One train wreck at a time.

All quotes by author Jonathan Tropper

“Everyone always wants to know how you can tell when it's true love, and the answer is this: when the pain doesn't fade and the scars don't heal, and it's too damned late. The tears threaten to return, so I willfully banish all thoughts from my head and take a few more deep breaths. I'm suddenly dizzy from the panic attack I've just suffered, and I close my eyes, resting my head against the warm leather of my steering wheel. Loneliness doesn't exist on any single plane of consciousness. It's generally a low throb, barely audible, like the hum of a Mercedes engine in park, but every so often the demands of the highway call for a burst of acceleration, and the hum becomes a thunderous, elemental roar, and once again you're reminded of what this baby's carrying under the hood.” 

--'The Book of Joe'

"I find that most people worth knowing are fucked up in some way or another.” 

--'The Book of Joe'

“You have to look at what you have right in front of you, at what it could be, and stop measuring it against what you've lost. I know this to be wise and true, just as I know that pretty much no one can do it.” 

--'This Is Where I Leave You'

“We all start out so damn sure, thinking we've got the world on a string. If we ever stopped to think about the infinite number of ways we could be undone, we'd never leave our bedrooms.” 

--'This Is Where I Leave You'

“It would be a terrible mistake to go through life thinking that people are the sum total of what you see.” 

--'This Is Where I Leave You'

“And even if you didn't fall in love in the eighties, in your mind it will feel like the eighties, all innocent and airbrushed, with bright colors and shoulder pads and Pat Benetar or the Cure on the soundtrack.” 

--'This Is Where I Leave You'

“It's hard to imagine her ever having felt lost, but it's impossible to know the people your parents were before they were your parents.” 

--'This Is Where I Leave You'

“I've never been shot, but this is probably what it feels like, that second of nothingness right before the pain catches up to the bullet.” 

--'This Is Where I Leave You'

“She was smart and funny and vulnerable and just so goddamned beautiful, the kind of beautiful that was worth being shot down over.” 

--'How to Talk to a Widower'

“I wake up like this, this sense that I've somehow been transported to an alternate universe where my life took a left instead of a right because of some seemingly insignificant yet cosmically crucial choice I've made, about a girl or a kiss or a date or a job or which Starbucks I went into...something.” 

--'Everything Changes'

“One train wreck at a time, I always say."

“I totally remember what it felt like to be so full…Full of promise, full of dreams, full of shit. Mostly just full of yourself. So full you’re bursting. And then you get out into the world, and people empty you out, little by little, like air from a balloon…You try like hell to fill yourself up with fresh air, from you and from other people. But back then…it was so damn effortless to feel full, you know? All you had to do was breathe."

“Life, for the most part, inevitably becomes routine, the random confluence of timing and fortune that configures its components all but forgotten. But every so often, I catch a glimpse of my life out of the corner of my eye, and am rendered breathless by it.”

There is nothing wrong with loving the crap out of everything.

“If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it.”

--Unknown

“Whatever’s there to feel, feel it – the riddance, the relief, the fright and freedom, the fear of forgetting, the dull ache of your own mortality. Get with someone you can trust with tears, with anger, and wonderment and utter silence. Get that part done – the sooner the better. The only way around these things is through them.”

--Thomas Lynch, 'The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade'

“Italy is a dream that keeps returning for the rest of your life.”

--Anna Akhmatova

“My shadow serves as the friend I crave."

--Anna Akhmatova

“Instead of saying “I don’t have time” try saying “it’s not a priority,” and see how that feels. Often, that’s a perfectly adequate explanation. I have time to iron my sheets, I just don’t want to. But other things are harder. Try it: “I’m not going to edit your résumé, sweetie, because it’s not a priority.” “I don’t go to the doctor because my health is not a priority.” If these phrases don’t sit well, that’s the point. Changing our language reminds us that time is a choice. If we don’t like how we’re spending an hour, we can choose differently.”

--Unknown

“You either like me or you don’t. It took me twenty-something years to learn how to love myself, I don’t have that kinda time to convince somebody else.”

--Daniel Franzese

“There is nothing wrong with loving the crap out of everything. Negative people find their walls. So never apologize for your enthusiasm. Never. Ever. Never.”

--Ryan Adams

“Don’t wait until everything is just right. It will never be perfect. There will always be challenges, obstacles and less than perfect conditions. So what. Get started now. With each step you take, you will grow stronger and stronger, more and more skilled, more and more self-confident and more and more successful.”

--Mark Victor Hansen

“You know what’s the trouble with you? You’re an expatriate. One of the worst type… You get precious… You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed with sex. You spend all your time talking, not working.”

--Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises

“I want to know you. You seem like someone worth knowing. Every day I feel like I’m surrounded by people with hard edges and sour faces but I get the sense that you’re different. Too often people seem to think that they have the answers to everything. Their faces are trapped in permascowls and they can’t be bothered with anything besides their own narcissism. You aren’t like that. You still ask questions. You’re still looking for the answers.”

--Ryan O’Connell, 'I Want To Know You'

You have to make all of it up.

All quotes from I Wrote This For You

May you do the things you want to and always remember what it felt like when you were doing them.

Most importantly, if you can at all avoid it, don't be normal. Strive, burn and do everything you can to avoid being the industry standard. Even the highest industry standard. Be greater than anything anyone else has ever dreamed of you. Don't settle for pats on the back, salary increases, a nod-and-a-smile. Instead, rage against the tepidness of the mundane with every fiber of whatever makes you, you. Change this place.

I've tried to put you down on paper so many times. But you keep getting up.

You have until the hour you die to do everything you've ever really wanted to do and say everything you've ever really wanted to say. It sounds less fair when you get older.

One day, you realise that there are some people you'll never see again. At least, not in the same way.

You keep trying to tell the truth about who you are but you keep changing, every time someone listens.

If you open up too much, people can fall in and hurt themselves.

And yet, when you get here, you are not given instructions. No one tells you that heart A is meant to slot into heart B. There are no diagrams about how you are meant to live each day or directions on how to assemble some semblance of happiness. You are not even told what colours to paint your feelings or, given a purpose and a reason for your life. You have to make all of it up. You have to make all of it, yourself.

I have a list in my head of all the feelings I still want to feel before I die. And you have ticked so many things off that list.

Stop thinking about what they're thinking about you.

If you like a whole bunch of things and I like a whole bunch of things, maybe one of the things that we both like, can be each other.

The human heart is made from the only substance in the universe that can become stronger, after it's been broken.

Those who walk away from you in the dark should be forgotten in the light.

And if you want to know the feeling I'm talking about, run your own fingers slowly through your hair, and pretend they're someone else's.

a poem about wanderlust

i have known the taste of salt water,
and the smell of decaying forests,
and the cracks in hundreds of sidewalks.
i have loved the gas pedal,
and the airport concourse,
and the ever-changing time zones.
in all of these places,
i thought i could find a home in not having one;
i have chased the sun across the sky so many times,
not yet ready to admit,
you never catch up.
--topographe

The answer is dreams.

“The answer is dreams. Dreaming on and on. Entering the world of dreams and never coming out. Living in dreams for the rest of time.”

--Haruki Murakami

“You rest, you rust.”

--Oscar de la Renta

“I love big bags because all my eyeglasses are so big, and it’s very hard to get any bag that fits them. And I always have to carry a lot of stuff. I’m always dragging. When you’re a bag lady, you’re a bag lady.”

--Iris Apfel

“I like the idea of wearing a glamourous coat with comfortable shoes; evening dresses with flats. I like it when there are two messages in one silhouette. I like it when it’s not first-degree sexy; when it’s not first-degree severe. I like it when everything is mixed.”

--Guillaume Henry, Creative Director of Carven

“And make no mistake about it, you are dumb. You’re a group of incredibly well-educated dumb people. I was there. We all were there. You’re barely functional. There are some screw-ups headed your way. I wish I could tell you that there was a trick to avoiding the screw-ups, but the screw-ups, they’re a-coming for ya. It’s a combination of life being unpredictable, and you being super dumb.”

--Remarks by Aaron Sorkin ‘83 at Syracuse University’s 158th Commencement and the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry’s 115th Commencement

“You know when sometimes you meet someone so beautiful and then you actually talk to them and five minutes later they’re as dull as a brick? Then there’s other people, when you meet them you think, “Not bad. They’re okay.” And then you get to know them and…and their face just sort of becomes them. Like their personality’s written all over it. And they just turn into something so beautiful.”

--Amelia Pond

“What you are is a complicated girl with simple needs. You need your books and time to read, and you need a few friends and you need someone-not to take care of you, but to care for you. If you have all those things, you’ll always be alright.”

--Brian Morton, 'Breakable You'

“She did not need much, wanted very little. A kind word, sincerity, fresh air, clean water, a garden, kisses, books to read, sheltering arms, a cosy bed, and to love and be loved in return.”

--Starra Neely Blade

"Do magic. Enter her heart without touching her."

--Unknown

Everything takes time.

All quotes by author David Foster Wallace

“Everything I’ve ever let go of had claw marks on it.”

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.” 

--'This Is Water'

“Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.” 

--'Infinite Jest'

“I like the fans’ sound at night. Do you? It’s like somebody big far away goes like: it’sOKit’sOKit’sOKit’sOK, over and over. From very far away.” 

--'Infinite Jest'

“She wanted only tall smooth bottles whose labels spoke of Proof.” 

--'Infinite Jest'

“You have decided being scared is caused mostly by thinking."

“We're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we've never even met?” 

“Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.” 

--'Brief Interviews With Hideous Men'

“I'd like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time, instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them.”

“Look. Listen. Use ears I'd be proud to call our own. Listen to the silence behind the engine's noise. Jesus, Sweets, listen. Hear it? It's a love song. For whom? You are loved.” 

--'Girl With Curious Hair'

“Tell them there are no holes for your fingers in the masks of men. Tell them how could you ever even hope to love what you can't grab onto.” 

--'Girl With Curious Hair'

“What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves, they've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.”

“I have this -- here’s this thing where it’s going to sound sappy to you. I have this unbelievably like five-year-old’s belief that art is just absolutely magic. And that good art can do things that nothing else in the solar system can do. And that the good stuff will survive, and get read, and that in the great winnowing process, the shit will sink and the good stuff will rise.”

Epitaph

“Your epitaph will begin: “She redefined what it meant to be a good woman.” It will say: “She scaled mountains, in hiking boots and in heels. She started in her own backyard and then went all the way around the world. She accepted challenges with curiosity and determination. She emerged victorious regardless of outcome, knowing both the pleasure of success and the grace of failure. She tasted long hot days and cool still nights, at home wherever she found herself. She wasn’t always popular, but she was always true. She wasn’t always comfortable, but no one can say she didn’t enjoy her life. She explored her edges, increased her capacity, and lived as big as she could dream. Moved equally by bliss and pain, she played her heart out one moment at a time. She was dialed in. She was courageous. She was turned on.””

--The Turned-on Woman’s Manifesto

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
--Mary Oliver

I think I made you up inside my head.

“Relationships are both wonderful and tricky. The wonderful traits of a person are all sparkly and shiny, and we are attracted to that. But the real work is learning to find good in the gnarly aspects. It is a real art. Believing in the other person’s goodness and integrity enough to be content with working with the challenging parts. The sparkly parts are easy to love. Our job is to make the love bigger than an argument or an intense disagreement. You see, this is being authentic, vulnerable and true. And much more than a fairytale type romance. The real and honest and courageous decision is to love the warts and all. That is the true miracle.”

--Rachel Sat Siri Dougherty

“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

“Happiness often slips in through a door you didn’t know you left open.”

--John Barrymore

“I have never found anybody who could stand to accept the daily demonstrative love I feel in me, and give back as good as I give.”

--Sylvia Plath

“I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane. (I think I made you up inside my head.)”

--Sylvia Plath

“You don’t need to make your tastes a self-conscious statement about who you are. Just unapologetically like the things you like.”

--Adulting: Step 179: Stop enjoying things ironically. Just enjoy them.

“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”

--Margaret Atwood

"The sun was warm but the wind was chill. 

You know how it is with an April day."

--Robert Frost

“You can’t ever be really free if you admire somebody too much.”

--Tove Jansson

“Some people are uncomfortable with silences. Not me. I’ve never cared much for call and response. Sometimes I will think of something to say and then I ask myself; is it worth it? And it just isn’t.”

--Miranda July

“A daydreamer is prepared for most things.”

--Joyce Carol Oates

“Vulnerability is one of the last things we share with people, yet one of the first things they try to recognize.”

--Dallas Clayton 

“It’s great when you finally realise that being miserable doesn’t protect you from bad stuff happening.”

--Alain de Botton

“One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.”

--Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“A girl should be two things: who and what she wants.”

--Coco Chanel

“God is within her, she will not fall;

God will help her at break of day.”

--Psalm 46:5

“The world is simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.”

--Henry Miller

“The essence of pleasure is spontaneity.”

--Germaine Greer

“Every stylish girl knows that when the sun goes down, the heel goes up.”

--Nina Garcia

“There is in the soul a desire for not thinking. For being still. Coupled with this a desire to be strict, yes, and rigorous. But the soul is also a smooth son of a bitch, not always trustworthy. And I forgot that.”

--Raymond Carver, 'All of Us: The Collected Poems'

“Some changes look negative on the surface but you will soon realize that space is being created in your life for something new to emerge.”

--Eckhart Tolle

“It is one of the defects of my character that I cannot altogether dislike anyone who makes me laugh.”

--W. Somerset Maugham, 'The Moon and Sixpence'