Just say it out loud.

“Suddenly I realize

That if I stepped out of my body I would break

Into blossom.”

--James Wright, 'A Blessing'

“The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.”

--Terence McKenna

“Nothing will work unless you do.”

--Maya Angelou

“Life is never just one note. This is no different. …NO ONE - not one single person - on this earth is all alone with any feeling they have. Everyone has felt something similar at some time - and maybe they’re as scared of it as you are. Just say it! Just say it out loud.”

--o, world

“Admit what you’ve lost and live with the cost; at times it does hurt to be healed.”

--Brian Yorkey, 'Next to Normal'

“Everything has its own place and function. That applies to people, although many don’t seem to realize it, stuck as they are in the wrong job, the wrong marriage, or the wrong house. When you know and respect your Inner Nature, you know where you belong. You also know where you don’t belong.”

--The Tao of Pooh

“I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched.”

--Edgar Allan Poe

“A mind that is stretched to a new idea never returns to its original dimension”

--Oliver Wendell Holmes

“You’ve got to know the rules to break them. That’s what I’m here for, to demolish the rules but to keep the tradition.”

--Alexander McQueen

"Failing at something you love to do feels much better than succeeding at something you care nothing about."

--Dallas Clayton

“We need to remember what’s important in life: friends, waffles, and work. Or waffles, friends, work … doesn’t matter. But work is third.”

--Leslie Knope, 'Parks & Recreation'

“I meet you. I remember you. Who are you? You’re destroying me. You’re good for me. How could I know this city was tailor made for love? How could I know you fit me like a glove? I like you. How unlikely. How low all of a sudden. How sweet. You cannot know.”

--Hiroshima Mon Amour, Alain Resnais, 1959

“It’s your choice to decide what looks good on you. What world you fit in. What do you feel about that. And don’t be afraid of having to be one look. Be anything you want to be. And be many things.”

--Ralph Lauren

"I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought, there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it's true I'm here, and I'm just as strange as you."

--Frida Kahlo

“Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.”

--Charles Baudelaire

“At times it feels like music is an excuse to be a human. It feels like people need that excuse to go and put their arms in the air and sing their hearts out.”

--Marcus Mumford

“The more I think it over, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.”

--Vincent Van Gogh

“I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.”

--Vladimir Nabokov

“I can never say what I want to say. It’s been like this for a while now. I try to say something, but all I get are the wrong words-the wrong words or the exact opposite words from what I mean. I try to correct myself, and that only makes it worse. I lose track of what I was trying to say to begin with. It’s like I’m split in two and playing tag with myself. One half is chasing the other half around the big, fat post. The other me has the right words, but this me can’t catch her.”

--Haruki Murakami, 'Norwegian Wood'

“I have faith in the fact that, as I change, so will the things that I’m interested in, as long as I keep up my own change.”

--Michelle Williams in Interview Magazine

“I had always been kind of obsessed with making a home of my own and was always drawing rooms that I wanted to live in, down to pictures on the wall and the faces that would be in the photographs, and how the couches would be situated.”

--Michelle Williams in Interview Magazine

“…I would roll down the window and hang my head out like a dog, and let the 60-mile-an-hour wind slap me. It was the only way i could get the day off me.”

--Michelle Williams in Interview Magazine

“I still have a hard time giving up on the day and admitting exhaustion.”

--Michelle Williams in Interview Magazine

“Existence is not a problem to be solved, it is a mystery to be lived. And you should be perfectly aware what the difference is between a mystery and a problem. A problem is something created by the mind; a mystery is something which is there, not created by the mind. A problem has an ugliness in it, like disease. A mystery is beautiful. With a problem, immediately a fight arises. You have to solve it; something is wrong, you have to put it right; something is missing, you have to supply the missing link. With a mystery there is no question like that. The moon arises in the night…. It is not a problem, it is a mystery. You have to live with it. You have to dance with it. You have to sing with it, or you can be just silent with it. Something mysterious surrounds you.”

--Osho

You’re already home where you feel love

“Mama once told me you, you’re already home where you feel love”

--The Head and the Heart, Lost In My Mind

“I began to draw an invisible boundary between myself and other people. No matter who I was dealing with. I maintained a set distance, carefully monitoring the person’s attitude so that they wouldn’t get any closer. I didn’t easily swallow what other people told me. My only passions were books and music.”

--Haruki Murakami, 'Sputnik Sweetheart'

“Socializing is as exhausting as giving blood. People assume we loners are misanthropes, just sitting thinking, ‘Oh, people are such a bunch of assholes,’ but it’s really not like that. We just have a smaller tolerance for what it takes to be with others. It means having to perform. I get so tired of communicating.”

--Anneli Rufus

“I think if you are really into words and poetry and situations of life, there is always a little kiss of sadness on everything you do… It’s just the kind of person who I am. I always look carefully beneath the outward appearance of things. I want to know what’s really going on in somebody’s heart.”

--Stevie Nicks

“‎Fashion is the armour to survive the reality of everyday life.”

--Bill Cunningham

“The quickest way to know a woman is to go shopping with her.”

--Marcelene Cox

“By 19, I had found my look. Oversize t-shirts, bike shorts, and wrestling shoes. To prevent the silhouette from being too baggy, I would cinch it at the waist with my fanny pack. I was pretty sure I would wear this look forever. The shirts allowed me express myself with cool sayings like ‘there’s no crying in baseball’ and ‘universität heidelberg,’ the bike shorts showed off my muscular legs, and the fanny pack held all my trolley tokens. I was nailing it on a daily basis. Find something like this for yourself as soon as possible.”

--Tina Fey, 'Bossypants'

“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”

--Albert Camus

“Someday, somewhere - anywhere, unfailingly, you’ll find yourself, and that, and only that, can be the happiest or bitterest hour of your life.”

--Pablo Neruda

“Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it’s much the same”

--Margaret Atwood, 'The Blind Assassin'

“There’s only one me

I have ever liked being;

the me that you see.”

--Tyler Knott Gregson

“How privileged you are, to be passionately

Clinging to what you love;

The forfeit of hope has not destroyed you.”

--Louise Gluck, 'October'

“I felt all inner development was ceasing, that all becoming and growing were being choked, because a single idea was filling my entire soul.”

--Ellen West

“I feel like we’re all wounded and we can carry wounds throughout our lives. It can be small incidents that happen, or the soul you’re born into. I’ve always thought I carried this heartbreak since the day I was born.”

--Lykke Li

“I am a dreamer. I know so little of real life that I just can’t help re-living such moments as these in my dreams, for such moments are something I have very rarely experienced. I am going to dream about you the whole night, the whole week, the whole year.”

--Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.”

--Rainer Maria Rilke

“I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.”

--James Baldwin

“Let nature do the freezing and frightening and isolating in this world. Let men work and love and fight it off.”

--Jack Kerouac

“I’m not a girl, nor will I ever be. But if I were a girl, I’d like to be Sofia. She’s very feminine. And she’s very quiet. But then, her movie’s done. She loves fashion and music and art and film, and she is able to combine them in a way that all seems to be quite natural. There’s nothing forced about it; she doesn’t have that gritty hunger to prove what she knows. There are certain people who have confidence and absolutely adore themselves and, five minutes around them, I just want to not be around them anymore. Sofia is confident in such a lovely way. It’s not aggressive or arrogant, and that’s a gift. I’m sure she works quite hard, but it all seems effortless.”

--Marc Jacobs on Sofia Coppola

moonlight in an orange grove and vanilla ice cream cones

Everything feels like it’s overflowing. Like I’m chasing after the things that fill up each day and I can’t keep up with it all. Do you know this thing I’m talking about? I have these almost black outs, selective memory and freak moments where I don’t know how I got there. First I’m bike riding on the lake front thinking about that boy I wrote for and how he had night terrors, I see him walking down these grand empty rooms with old sheets covering the furniture. I’m hearing the bells of other bike riders, smiling at a tiny little black girl picking flowers on the side of the road and then the next thing I know I have a brown bag full of groceries wandering some aisle in whole foods, and then I’m throwing up in the lot next to Acadia, asking the french man how much he’s selling his post cards for, singing at the top of my lungs with you when the windows are rolled down on high way forty three, crying in my parent’s bathroom when no one is home and I don’t even know why I drove there in the first place. I keep finding myself in random moments and losing myself in the mess of living uncontrollably, helplessly, smiling even when I feel out of place, listening to people talk because I have nothing to say and I don’t believe in small talk. Handing out cigarettes to the homeless musicians on Decatur, waiting for you on the stairs like a goddamn child, wondering what kind of things you write about without me, if you still believe in the same things or if maybe they out grew you and the sad days you spend trying to out grow them. How me and Billy were holding those sticks out in front of us when we were exploring the abandoned homes on parker chapel road and it was the first time in months that I felt so good. Effortlessly happy. The smell of that newspaper from 1928 and when we snuck into that thin dark hallway to read all the restricted material in the library. And then I’m smoking a cigarette on someone else’s steps, I’m sitting in Warren’s passenger seat with my feet on the dashboard and a good song on the radio. Now you’re holding my hand and telling me how small I am. Like I don’t already know. Like I don’t feel it all the time. Like it’s not pressing up against me, mocking me, pointing out stars bigger than I am. But that’s okay. I take what I can get. And my ribcage rattles when the feelings grow louder. You can hear it like old cities breathing curse words and dog woods. If you listen carefully you can hear the ghosts of everything I’ve ever been. Are you listening?
--Ashli Wood