because i want people to understand what I think about so often. to think the world is as beautiful as i think it is. and i want to talk to everyone about everything. good god, i want to yell at everyone, “do you see it? do you see everything around you?” i would ask them, panicked. they would just keep staring up at me. “don’t you notice it?? all of it? the world? it’s fucking beautiful. and we trample all over it, raking away its blanket of leaves, scraping away its fallen snow so meticulously arranged, walking from a to b to c to d, fixated on a flaw in our fingernails, spitting gum out of car windows haphazardly. “don’t you see it?” i’d ask. “it’s wonderful and i want you to realize it,” i would flail my arms around and be out of breath. but i could inhale and keep going.

--melt_into_spring

It's the simple life for me.

“I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn’t have a god, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. I didn’t make for an interesting person. I didn’t want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone.”

--Charles Bukowski

We can go all night

dancing to music we’ve never heard

and don’t much care for

drinking until it gets so very funny

every word, every step.

--Dallas Clayton

"I am simply looking for beauty, whatever that is - it's nothing that can be explained - only felt. If I find it in a single bowl, or wandering line of pots, good. I am grateful."

--Gwyn Hanssen Pigott, 'Potter'

Always treat your woman like a lady.

Never get too old to call her baby.

Never let your praying knees get lazy.

And love like crazy.

And then God created Saturn…and he liked it, so he put a ring on it…

"Gorgeous. Haunting. Let go. Decompress. Grandiose and gratifying. The waves will roll over you."

--Dianna Agron

Take me to the place where the sea meets the sky. It's the simple life for me.

i am not strange

i am an artist

"Now listen, life is lovely, but I Can’t Live It. I can’t even explain. I know how silly it sounds… but if you knew how it Felt. To be alive, yes, alive, but not be able to live it. Ay that’s the rub. I am like a stone that lives… locked outside of all that’s real… do you know of such things, can you hear? I wish, or think I wish, that I were dying of something for then I could be brave, but to be not dying, and yet… and yet to be behind a wall, watching everyone fit in where I can’t, to talk behind a gray foggy wall, to live but to not reach or to reach wrong… to do it all wrong… believe me, (can you?)"

Anne Sexton, 'A Self-Portrait in Letters'

"She would tell her about the music and the lights and how when you got going fast some looked like stars and others looked like fireflies that came so close to your nose you had to be careful not to breathe them in."

--Dennis G. Dillingham, Jr., 'The White Carousel Horse'

“She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow.”

--Sandra Cisneros

We have advantages. We have a cushion to fall back on. This is abundance. A luxury of place and time. Something rare and wonderful. It's almost historically unprecedented. We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to.

I prefer places where buildings are not taller than the tallest of trees

I was anti-everything and everyone. I didn't want people around me. This aversion was not some big crippling anxiety; merely a mature recognition of my own psychological vulnerability and my lack of suitability as a companion. Thoughts jostled for space in my crowded brain as I struggled to give them some order which might serve to motivate my listless life.

"What is beautiful for you may not be beautiful to someone else. Or whatever is beautiful here may not be beautiful there and what is sometimes beautiful today is not necessarily beautiful tomorrow. Perhaps this is the story of fashion and what makes fashion move forward, the fact that there is no decision whatsoever with what's wrong."

--Alber Elbaz, Artistic Director, Lanvin

"If clothes look beautiful on the hangers they won't necessarily look beautiful on the body. And that which may look good on the hanger, may look good on the body. Mr. Geoffrey Beene once told me that fashion is not what's on the back or the front of a coat but what's in between."

--Alber Elbaz, Artistic Director, Lanvin

"Ever tried

Ever failed

No matter

Try again

Fail again

Fail better"

--Samuel Beckett

“I don’t want to earn my living; I want to live.”

--Oscar Wilde

"Everybody has to leave, everybody has to leave their home and come back so they can love it again for all new reasons."

--Donald Miller, 'Through Painted Deserts'

"Dogs are minor angels, and I don't mean that facetiously. They love unconditionally, forgive immediately, are the truest of friends, willing to do anything that makes us happy, etcetera. If we attributed some of those qualities to a person we would say they are special. If they had ALL of them, we would call them angelic. But because it's "only" a dog, we dismiss them as sweet or funny but little more. However when you think about it, what are the things that we most like in another human being? Many times those qualities are seen in our dogs every single day-- we're just so used to them that we pay no attention."

--Jonathan Carroll

"When people talk about the good old days, I say to people, 'It's not the days that are old, it's you that's old.' I hate the good old days. What is important is that today is good."

--Karl Lagerfeld

Let life happen to you.

All quotes by poet Rainer Maria Rilke

"Let everything happen to you

Beauty and terror

Just keep going

No feeling is final"

"The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things."

"The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of."

--'Letters to a Young Poet'

"But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths."

"It is always what I have already said: always the wish that you may find patience enough in yourself to endure, and simplicity enough to believe; that you may acquire more and more confidence in that which is difficult, and in your solitude among others. And for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is right, in any case."

"Earth, my dearest, oh believe me, you no longer need your springtimes to win me over...Unspeakably, I have belonged to you, from the flush."

"And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it."

--'Letters to a Young Poet'

"And isn't the whole world yours? For how often you set it on fire with your love and saw it blaze and burn up and secretly replaced it with another world while everyone slept. You felt in such complete harmony with God, when every morning you asked him for a new earth, so that all the ones he had made could have their turn. You thought it would be shabby to save them and repair them; you used them up and held out your hands, again and again, for more world. For your love was equal to everything."

--'The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge'

"We discover that we do not know our role; we look for a mirror; we want to remove our make-up and take off what is false and real. But somewhere a piece of disguise that we forgot still sticks to us. A trace of exaggeration remains in our eyebrows; we do not notice that the corners of our mouth are bent. And so we walk around, a mockery and a mere half: neither having achieved being nor actors."

"Who has not sat before his own heart's curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart."

“Why then, have to be human?

Oh not because happiness exists,

Not out of curiosity..

But because being here means so much;

because everything here,

vanishing so quickly, seems to need us,

and strangely keeps calling to us.. To have been

here, once, completely, even if only once,

to have been at one with the earth -

this is beyond undoing.”

IF I LIKE YOU THAT MEANS (AT LEAST ONE OF THESE THINGS) YOU ARE DISINTERESTED, I AM SCARED TO ADMIT I LIKE YOU SO I AM NOT GOING TO CALL YOU BACK, I WILL WRITE ABOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF US EVERYWHERE, I WILL EMAIL MY BEST FRIEND ABOUT YOUR VOICE, YOU ARE NOT SINGLE, YOU DON’T KNOW MY NAME, I REALLY HAVE TO KNOW WHAT YOUR FAVORITE SORT OF MUSIC IS, I LIKE TO EAT GREEN APPLES AND THINK OF YOU, I DIDN’T MEAN TO BECOME YOUR BEST FRIEND BUT NOW I DON’T KNOW HOW TO TELL YOU I THINK I AM IN LOVE WITH YOU, YOU ARE NOT MY TYPE BUT I LIKE YOUR T-SHIRT (AND YOUR EYELASHES), I AM AN IDIOT, YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL, I REALLY WANT TO CALL YOU, I DIDN’T SEE YOU TODAY SO I AM GOING TO YELL AT EVERYONE, YOU ARE MILES AWAY, I AM DESPERATE, YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW ME, I WANT TO GET DRUNK WITH YOU, LET’S SLEEP UNDER THE SKY TOGETHER, I WONDER IF YOU WOULD EVER LIKE TO WAKE UP NEXT TO ME, I WANT YOU FOR MY BIRTHDAY.

Bars Poetica

This is the story I've tried to tell. Guy
exists. Father mother sister brother.
Oh pretty stars, oh bastard moon
I see you watching me. The trembling
years leading to sex, the trembling sex.
Death as garnish. Death as male lead,
female lead, death as a cast
of thousands. God in, on, as, with,
to, around, because who knows
because. All the while feeling air's
a quilt of tongues, that spaces
between words are more articulate
than words. It's not like you'd hope,
that anyone can make sense.
Look around you, let your ears
breathe deep--almost no one does.
Have another drink. When they throw us out
there's a place down the street
that never closes, and when it does
we'll climb a fire escape and praise
the genealogy of light. The Big Bang
sounds like what it was, the fucking
that got everything under way.
That love was there from the start
is all I've been trying to say.
--Bob Hicok

'I Am' by Tyler Knott Gregson

I am the longing. I am the unscratched surface of my potential. I am the first step waiting to be taken. I am the smirk that won't wipe off my face. I am the unquenched thirst. I am the desire. I am the patience that is wearing thin. I am the end of the rope. I am the love unspoken for. I am the fear, but I am the courage. I am the uncharted waters. I am the waiting, the waiting, the waiting. I am the glass half full. I am the unspoken understanding. I am the butterfly effect. I am the arms raised in victory, I am the hands holding my head in defeat. I am the moment of clarity. I am the double take. I am the words I scribble. I am the lips unkissed, my hands not held. I am the lyrics. I am the melody. I am the honesty, I am the loyalty. I am the wonder, the beautiful wonder. I am the late night talk. I am the sour and I am the sweet. I am the last blink before sleep. I am the first breath of the morning. I am the goosebumps, I am the sweat. I am the most romantic thing I've yet to do. I am the thoughts uncontrollable. I am the raised eyebrow. I am the teardrop tracing the contours of my face. I am the laughter, the uncensored laughter. I am the mistakes I've made, and the lessons I've learned. I am the success. I am the failure. I am the ambition, I am the apathy. I am the opposites inside me. I am the trembling anticipation. I am the love I take. I am the compassion. I am the underestimation I receive. I am the focus I always lose. I am the memories. I am the stolen breath and the skipped heartbeat. I am the worry. I am the calm. I am the smile. I am the freedom, I am the dependence. I am the broken heart. I am the misplaced trust. I am the confidence, but I am the insecurity. I am the faith. I am the logical next step. I am the places I've seen. I am the perfect guy for someone out there. I am the first hello with whoever she will be. I am the first kiss. I am the first fight. I am the shared dreams. I am the beating of my heart. I am the infinite space between today and tomorrow. I am the last straw. I am the confusion. I am the incompatibility. I am the comfortable silence. I am the wink. I am the thought in the back of my mind. I am the first star I wish on. I am the aching. I am the poetry I write. I am the uncertainty of who it is for. I am the relief, the sweet relief. I am the shadows across my face. I am the peace. I am the lack. I am the happiness I am surrounded by. I am the man I'm becoming. I am the boy I used to be. I am the whole, but I am the pieces. I am the pieces.

Loneliness adds beauty to life.

“Loneliness adds beauty to life. It puts a special burn on sunsets and makes night air smell better.”

--Henry Rollins

I am alive and that is the best that I can do.

Thinking of me as others may see me scares the crap out of me.

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

I think it used to mean

making enough

everyday

to provide for the people you love

and loving enough

so that those people

would also provide for you.

It seems like now it means

making more than you could ever need or use

and keeping as much of it as possible

because you don’t have time

everyday

to love anyone enough

for them to want to share.

--Dallas Clayton

THE RULES

Trying to explain to a child

why cavemen didn’t wear clothes in the summer

but we have to

is like admitting

that nothing we ever do

really makes any sense at all.

--Dallas Clayton

“If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, ‘thank you,’ that would suffice.”

--Meister Eckhart

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

--Albert Einstein