Be in love with your life.

"I chose my wife, as she did her wedding gown, for qualities that would wear well."

--Oliver Goldsmith

"It’s up to you to pump up your own heart. Get it real big. Then let everyone in."

--Kimya Dawson

“I always feel like I’m struggling to become someone else. Like I’m trying to find a new place, grab hold of a new life, a new personality. I guess it’s part of growing up, yet it’s also an attempt to reinvent myself. By becoming a different me, I could free myself of everything. I seriously believed I could escape myself- as long as I made the effort. But I always hit a dead end. No matter where I go, I still end up me. What’s missing never changes. The scenery may change, but I’m still the same old incomplete person. The same missing elements torture me with a hunger that I can never satisfy. I guess that lack itself is as close as I’ll come to define myself.”

--Haruki Murakami

“Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion.”

--Audrey Niffenegger

“The fortunate people - the truly fortunate - are not so much those who succeed in life as those who succeed in living. There are some who do both; many who do neither, and some who do either one, but not the other. Success in life, so called, can be overdone, but hardly success in living. It seems possible to succeed too much in various lines of attainment, legitimate and sincerely profitable in themselves, but success in living involves getting the most out of life, not in a day or a year or a decade, but in a lifetime. That involves living wisely, and you can’t live too wisely.

--Edward Sanford Martin, 'Too Much Success', 1908

“I have to be alone very often. I’d be quite happy if I spent from Saturday night until Monday morning alone in my apartment. That’s how I refuel.”

--Audrey Hepburn

“I want you for mine & mine forever. You & you only. I’l gladly give my heart for yours & at any time you wish we’ll make the exchange.”

--William Glass Meggs to his future wife, Miss Nellie Lang, April 1899

“… but, that’s what it’s all about. A toothless smile. A middle finger. A freshly gooey slice of Napoleon pizza and the bigger jeans you have to buy. The lingerie to feel sexy in and the moments you think, Sono solo, I am alone. It is imperfect. It is a combination of the tears you drown in each night and the wide-eyed, gasping-for-air, tears-rolling-down-your-cheek laughter you share with friends in the afternoon. It is life. It is wonderful. It all feels so right. Attraversiamo.”

--Elizabeth Gilbert, 'Eat Pray Love'

“I believe the nicest and sweetest days are not those on which anything very splendid or wonderful or exciting happens, but just those that bring simple little pleasures, following one another softly, like pearls slipping off a string.”

--L.M. Montgomery

“Forgive and give as if it were your last opportunity. Love like there’s no tomorrow, and if tomorrow comes, love again.”

--Max Lucado

“You say that you love rain, but you open your umbrella when it rains. You say that you love the sun, but you find a shadow spot when the sun shines. You say that you love the wind, but you close your windows when wind blows. This is why I am afraid, you say that you love me too.”

--William Shakespeare

“On the other side

I can see us waiting for

all we know we’ll be.”

--Tyler Knott Gregson

“‘You know, you’re a little complicated after all.”

“Oh no,” she assured him hastily. “No, I’m not really - I’m just a - I’m just a whole lot of different simple people.”

--F. Scott Fitzgerald, 'Tender Is the Night'

“That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it and think how different its course would have been. Pause, you who read this, and think for a long moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on that memorable day.”

--Charles Dickens, 'Great Expectations'

“You spend 99% of your life looking for the other 1%. But it’s worth it.”

--I Wrote This For You

“Be in love with your life. Every detail of it.”

--Jack Kerouac

“Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.”

--Jhumpa Lahiri

“Instead of looking at the past, I put myself ahead twenty years and try to look at what I need to do now in order to get there then.”

--Diana Ross

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”

--F. Scott Fitzgerald, 'The Great Gatsby'

“I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I’m gone which would not have happened if I had not come.”

--Salman Rushdie

So maybe I wanted to give you something more than a catalog

of non-definitive acts,

something other than the desperation.

Dear So-and-So, I'm sorry I couldn't come to your party.

Dear So-and-So, I'm sorry I came to your party

and seduced you

and left you bruised and ruined, you poor sad thing.

You want a better story. Who wouldn't?

--Richard Siken, Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out

“Where there is no struggle, there is no strength.”

--Oprah Winfrey

“Luxury has changed a lot. In the past it was eating in a three-star restaurant. Now it’s eating home-grown vegetables in a garden or somewhere on a mountain, or going to a small cottage where you find handmade cheese, and just having a taste of that in open air, that’s luxury now. In fashion it’s a bit the same. In the past, haute couture was luxury. And now finding a sweater in hand-spun cashmere somewhere in the hills of Nepal is far more exciting and luxurious.”

--Dries Van Noten

“My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while. I’m two, and both keep their distance — Siamese twins that aren’t attached.”

--Fernando Pessoa

“I don’t want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted just like that, and it didn’t mean anything? What then?”

--Neil Gaiman, 'Coraline'

all these words are just a matter of time

This is our handmade hope. We brought it up from the dirt. Listen up tulip, this won’t be easy. Your hands will tremble when they’ve got nothing to hold. And all the things you love will find better ways to out run you. Do you want comfort or remorse? I can hear your ribs calling out, I can hear your voice getting caught between the bones - Our lips so close saying “I’m ready” - are you sure? You’ll never feel this young again, buttercup. No more coca cola, heat wave, bottle rocket, making out in the backseat of someone else’s truck past your curfew, no more loud and wild secrets to uproot you right where you’re standing. Can you see the storm brewing down the road?

This is what happens when the world doesn’t feel like flowers anymore.

Been building our moments into chandeliers out of shadows and glass beer bottles. Trying to bend the sound they make when they clang against one another. Trying to make it something like summers when we were younger and you could wake up without that ever dancing wonder of where you’ll be by tomorrow. That god awful gorgeous gleam of naivety. That milk pale place between one sound and another. You idiots, don’t you know we can’t just forget about these things one day? They think we’re scared when really we’re just experts at putting our hearts into things without people noticing. Home-grown experiences and chasing after the crooked parts of ourselves we see in strangers. We are broken and strange and wonderful. We are selfish and lonely. We are brave, we are sad, we are home-bound, closing our fists tight around one another and the words. God, the words never were enough, were they? Just keep saying my name, just keep telling yourself we’ll goddamn burn before we fade away. We will keep trying to dig ourselves into something that the memories and the feelings can’t drag us out of. The pine trees kissing the sky, the porch swing, the flowers, all our fears braided around them. Keep telling them “if you cross me, I’ll get you” keep saying “be kind, be strong, be true”

but that quiet corner of you always thinking about our collar bones missing loudly the way it used to feel when stars could fall into them if they wanted. I’m ready if you are.

--Ashli Wood