You belong.

"You should above all things be glad and young

For if you're young, whatever life you wear

it will become you; and if you are glad

whatever's living will yourself become."

--EE Cummings

“You have to get past the idea that music has to be one thing. To be alive in America is to hear all kinds of music constantly—radio, records, churches, cats on the street, everywhere music, man. And with records, the whole history of music is open to everyone who wants to hear it. … Nobody has to fool around with musty old scores, weird notation, and scholarship bullshit: you can just go into a record store and pick a century, pick a country, pick anything, and dig it, make it a part of you, add it to the stuff you carry around, and see that it’s all music.”

--Jerry Garcia

“Pick the day. Enjoy it — to the hilt. The day as it comes. People as they come… The past, I think, has helped me appreciate the present, and I don’t want to spoil any of it by fretting about the future.”

--Audrey Hepburn

"That is part of the beauty of literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong."

--F. Scott Fitzgerald

“When people are ready to, they change. They never do it before then, and sometimes they die before they get around to it. You can’t make them change if they don’t want to, just like when they do want to, you can’t stop them.”

--Andy Warhol

“Let’s face it, you’re either serious about what you’re doing or you’re not serious about what you’re doing. And you can’t mix the two. And life is short.”

--Bob Dylan on Creativity

"I like beginnings because they're so full of promise. The first page of a book, the first day of a job, the first time you buy yourself flowers, the first date with a new man, the first touch, the first kiss, the first kick of a good liquour, the first moment you hold your own baby. I like beginnings because I know there's always more to come."

--Shyma Perera, 'Bitter Sweet Symphony'

“Often a man wishes to be alone and a girl wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others … But we were never lonely and never afraid when we were together. I know that the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started. But with Catherine there was almost no difference in the night except that it was an even better time.”

--Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell To Arms

“We have an idea of a “summer book”. To be read on a beach, or in a hammock, or amid long grass. It promises pleasure and total immersion: if every few minutes you find yourself laying it flat upon your chest and wondering about lunch then it is probably not a summer book.”

--Zadie Smith

“I wish we could spend July by the sea, browning ourselves and feeling water-weighted hair flow behind us from a dive. I wish our gravest concerns were the summer gnats. I wish we were hungry for hot dogs and dopes, and it would be nice to smell the starch of summer linens and the faint odor of talc in blistering summer bath houses. We could lie in long citoneuse beams of the five o’clock sun on the plage at Juan-les-Pins and hear the sound of the drum and piano being scooped out to sea by the waves.”

--Zelda Fitzgerald

Tonight on the car ride home I leaned myself forward so I could see the stars better and turned the volume up while simon and garfunkle were playing. started yelling out the lyrics to “only living boy in new york” and felt really lost and really alive for the first time since high school. The other night I wrote about how my father is a man of minor miracles - realized today that I’m a girl of minor fiascoes. Thought about how I held you last week. It was the first time I ever held new life. I never knew what that felt like before. It made me nervous, thinking about what I was holding. This tiny little thing. God, you were beautiful. You were perfect. And it’s fucking tragic to me how these words lack the strength entirely to convey the feelings I’ve got criss-crossed behind them. Started to cry when I thought about the holes in your heart. Wondered if they were big enough to hold things like your mothers voice, the sticky sunlight of morning getting caught in the wax of the wings you left behind, the sound your grandmother made as she cried on the drive home. Or if maybe they’re too small for things like that. If maybe the only things they can hold are tiny handcrafted secrets I spend my days trying to build out of the dirt. How sometimes I find myself desperately trying to enjoy a moment, but my body feels to heavy for it. Like my heart’s stumbling all over the place, hands fumbling, thoughts all water-colored and messy. Trying so hard to notice the beauty in ordinary moments, to enjoy things slowly and without effort, admiring people who live so easily. I see some lovers making out by the lakefront, hear a boy playing guitar on a bench, make up a fake constellation out of some left-over stars and I’m trying to tell myself “enjoy this. you’re young and the world still has the ability to be lovely sometimes” but it’s like the feelings keep falling all over the place. Like they can’t get comfortable, breathing heavily under me. I try so hard to take things for what they are and love them even in their crookedness, in their almost poetic way of never being like I thought beautiful things were supposed to be. But my body’s just to heavy for it. Too clumsy to sit still for a goddamn second and love some moment serenely in the quiet symphony of summer’s eternity. Maybe you’re not the only one with holes in your heart burying quiet thoughts your mouth can’t even whisper yet.

--Ashli Wood

If you relax, it comes.

"I like women who haven't lived with too many men. I don't expect virginity but I simply prefer women who haven't been rubbed raw by experience. There is a quality about women who choose men sparingly; it appears in their walk, in their eyes, in their laughter and in their gentle hearts. Women who have had too many men seem to choose the next one out of revenge rather than with feeling. When you play the field selfishly everything works against you: one can't insist on love or demand affection. You're finally left with whatever you have been willing to give which often is: nothing. Some women are delicate things, some women are delicious and wondrous. If you want to piss on the sun go ahead but please leave them alone."

--Charles Bukowski

“Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake.”

--Victor Hugo

“Sometimes I’m terrified of my heart; of its constant hunger for whatever it is it wants. The way it stops and starts.”

--Edgar Allan Poe

“You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.”

--Eckhart Tolle

“Any idiot can face a crisis - it’s day to day living that wears you out.”

--Anton Chekhov

“…she laughed, I love it when she laughs, although the truth is I am not in love with her…”

--Jonathan Safran Foer, 'Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close'

“Worrying is carrying tomorrow’s load with today’s strength- carrying two days at once. It is moving into tomorrow ahead of time. Worrying doesn’t empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength.”

--Corrie Ten Boom

“Don’t seek, don’t search, don’t ask, don’t knock, don’t demand – relax. If you relax, it comes. If you relax, it is there. If you relax, you start vibrating with it.”

--Osho

Fourth of July

If I have any romantic notions left,

please let me abandon them here

on the dashboard of your Subaru

beside this container of gas station

potato salad and bottle of sunscreen.

Otherwise, my heart is a sugar packet

waiting to be shaken open by some

other man’s hand. Let there be another town

after this one, a town with an improbable Western

name—Wisdom, Last Chance—where we can get

a room and a six-pack, where the fireworks

end early, say nine o’clock, before it’s really

gotten dark enough to see them because

everyone has to work in the morning.

I’m not asking for love anymore.

I don’t care if I never see a sailboat again.

--Keetje Kuipers

I'll play you some songs that'll change your life.

"I doubt that parents have an inkling of how deep a child's love goes. It is more thorough than adult love. I loved not only my parents: I loved their love."

--Josephine Humphreys, 'Rich In Love'

“When you feel that you are a lonely, put-upon, isolated little stranger confronting all this, you are under the influence of an illusory feeling, because the truth is quite the reverse. You are the whole works, all that there is, and always was, and always has been, and always will be.”

--Alan Watts

“I will remember the kisses our lips raw with love and how you gave me everything you had and how I offered you what was left of me.”

--Charles Bukowski

“I’m attracted to the extreme light and the extreme dark. I’m interested in the human condition and what makes people tick. I’m interested in the things people try to hide.”

--Johnny Depp

"My dad’s a gruff man, sarcastic in tone and short with dialog. But he’s also a man of minor miracles. Quiet in their presence but grand in their wake. He told me “C’mere and I’ll play you some songs that’ll change your life.” And they did. Not in obvious ways, but carefully. Quietly and entirely."

--Ashli Wood

“Learn to be quiet just as you learn to talk, because if talking guides you, being quiet protects you. By being quiet, you attain two characteristics: you are able to take knowledge from those more knowledgeable than you, and you are able to repel the ignorance of those more ignorant than you.”

--Abu adh-Dhiya

“I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”

--Robert Louis Stevenson

“Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong.”

--Ella Fitzgerald

“You won’t do it at the right time. You’ll be late. You’ll be early. You’ll get re-routed. You’ll get delayed. You’ll change your mind. You’ll change your heart. It’s not going to turn out the way you thought it would. It will be better.”

--Kate Moller

“This is a subtle truth: Whatever you love, you are.”

--Rumi

“I feel like your life is sort of always a battle between safety and freedom. You know: do you want to throw yourself into something head first, or do you want to be cautious?”

--Florence Welch, Nylon magazine

“Be thankful for what you have; you’ll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don’t have, you will never, ever have enough.”

--Oprah Winfrey

"So therefore I dedicate myself to myself, to my art, my sleep, my dreams, my labors, my suffrances, my loneliness, my unique madness, my endless absorption and hunger- because I cannot dedicate myself to any fellow being."

--Jack Kerouac

“A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.”

--Franz Kafka