Tell me that you love me.

Every time I take a shower I always write the name of the guy I like currently on the glass door that has fogged up from the heat of the water. I don’t know when I started doing this but I’ve pretty much been doing it for as long as I can remember. It just feels freeing to write it down, it’s like I’m telling someone but the secret is kept forever as the steam slowly covers over the letters again. Anyways, my point is: I wrote your name on my shower door five times this morning.

I guess what makes me different from most girls is that I'm not the type to squeal all over you and I don't ask for your attention at all times. I know what I want and I know how to get it but I don't hurt people along the way. I can be a bitch but I'm also a weird, obnoxious loser, but hey, that's the truth in me. I guess you can say I'm complicated, but I'd rather be difficult than easy any day. I can be hard to figure out at times but if you know me, I'm not that much of a confusing person. So why don't you actually open up your heart instead of just your eyes and take a look at me, then tell me that you love me.

“You have to walk carefully in the beginning of love; the running across fields into your lover’s arms can only come later when you’re sure they won’t laugh if you trip.”

--Jonathan Carroll

If this comes creased and creased again and soiled

as if I’d opened it a thousand times

to see if what I’d written here was right,

it’s all because I looked too long for you

to put in your pocket. Midnight says

the little gifts of loneliness come wrapped

by nervous fingers. What I wanted this

to say was that I want to be so close

that when you find it, it is warm from me.

--Ted Koozer

I’m going to tell you that there is nothing better than men who love women. Who can be wholly and truly, uncomfortably undone by one. That is the only sort of man worth having.

"Today, see if you can stretch your heart and expand your love so that it touches not only those to whom you can give it easily, but also to those who need it so much.”

--Author Unknown

“For me, it was a bottle of Strawberry Kiwi Arbor Mist because when you are twenty, this is the solution to every problem. I was freshly dumped and I drank the whole thing in my bathtub. Eventually the water grew cold and I got out, wrapping myself in loose bedsheets. I dripped into my living room and onto my couch. It had been two weeks and I still wasn’t sure how to be alone. I turned on the tv and went through every channel and eventually made my way through the movie channels to find Hannah and Her Sisters playing. It was just at the part of Mickey and Holly’s first date and I laughed as he asked her whether she had a kilo of coke in her purse. I pushed my wet hair behind my ears and watched as Mickey and Holly met again unexpectedly and things were easy. They just were, if you will. You’d never think that it would be that easy, especially for these two, but it is. That guy I was drinking mom wine over didn’t leave me because I worried too much, he left because things weren’t right. I got it then. Life was too short to be with someone who wasn’t quite right, someone who made you think more than they made you feel.”

I'll find strength in pain

All lyrics by Mumford & Sons

And there will come a time, you'll see, with no more tears

And love will not break your heart, but dismiss your fears

Get over your hill and see what you find there

With grace in your heart and flowers in your hair

And now my heart stumbles on things I don't know

Lend me your hand and we'll conquer them all

But lend me your heart and I'll just let you fall

Lend me your eyes I can change what you see

But your soul you must keep, totally free

In these bodies we will live, in these bodies we will die

Where you invest your love, you invest your life

Seal my heart and brake my pride

I've nowhere to stand and now nowhere to hide

Align my heart, my body, my mind

To face what I've done and do my time

But close my eyes for a while

Force from the world a patient smile

Rate yourself and rake yourself

Take all the courage you have left

Wasted on fixing all the problems

That you made in your own head

And I'll find strength in pain

And I will change my ways

Cause I need freedom now

And I need to know how

To live my life as it's meant to be

Lead me to the truth and I will follow you with my whole life

And my head told my heart

"Let love grow"

But my heart told my head

"This time no"

Wanna take my time for me.

“I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken - and I’d rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I lived.”

--Margaret Mitchell

I hate looking at myself and realizing that I don't like what I see. I hate looking back at things I did and wondering why I was like that. Every day there's something wrong. Just one trivial thing that can make me unhappy for just a moment. It's like it's not even possible to have a day without one bad feeling.

“Choosing a path meant having to miss out on others. She had a whole life to live, and she was always thinking that, in the future, she might regret the choices she made now. “I’m afraid of committing myself,” she thought to herself. She wanted to follow all possible paths and so ended up following none. Even in that most important area of her life, love, she had failed to commit herself. After her first romantic disappointment, she had never again given herself entirely. She feared pan, loss, and separation. These things were inevitable on the path to love, and the only way of avoiding them was by deciding not to take that path at all. In order not to suffer, you had to renounce love. It was like putting out your own eyes not to see the bad things in life.”

--Paulo Coelho, 'Brida'

“A dog has no use for fancy cars or big homes or designer clothes. Status symbol means nothing to him. A waterlogged stick will do just fine. A dog judges others not by their color or creed or class but by who they are inside. A dog doesn’t care if you are rich or poor, educated or illiterate, clever or dull. Give him your heart and he will give you his. It was really quite simple, and yet we humans, so much wiser and more sophisticated, have always had trouble figuring out what really counts and what does not. As I wrote that farewell column to Marley, I realized it was all right there in front of us, if only we opened our eyes. Sometimes it took a dog with bad breath, worse manners, and pure intentions to help us see.”

--John Grogan

"If you spend your time waiting for the inspiration to come to you, for the ideas to “gush forth”, it will be too late. It is like with magazines: there is a deadline…we have deadlines and that is a healthy form of discipline. It creates ideas."

--Karl Lagerfeld

“You have been told that real life is not like college and you have been correctly informed. Real life is more like high school.”

--Meryl Streep

“I love to sleep. Do you? Isn’t it great? It really is the best of both worlds. You get to be alive and unconscious.”

--Rita Rudner

“I’m free, I think. I shut my eyes and think hard and deep about how free I am, but I can’t really understand what it means. All I know is I’m totally alone. All alone in an unfamiliar place, like some solitary explorer who’s lost his compass and his map. Is this what it means to be free?”

--Haruki Murakami

I'd hate to be snow. Even if it's true that every flake's different, they're still the same to me. Stars are better. They hang in the sky. People stretch their eyes looking for them. They shed sparks. Have names. You can't touch them. They don't melt.

“I studiously avoid looking at myself in a mirror. It would not be productive. If we think we have physical imperfections, obsessing about them is only destructive. Low self-esteem involves imagining the worst that other people can think about you. That means they’re living upstairs in the rent-free room.”

--Roger Ebert

“There’s always a weak way out. I’ve always known that. Yeah, I didn’t want to be here, but I didn’t want to kill myself. I just wanted to push a button and disappear. The dogs were there when no one else was there. I think I hadn’t left the house for four or five months, and I was sitting in the closet, sleeping in the closet for some reason, and I was in a bad place, and I just remember I was thinking, ‘Oh, man, if I do this.’ And then I looked at my dog, Lowjack, and he made a sound, like a little almost human sound. I don’t have kids, the dogs became everything to me. The dog was looking at me going, ‘Who’s going to take care of me?’”

--Mickey Rourke

“Well, this is not how I expected to wake up this morning. After I recieved the news, Malia walked in and said, “Daddy, you won the Nobel Peace Prize, and it is Bo’s birthday.” And then Sasha added, “Plus, we have a three-day weekend coming up.” So, it’s good to have kids to keep things in perspective.”

--Obama, on winning the Nobel Peace Prize

Hell is other people at breakfast.

“I wanna breeze and an open mind

I wanna swim in the ocean

Wanna take my time for me”

--Stereophonics, 'Maybe Tomorrow'

And that's me: I suffer from a failure of imagination. I could do what I wanted, every day of my life, and what I want to do, apparently, is to get walloped out of my head and pick fights. Telling me I can do anything I want is like pulling the plug out of the bath and then telling the water it can go anywhere it wants. Try it, and see what happens.

Maybe it’s about stringing together all the little things.

All quotes by author Ann Brashares

we aren’t in high school. we aren’t really in our families and we aren’t in our houses. those are the places we grew up and the times we spent together, but they aren’t us. if we think they are, then we’re lost, because times end and places are lost. we aren’t any place or any time. we are everywhere.

- forever in blue: the fourth summer of the sisterhood

when you remembered to forget, you were remembering. it was when you forgot to forget that you forgot.

- forever in blue: the fourth summer of the sisterhood

maybe happiness didn’t have to be about the big, sweeping circumstances, about having everything in your life in place. maybe it was about stringing together a bunch of small pleasures. wearing slippers and watching the miss universe contest. eating a brownie with vanilla ice cream. getting to level seven in dragon master and knowing there were twenty more levels to go. maybe happiness was just a matter of the little upticks- the traffic signal that said “walk” the second you go there- and downticks- the itch tag at the back of your collar- that happened to every person in the course of the day. maybe everybody had the same allotted measure of happiness within each day. maybe it didn’t matter if you were a world-famous heartthrob or a painful geek. maybe it didn’t matter if your friend was possibly dying. maybe you just got through it. maybe that was all you could ask for.

- sisterhood of the traveling pants

particularly beautiful people were like particularly funny-looking people, though. once you know them you mostly forgot about it.

- the sisterhood of the traveling pants

some people fall in love over and over again while some people can only do it once.

- forever in blue: the fourth summer of the sisterhood

maybe the truth is, there’s a little bit of loser in all of us. being happy isn’t having everything in your life be perfect. maybe it’s about stringing together all the little things.

- the sisterhood of the traveling pants

she was astonished, and at the same time she knew. there were many things in life like that. you couldn’t imagine it, and then it happened and you couldn’t really imagine it hadn’t.

- the last summer (of you and me)

you’ll turn out ordinary if you’re not careful.

when she is happy, she can’t stop talking, when she is sad she doesn’t say a word.

love made you admire funny things about a person, like how good she was at remembering to return her library books and at slicing cucumbers very thin. she was a veritable wonder at pulling a splinter out of her foot.

you could feel things or you could find a way to shut down. but once you were feeling things, you couldn’t decide exactly what to feel. that was the trouble with letting them in at all. they made a mess of the place.

I'm cracking open.

All quotes by author Libba Bray

please. we know. these are hard times. the world hurts. we live in fear and forget to walk with hope. but hope has not forgotten you. so ask it to dinner. it’s probably hungry and would appreciate the invitation.

- going bovine

you can never know about your own destiny: are the people you meet there to play a part in your own destiny, or do you exist just to play a role in theirs?

- going bovine

prepared to fly, even if she has to lose her legs to do it.

i’m like everyone else in this stupid, bloody, amazing world. i’m flawed. impossibly so. but hopeful. i’m still me.

- the sweet far thing

and yet, you’re still alone. all that trying and still you stand apart, watching from the other side of the glass. afraid to have what you truly want because what if it’s not enough after all? so much better to wrap yourself up in the longing. the yearning. the restlessness.

i know i’ve done the right thing but i couldn’t feel worse about it, and i suppose that is part of what it is to lead.

- the sweet far thing

how i’d love to get away from here and be someone else for a while in a place where no one knows or expects certain things from me.

- a great and terrible beauty

it is a giggle full of high spirits and merry mischief, proof that we never lose our girlish selves, no matter what sort of women we become.

- the sweet far thing

it’s strange how deliberate people are after a death. all the indecision suddenly vanishes into clear, defined moments—changing the linens, choosing a dress or a hymn, the washing up, the muttering of prayers. all the small, simple, conscious acts of living a sudden defense against the dying we do every day.

i can’t make a sound. i only nod. i’ve heard it said that god is in the details. it’s the same with the truth. leave out the details, the crucial heart, and you can damn someone with the bare bones of it.

there is never any turning back. you have to go forward. make the future yours.

we are all unkind from time to time. we all do things we desperately wish we could undo. those things just become a part of who we are, along with everything else. to spend time trying to change that, well it’s just like chasing clouds.

- a great and terrible beauty

that’s what living in their world is—a big lie. an illusion where everyone looks the other way and pretends that nothing unpleasant exists at all, no goblins of the dark, no ghosts of the soul.

instead, i try to adjust to the dawn, letting the tears fall where they may, because it is morning; it is morning and there is so much to see.

- the sweet far thing

but forgiveness… i’ll hold on to that fragile slice of hope and keep it close, remembering that in each of us lie good and bad, light and dark, art and pain, choice and regret, cruelty and sacrifice. we’re each of us our own chiaroscuro, our own bit of illusion fighting to emerge into something solid, something real.

no one asks how or what i am doing. they could not care less. we’re all looking glasses, we girls, existing only to reflect their images back to them as they’d like to be seen. hollow vessels of girls to be rinsed of our own ambitions, wants, and opinions, just waiting to be filled with the cool, tepid water of gracious compliance. a fissure forms in the vessel. i’m cracking open.

it’s knowing i’ll never have what she has—a beauty so powerful it brings things to you. i fear i will always have to chase things i want. i’ll always have to wonder whether i’m truly wanted or whether i’ve just been settled for.

we’re all strangers connected by what we reveal, what we share, what we take away—our stories. i guess that’s what i love about books—they are thin strands of humanity that tether us to one another for a small bit of time, that make us feel less alone or even more comfortable with our aloneness, if need be.

and for a moment, i understand that i have friends on this lonely path; that sometimes your place is not something you find, but something you have when you need it.

- rebel angels

‘do you ever feel that way?’ ‘lonely?’ i search for the words. ‘restless. as if you haven’t really met yourself yet. as if you’d passed yourself once in the fog, and your heart leapt—‘ah! there i am! i’ve been missing that piece!’ but it happens too fast, and then that part of you disappears into the fog again. and you spend the rest of your days looking for it.’ he nods, and i think he’s appeasing me. i feel stupid of having said it. it’s sentimental and true, and i’ve revealed a part of myself i shouldn’t have. ‘do you know what i think?’ kartik says at last. ‘what?’ ‘sometimes, i think you can glimpse it in another.’

- the sweet far thing

in a world beyond this one, that river goes on singing sweetly, enchanting us with what we want to hear, shaping what we need to see in order to keep going. in those waters, all disappointments are forgotten, our mistakes forgiven. gazing into them, we see a strong father. a loving mother. warm rooms where we are sheltered, adored, wanted. and the uncertainty of our futures is nothing more than the fog of breath on a windowpane.

- a great and terrible beauty

we can’t live in the light all of the time. you have to take whatever light you can hold into the dark with you.

- a great and terrible beauty

Let love write on you for a little.

“It was my first big chance, but here I was, sitting back and letting it run through my fingers like so much water.”

--Sylvia Plath

The saddest thing I ever did see was a woodpecker pecking on a plastic tree. He looks at me and, "Friend," says he, "Life ain't as sweet as it used to be."

You'll find that sometimes life is so much happier when you're just glad to be alive.

And I think that we should run as fast as we can into what we don't know.

"'Love is never having to say you’re sorry.’ What a crock. Love is constantly saying you’re sorry, even when you know damn well you’re right.

--Kim Gruenenfelder, 'A Total Waste of Makeup'

"At a certain part in your life. Probably when too much of it has gone by. You will open your eyes and see yourself for who you are. Especially for everything that made you so different from all the awful normals. And you will say to yourself, 'But I am this person.' And in that statement, that correction, there will be a kind of love."

--'Phoebe in Wonderland'

"Happiness is anyone and anything that's loved by you."

--Charlie Brown

“I speak two languages, Body and English.”

--Mae West

You have to be really ambitious but you have to balance that with patience. You have to have both.

All your life you are told things you can’t do. All your life they will say you’re not good enough, or strong enough, or talented enough. They will say you’re the wrong height, or the wrong weight, or the wrong type to play this or achieve that. They will tell you no, a thousand times no. Until all the no’s become meaningless. All your life they will tell you no, quite firmly and very quickly. And you will tell them yes.

"If you get far enough away, you’ll be on your way home."

--Tom Waits

I want you to take up all my time. I want you to fill up the gaps in my life with good conversation. I want your charm to consume me. You are the sort of person I could fall in love with these days.

"I always carry lots of stuff with me wherever I roam, always weighted down with books, with cassettes, with pens and paper, just in case I get the urge to sit down somewhere, and oh, I don’t know, read something or write my masterpiece. I want all my important possessions, my worldly goods, with me at all times. I want to hold what little sense of home I have left with me always. I feel so heavy all the time, so burdened. This must be a little bit like what it’s like to be a bag lady, to drag your feet here, there, and everywhere, nowhere at all."

--Elizabeth Wurtzel

"He was always in his room writing those things, never with people. I used to tell him, what good is all of that love doing on paper? I said, let love write on you for a little."

--Jonathan Safran Foer, 'Everything Is Illuminated'

Anything I can mistake in the dark for being what I'm looking for is good enough for me.

"I do maintain that if your hair is wrong, your entire life is wrong."

--Morrissey

"I'll tell you a trick that's sometimes a big help: when you start looking around for something good to take the place of the bad, as a general rule, you can find it."

--'Old Yeller'

"Rule number one: Always stick around for one more drink. That’s when things happen. That’s when you find out everything you want to know."

--John Berendt, 'Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil'

I need to know that hearts haven't become extinct. I want to project myself back to another time that still feels so close. My body went on without me and I'm still back there, all warm and brokenhearted. I'm lost under the covers. But I have a feeling it's morning and it's time to get up.

I don't tell somebody I love them unless I mean it because I know what it feels like to be told those words but having no true meaning. I give thanks for I know unappreciative people. I take chances because I know what regret feels like. I forgive because I know what it feels like to not be forgiven. I find something perfect in everyone because I know how much it hurts to be told your full of flaws. Promises don't exist because I had someone who didn't keep theirs. I don't judge because I have been judged . I don't make the whole world happy because that's the only thing that doesn't make me happy. I trust very few because some time or another somebody has turned their back on me. I learned how to be happy by myself because I realized I wasn't happy with someone. I've learned to smile in the worst times because I know what it's like to cry in the best times. I guard my heart because I know how it feels to be played around with. I look before I fall because I fell and had forgot to look. I choose to be myself because I have met the fakes.