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'