You can have anything that you want.

"What is the goal? A house that is like the life that goes with it, a house that gives us beauty as we understand it--and beauty of a nobler kind that we may grow to understand."

--Elsie de Wolfe

“The trouble with living alone is that it’s always your turn to do the dishes.”

--Unknown

“Hospitality is making your guests feel at home, even if you wish they were.”

--Unknown

“A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life: he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair, the rest of his days.”

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The fellow that owns his own home is always just coming out of a hardware store.”

--Kin Hubbard

“You know what I tell people who ask me what’s a fashion faux pas? It’s when you look in the mirror and see a stranger looking back.”

--Iris Apfel

“One of my favorite clothing patterns is camouflage. Because when you’re in the woods it makes you blend in. But when you’re not it does just the opposite. It’s like, ‘Hey, there’s an asshole.’”

--Demetri Martin

“I never go outside unless I look like Joan Crawford the movie star. If you want to see the girl next door, go next door.”

--Joan Crawford

“You try, you fail. You try again, you fail again. But the only true failure is when you stop trying.”

--Leota, 'The Haunted Mansion'

“I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else’s whim or to someone else’s ignorance.”

--Bell Hooks

“Do yourself a favor. Before it’s too late, without thinking too much about it first, pack a pillow and a blanket and see as much of the world as you can. You will not regret it. One day it will be too late.”

--Jhumpa Lahiri, 'The Namesake'

“Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.”

--Rumi

“To make the right choices in life, you have to get in touch with your soul. To do this, you need to experience solitude, which most people are afraid of, because in the silence you hear the truth and know the solutions.”

--Deepak Chopra

“Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible. As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know.”

--Carl Jung

“Oftentimes I’ll just overflow, and then I’ll need to spend a week alone and not talk to anybody or call anybody.”

--Justin Vernon

“Not only have I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, I remain unconvinced that the distinction matters."

--Joan Didion

"You need to let the little things that would ordinarily bore you suddenly thrill you."

--Andy Warhol

"It's the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting."

--Paulo Coelho

“For most of life, nothing wonderful happens. If you don’t enjoy getting up and working and finishing your work and sitting down to a meal with family or friends, then the chances are that you’re not going to be very happy. If someone bases his happiness or unhappiness on major events like a great new job, huge amounts of money, a flawlessly happy marriage or a trip to Paris, that person isn’t going to be happy much of the time. If, on the other hand, happiness depends on a good breakfast, flowers in the yard, a drink or a nap, then we are more likely to live with quite a bit of happiness.”

--Andy Rooney

"Work for a cause, not for applause. Live life to express, not to impress. Don't strive to make your presence noticed, just make your absence felt."

--Unknown

“I think you can have anything that you want. Find someone who has a life that you want and figure out how they got it. Read books. Figure out what you’re passionate about. Pick your role models wisely. Find out what they did and do it.”

--Lana Del Rey

“It is obvious that we can no more explain a passion to a person who has never experienced it than we can explain light to the blind.”

--T.S. Elliot

“To say “I love you” one must know first how to say the “I”.”

--Ayn Rand, 'The Fountainhead'

Delicious Ambiquity.

"What's for you won't pass you by."

--Lillian Breed

“You are worried about seeing him spend his early years in doing nothing. What! Is it nothing to be happy? Nothing to skip, play, and run around all day long? Never in his life will he be so busy again.”

--Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 'Emile', 1762

“A new dress doesn’t get you anywhere; it’s the life you’re living in the dress and the sort of life you had lived before, and what you will do in it later.”

--Diana Vreeland

"My research this season is about finding what romantic means today."

--Miuccia Prada, September 1996

“I came to the conclusion that ‘God’ is just the word ‘good’ with the ‘o’ taken out, and ‘Devil’ is the world ‘evil’ with a ‘D’ added. Really, all that people have done throughout history is to personify the two forces of Good and Evil.”

--Paul McCartney

“Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I’d have the facts.”

--'To Kill a Mockingbird'

“I didn’t know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I’d cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.”

--Sylvia Plath

“In one moment your entire life can change course. The moment you decide where you’re going because you refuse to go back to where you’ve been.”

--Unknown

“Your soul doesn’t care what you do for a living - and when your life is over, neither will you. Your soul cares only about what you are being while you are doing whatever you are doing.”

--Neale Donald Walsch

“Rest satisfied with doing well, and leave others to talk of you as they please.”

--Pythagoras

“Run like hell my dear

From anyone likely

To put a sharp knife

Into the sacred, tender vision

Of your beautiful heart.”

--Hafiz

“If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things that others don’t know. It’s what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.”

--Don DeLillo, 'Point Omega'

“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity.”

--Gilda Radner

“The morning breezes have secrets to tell; don’t go back to sleep.”

--Rumi

“Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.”

--Carl Sagan

“Take chances, take a lot of them. Because honestly, no matter where you end up and with whom, it always ends up just the way it should be. Your mistakes make you who you are. You learn and grow with each choice you make. Everything is worth it. Say how you feel, always. Be you, and be okay with it.”

--Unknown

I am running into a new year

and the old years blow back

like a wind

that I catch in my hair

like strong fingers like

all my old promises and

it will be hard to let go

of what I said to myself

about myself

when I was sixteen and

twenty-six and thirty-six

even thirty-six but

I am running into a new year

and I beg what I love and

I leave to forgive me

--Lucille Clifton