The bitter so bitter you gave up the sweet.

“We’re too much ourselves. Afraid of letting go of what we are in case we’re nothing, and holding on so tight we lose everything else.”

--Clive Barker

“There’s power in numbers. It takes a village. Say it however you want, but the truth is that we cannot go through this life alone. Some of us are lucky enough to be born in the vicinity of our tribe; others will have to travel far and wide it, as I did. But I truly believe that whoever you are…there’s a place for you to fit in… The road to your dreams is sometimes dark, and it’s sometimes magical, but The Wizard of Oz had one thing right: it’s ultimately about the journey and the characters who accompany you on it, not about the destination.”

--Kelly Cutrone

"This is an important lesson to remember when you're having a bad day, a bad month, or a shitty year. Things will change: you won't feel this way forever. And anyway, sometimes the hardest lessons to learn are the ones your soul needs most. I believe you can't feel real joy unless you've felt heartache. You can't have a sense of victory unless you know what it means to fail. You can't know what it's like to feel holy until you know what it's like to feel really fucking evil. And you can't be birthed again until you've died."

--Kelly Cutrone, 'If You Have to Cry, Go Outside: And Other Things Your Mother Never Told You'

"After all, you can't truly be happy if you've never known pain. You can't truly feel joy if you've never felt heartbreak. You can't know what it's like to be filled unless you've been empty."

--Kelly Cutrone, 'If You Have to Cry, Go Outside: And Other Things Your Mother Never Told You'

“Growth demands a temporary surrender of security.”

--Gail Sheehy

Once again, she asked me what I meant. And again, my heart was in my words, but the explanation made no sense. Typical me.

“Where’s my heart at? Aw. Um, in my chest. I think it’s in there—on the right hand side. Sometimes it’s in my mouth and sometimes I can feel it in my stomach, when I get really nervous. So it’s pretty physical.”

--Florence Welch, when asked where her heart is at

What people don't understand about being a genius

Is that it is hard

It creeps inside of you and you can't relate

The world is the thing you cannot master

You really can't

You try to work for people

You let the people down

--Dorothea Lasky, 'Own Life'

"It’s only when you’ve lost someone that you realize the nonsense of that phrase “It’s a small world”. It isn’t. It’s a vast, devouring world, especially if you’re alone."

--Clive Barker, 'Books of Blood 2'

"That was what she really wanted. To forget so thoroughly she'd never have another memory again, the bitter so bitter you gave up the sweet."

--Janet Fitch, 'Paint It Black'

"Here, here is my dark world. You carry it for a change. I'm out."

--Janet Fitch

"I wonder which is preferable, to walk around all your life swollen up with your own secrets until you burst from the pressure of them, or to have them sucked out of you, every paragraph, every sentence, every word of them, so at the end you’re depleted of all that was once as precious to you as hoarded gold, as close to you as your skin - everything that was of the deepest importance to you, everything that made you cringe and wish to conceal, everything that belonged to you alone - and must spend the rest of your days like an empty sack flapping in the wind, an empty sack branded with a bright fluorescent label so that everyone will know what sort of secrets used to be inside you?"

--Margaret Atwood

"She was extending a hand that I didn’t know how to take, so I broke its fingers with my silence."

--Jonathan Safran Foer

"I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. There is not any part of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surfaces of the water."

--D. H. Lawrence

“I have no advice for anybody; except to, you know, be awake enough to see where you are at any given time, and how that is beautiful, and has poetry inside. Even places you hate.”

--Jeff Buckley

"Your head’s like mine, like all our heads; big enough to contain every god and devil there ever was. Big enough to hold the weight of oceans and the turning stars. Whole universes fit in there! But what do we choose to keep in this miraculous cabinet? Little broken things, sad trinkets that we play with over and over. The world turns our key and we play the same little tune again and again and we think that tune’s all we are."

--Grant Morrison, 'The Invisibles'

"Believe me, nothing is more beautiful than to carry out crazy ideas. I’d like my whole life to be one single crazy idea."

--Milan Kundera, 'Farewell Waltz'