIS IS NOT A TABLE." "THIS IS NOT A WALL," I'd say. "THAT IS NOT A CEILING." We'd go on like that. "IT IS NOT RAINING OUT." "MY SHOE IS NOT UNTIED!" Bird would yell. I'd point to my elbow. "THIS IS NOT A SCRAPE." Bird would lift his knee. "THIS IS ALSO NOT A SCRAPE!" "THAT IS NOT A KETTLE!" "NOT A CUP!" "NOT A SPOON!" "NOT DIRTY DISHES!" We denied whole rooms, years, weathers. Once, at the peak of our shouting, Bird took a deep breath. At the top of his lungs, he shrieked: "I! HAVE NOT! BEEN! UNHAPPY! MY WHOLE! LIFE!" "But you're only seven," I said.

"An average of seventy-four species become extinct every day, which was one good reason, but not the only one, to hold someone's hand."

"Maybe the first time you saw her you were ten. She was standing in the sun scratching her legs. Or tracing letters in the dirt with a stick. Her hair was being pulled. Or she was pulling someone's hair. And a part of you was drawn to her, and a part of you resisted--wanting to ride off on your bicycle, kick a stone, remain uncomplicated. In the same breath you felt the strength of a man, and a self-pity that made you feel small and hurt. Part of you thought: Please don't look at me. If you don't, I can still turn away. And part of you thought: Look at me."
--'The History of Love'

Love whoever is around to be loved.

All quotes by author Kurt Vonnegut

"We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down."

"Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies: God damn it, you've got to be kind."

"Many people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.'"

"A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved."

"How nice--to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive."

"She was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops."

"I am eternally grateful for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else might be going on."

"And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep."

"People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say."

"There are too many of us and we are all too far apart."

She wants to be everything.

"I turn and I slowly walk away and I don't look back. It has always been a fault of mine, but it is the way I am. I never look back. Never."
--James Frey, 'A Million Little Pieces'

"My name is Mike. Instantly forgettable. Unlike Heather. What a breathless little name that is."
--Ellen Wittlinger, 'Lombardo's Law'

"Lost people are different. They will drive around in the same circle over and over rather than try a new path. Their fear of getting more lost paralyzes them into staying lost in the area that's just become familiar. It supersedes their ability to chart a new course. They circle and backtrack and stay comfortably lost because it's less scary than seeing something different than what's presently in front of them."
--Jill A. Davis

"A son is a son 'til he gets a wife, but a daughter is a daughter all her life."
--Emily Giffin, 'Love the One You're With'

"Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always supposedly in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night."
--Sylvia Plath

"When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn’t know.
"Oh, sure you know," the photographer said.
"She wants," said Jay Cee wittily, "to be everything."
--Sylvia Plath, 'The Bell Jar'

"There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad, I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.'"
--Sylvia Plath

"My chest feels full of glitter and helium, the way it used to when I was little and riding my father's shoulders at twilight, when I knew that if I held up my hands and spread my fingers like a net, I could catch the coming stars."
--Jodi Picoult, 'My Sister's Keeper'

"She went on at beautiful length about how she used to fly all around the apartment when she was four and no one was home. She surely dreamt that she was able to fly. The baby stood her ground like an angel. She said she knew she was able to fly because when she came down she always had dust on her fingers from touching the light bulbs."
--J.D. Salinger

"I don't know about bores. Maybe you shouldn't feel too sorry if you see some swell girl getting married to them. They don't hurt anybody, most of them, and maybe they're secretly all terrific whistlers or something. Who the hell knows? Not me."
--J.D. Salinger, 'The Catcher In The Rye'

"She's quite skinny, like me, but nice skinny. Roller-skate skinny. I watched her once from the window when she was crossing over Fifth Avenue to go to the park, and that's what she is, roller-skate skinny. You'd like her."
--J.D. Salinger, 'The Catcher in the Rye'

"He always had to know who was going. I swear, if that guy was shipwrecked somewhere, and you rescued him in the god damn boat, he'd want to know who the guy that was rowing it before he'd even get in."
--J.D. Salinger, 'The Catcher in the Rye'

"It always smelled like it was raining outside, even if it wasn't, and you were in the only nice, dry, cosy place in the world."
--J.D. Salinger

"He was one of those guys that think they're being a pansy if they don't break around forty of your fingers when they shake hands with you. God I hate that stuff."
--J.D. Salinger, 'The Catcher in the Rye'

"I wrote the story myself. It's about a girl who lost her reputation and never missed it."
--Mae West

"Keep a diary and one day it'll keep you."
--Mae West

"I've been things and seen places."
--Mae West

"There are millions of people in the world, and the spirits will see that most of them you never have to meet. But there are one or two you are tied to, and the spirits will cross you back and forth, threading so many knots until they catch and you finally get it right."
--Jodi Picoult, 'Picture Perfect'

Oh, you are the roots that sleep beneath my feet and hold the earth in place.

He always gets so mad at things you laugh at. "Don't get so worked up" you'd say. But on the back deck you admit that you haven't felt much like laughing lately anyway. And so I say, "that could change."

Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying "end-of-the-world switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH," the paint wouldn't even have time to dry.

“There's no excuse to be bored. Sad, yes. Angry, yes. Depressed, yes. Crazy, yes. But there's no excuse for boredom, ever.”
--Viggo Mortensen

When was the last time you did something for the first time?

You can’t save the damsel if she loves her distress.

It's enough to break your heart.

"Do you know how sometimes when you are riding your bike and you start skidding across sand, or when you miss a step and start tumbling down the stairs - you have those long, long seconds to know that you are going to be hurt, and badly?"
--Jodi Picoult, 'My Sister's Keeper'

There are random moments where sometimes the pain is too much to handle; triggered by a thought, or a memory, or even a song. They are too much to handle sitting up; so I go to lay down. Instead of falling asleep and succumbing to the dream world, I daydream. I daydream about could be’s and what if’s, stories I could write down but would rather not, but mostly I daydream about you. Because thinking about you makes me smile, and when I smile on the outside I am definitely smiling inside. I only wish we could be a little bit closer in distance.

"Dreams are always crushing when they don't come true. But it's the simple dreams that are often the most painful because they seem so personal, so reasonable, so attainable. You're always close enough to touch, but never quite close enough to hold and it's enough to break your heart."
--Nicholas Sparks, 'Three Weeks with My Brother'

Our life is made up of time.

"I never knew life could be like that. So great, and so terrible at the same time. Triumph came, but so did the tears and it left me thinking that possibly you can't have both at the same time; and maybe that's okay because it's life, and that's how it goes. It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think."
--Jean de la Bruyere

"If you live in each other's pockets long enough, you're related."
--Jodi Picoult, The Pact: A Love Story

"Life has been some combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning."
--Sylvia Plath, 'The Bell Jar'

"Our life is made up of time; our days are measured in hours, our pay measured by those hours, our knowledge is measured by years. We grab a few quick minutes in our busy day to have a coffee break. We rush back to our desks, we watch the clock, we live by appointments. And yet your time eventually runs out and you wonder in your heart of hearts if those seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years and decades were being spent the best way they possibly could. In other words, if you could change anything, would you?"
--Cecelia Ahern, 'Love, Rosie'

"In times of grief and sorrow I will hold you and rock you and take your grief and make it my own. When you cry, I cry and when you hurt, I hurt. And together we will try to hold back the floods to tears and despair and make it through the potholed street of life."
--Nicholas Sparks, 'The Notebook'

"Never forget that anticipation is an important part of life. Work's important, family's important, but without excitement, you have nothing. You're cheating yourself if you refuse to enjoy what's coming."
--Nicholas Sparks, 'Three Weeks with My Brother'

If conversation was the lyrics, laughter was the music.

"Too many people seem to believe that silence was a void that needed to be filled, even if nothing important was said."
--Nicholas Sparks, 'Nights in Rodanthe'

"If conversation was the lyrics, laughter was the music, making time spent together a melody that could be replayed over and over without getting stale."
--Nicholas Sparks

"There are moments when mental overload can render words impossible."
--Nicholas Sparks, 'The Choice'

"Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences."
--Sylvia Plath, 'The Bell Jar'

"I wondered which was harder, in the end. The act of telling, or who you told it to. Or maybe if, when you finally got it out, the story was really all that mattered."
--Sarah Dessen, 'Just Listen'

You're left so alone that you can't explain.

"I have to remind myself that time only frightens me when I think of having to spend it alone. Sometimes I scare myself with how many of my thoughts revolve around making me feel better about sleeping alone in a room."
--Douglas Coupland, 'Life After God'

“The sea’s only gifts are harsh blows, and occasionally the chance to feel strong. Now I don’t know much about the sea, but I do know that that’s the way it is here. And I also know how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong but to feel strong. To measure yourself at least once. To find yourself at least once in the most ancient of human conditions. Facing the blind death stone alone, with nothing to help you but your hands and your own head.”
--Christopher McCandless

"Sometimes it seems the harder you try to hold on to something or someone the more it wants to get away. You feel like some kind of criminal for having felt, for having wanted. For having wanted to be wanted. It confuses you, because you think that your feelings were wrong, and it makes you feel so small because it's so hard to keep it inside when you let it out and it doesn't come back. You're left so alone that you can't explain."
--Henry Rollins

"Morning. Strawberry sky dusted with white winter powder sugar sun. And nobody to munch on it with."
--Francesca Lia Block

"I'm single because I was born that way."
--Mae West

"He tells me I look as if I could use a hug and I laugh at him and he ignores me and steps forward and puts his arms around me and hugs me. I warm at the simple pleasure of human contact and for the first time in a long time I actually feel good."
--James Frey, 'A Million Little Pieces'

"Inside the snow globe on my father's desk, there was a penguin wearing a red-and-white-striped scarf. The penguin was alone in there, I thought, and I worried for him. When I told my father this, he said, 'Don't worry, Susie; he has a nice life. He's trapped in a perfect world.'"
--Alice Sebold

"I miss him in so many ways, but right now I miss him in the way you always miss someone when you're single among a room full of couples."
--Emily Giffin, 'Baby Proof'

We are friends for life.

"There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends."
--Sylvia Plath, 'The Bell Jar'

There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.

"We are friends for life. When we're together the years fall away. Isn't that what matters? To have someone who can remember with you? To have someone who remembers how far you've come?"
--Judy Blume

This is what it is to be happy.

"If for example, you came at four o’clock in the afternoon, then at three o’clock I shall begin to be happy."
--'The Little Prince'

"I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'"
--Kurt Vonnegut

"I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, 'This is what it is to be happy.'"
--Sylvia Plath, 'The Bell Jar'

"People want pretty much the same things: They wanted to be happy. Most young people seemed to think that those things lay somewhere in the future, while most older people believed they lay in the past."
--Nicholas Sparks, 'Nights in Rodanthe'

That nameless empty.

"He was the toast to her butter."
--Nicholas Sparks, 'The Lucky One'

"And when her lips meet mine, I feel a strange tingling I have never felt before, and suddenly a miracle, and I discover a forgotten paradise, unchanged all this time, ageless like the stars. I feel the warmth of her body, and I allow myself to slip away. I close my eyes and become a mighty ship in churning waters, strong and fearless, and she is my sails."
--Nicholas Sparks, 'The Notebook'

"Love, I've come to understand, is more than three words mumbled before bedtime."
--Nicholas Sparks

"There I went again, building up a glamorous picture of a man would would love me passionately the minute he met me, and all out of a few prosy nothings."
--Sylvia Plath

"Suddenly I realize that this is what I've been waiting for - a man who depends entirely on me... I dreamed for years of a man who couldn't live without me, a man who pictured my face when he closed his eyes, who loved me when I was a mess in the morning and when dinner was late and even when I overloaded the washing machine and burned out the motor. My son stares up at me as if I can do no wrong. I have always wanted someone who treats me the way he does; I just didn't know that I'd have to give birth to him."
--Jodi Picoult, Harvesting the Heart'

"Dearest Cecilia, the story can resume. The one I had been planning on that evening walk. I can become again the man who once crossed the surrey park at dusk, in my best suit, swaggering on the promise of life. The man who, with the clarity of passion, made love to you in the library. The story can resume. I will return. Find you, love you, marry you and live without shame."
--'Atonment'

What do I know about love? Not much— that’s the safe answer. Even when I think I have a grasp on it, something comes along to make me realize I don’t know anything at all. It’s just a concept to me. It’s the thing that all the songs are written about, the thing that makes smart people act stupidly. If I can make love a concept, it makes me a better observer. And it also leaves a place inside of me hollow. Sometimes I can actually feel it. To reach down inside that part— I wonder how it would feel, to touch a void. That nameless empty.

And it was through falling flat-on-my-butt in love with him that I realized the most important thing about first love: as deep as it is for you at the time, it's only a teaser for even more amazing things to come. And whether first love ends dramatically or hurtfully or simply, eventually all the emotional fog surrounding it clears and we can see that first love is so special because it's one of the few experiences in life when we follow only our heart - not reason, not 'rules', not what other people say. Maybe that's why we all hold on to our first love in some way - why we miss it or long for it, want to reclaim or redo it. Because first love opens our eyes to that feeling that everyone has been talking about, singing about, writing about. It makes you feel like you've crossed over from not knowing to knowing. With first love, everything is new and the possibilities it awakens in you are exhilarating.

"And then there are my friends, and they have their own lives. While they like to talk everything through, to analyze and hypothesize, what I really need, what I'm really looking for, is not something I can articulate. It's nonverbal: I need love. I need the thing that happens when your brain shuts off and your heart turns on. And I know it's around me somewhere, but I just can't feel it."
--Elizabeth Wurtzel

She's great. I mean she's... she's smart. She's beautiful. She's funny. She's a big ol' scaredy cat. If you creep up behind her she'll jump out of her skin. It's pretty amusing. Um, she's honest. She always calls them just like she sees them. You can always count on getting the truth from her even if the truth hurts. She's stubborn. We fight a lot. She can be so frustrating sometimes. But she's a really, really good friend. And loyal to a fault, she's... she believes in me. And I'm a dreamer so I mean, it's so good to have somebody like that in my life. God, if she goes away I don't know what I'm going to do. I mean she's my best friend, you know? She's... she's
more than that... she's everything.

"If I had to tell you how humans made their way to Earth, it would go like this: In the beginning, there was nothing at all but the moon and the sun. And the moon wanted to come out during the day, but there was something so much brighter that seemed to fill up all those hours. The moon grew hungry, thinner and thinner, until she was just a slice of herself, and her tips were as sharp as a knife. By accident, because that is the way most things happen, she poked a hole in the night and out spilled a million stars, like a fountain of tears.

Horrified, the moon tried to swallow them up. And sometimes this worked, because she got fatter and rounder.. But mostly it didn't, because there were just so many. The stars kept coming, until they made the sky so bright that the sun got jealous. He invited the stars to his side of the world, where it was always bright. What he didn't tell them, though, was that in the daytime, they'd never be seen. So the stupid ones leaped from the sky to the ground, and they froze under the weight of their own foolishness.

The moon did her best. She carved each of these blocks of sorrow into a man or a woman. She spent the rest of her time watching out so that her other stars wouldn't fall. She spent the rest of her time holding onto whatever scraps she had left."
--Jodi Picoult

Stories have happy endings.

“Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.”
--Victor Hugo

"We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss — we want more and more and then more of it."
--Marie Howe, 'What The Living Do'

"Give me books, fruit, French wine and fine weather and a little music out of doors, played by someone I do not know."
--John Keats

"If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin."
--Ivan Turgenev

I wish you were here. But you’re not, you’re there. And there doesn’t know how lucky it is.

If people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.

But the struggles make you stronger and the changes make you wise and happiness has its own way of taking its sweet time.

CAST OF CHARACTERS
I Can’t is a quitter,
I Don’t Know is lazy,
I Wish I Could is a wisher,
I Might is waking up,
I Will Try is on his feet,
I Can is on his way,
I Will is at work,
I Did is now the boss.
--Earl Cassel

"You’ve got to get up every morning with determination if you’re going to go to bed with satisfaction."
--George Horace Lorimer

She brings home the boys who make up melodies on the piano and don't look at her funny when she walks back into the house with her camera in her hands.

Stories have happy endings. She still believes this.

I have so much to say.

I am in love with words. Words that touch. They may hurt, but the touch. That's what counts.

I enjoy writing messages that I don't plan on sending.

I know that when we saw each other for the first time in a long time we both knew exactly what the other was thinking, but didn't say anything because it was too complicated.

It would be nice, to have the right words for once. I have so much to say but I don't know how to say any of it.

This life is what you make it.

“This life is what you make it. No matter what you’re going to mess up sometimes, it’s a universal truth. But the good part is, you get to decide how you’re going to mess it up. Girls will be your friends - they’ll act like it anyway. But just remember, some come, some go. The ones that stay with you through everything - they’re your true best friends. Don’t let go of them. Also remember, sisters make the best friends in the world. As for lovers, well, they’ll come and go, too. And babe, I hate to say it, most of them - actually pretty much all of them are going to break your heart, but you can’t give up; because if you give up, you’ll never find your soul mate. You’ll never find that half who makes you whole.”
--Marilyn Monroe

I am a walking contradiction. I am often complimented on my honesty, yet more often than not I am lying. I talk a lot, yet nothing is ever revealed. I mock people whose goals and ambitions aren’t clear while changing the topic when mine are questioned. I spend most of my time fantasizing about the life I missed out on and the opportunities I’ve lost, yet still refuse to accept who I am and the life that I lead. Truth be told, I have no idea who I am. If I were to meet myself in street one day, I wouldn’t even know. After introducing myself I’d walk away thinking, ‘that was one strange individual who is nothing like anyone I’ve ever met before.’ Worst part is, I’d finally be telling the truth.

"Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted."
--Sylvia Plath

"Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could."
--Louise Erdrich, 'The Painted Drum: A Novel'

My heart is closing like a fist.

“I love you. I love you but I’m turning to my verses and my heart is closing like a fist.”
--Frank O’Hara

I think you're kind of amazing. Nearly everything you say to me makes perfect sense and I really appreciate that. It's always a great thing to have someone who understands -- be your voice of reason. Oftentimes I feel like you are mine. You really are one of the greatest friends I've ever had and I count my lucky stars that we met.

I’m falling more in love with every single word I withhold. I’m falling more in love with every single word you say. I’m falling head over heels for you.

I miss the way it feels to fight against all those buzzing bees inside my belly when somebody has his nose close to mine trying to smell the honey that make my lips shine.

"See there’s this place in me where your fingerprints still rest, your kisses still linger, and your whispers softly echo. It’s the place where a part of you will forever be a part of me."
--Gretchen Kemp

This is real.

I couldn't convince you that the blue you see is the same blue that I see. But maybe that's how lovers know they're meant to love; they see the same blue. And they both know it.

So if all we have is that glance in the window. If all we have is till this train stops. If all we have is till the sun comes up, till your lift picks you up. And If all we have is till the day I die. I'm ok with what we have.

But really, all we want, and I speak for the entire human race here, is contact. Someone to let us know that we aren't alone. That the world isn't a dream and you and I really are happening at the same time, even if it's not in the same place. That this is real. You're really there. I'm really here. We're real. This is real.

I honestly couldn't care less if you like the same bands or you've read the same books. Tell me one original thing, tell me one true, real thing that brings me to my fucking knees that I've never heard before and I'm yours.