tackle the motherfucking shit out of love.

“Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t. I’m not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people’s lives, never your own.”

--Julian Barnes, 'Flaubert’s Parrot'

“Rock won’t eliminate your problems. But it will let you sort of dance all over them.”

--Pete Townshend

“When you’re happy, you enjoy the music. But, when you’re sad, you understand the lyrics.”

--Frank Ocean

“She discovered with great delight that one does not love one’s children just because they are one’s children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.”

--Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, 'Love in the Time of Cholera'

“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I do not think I’m easy to define. I have a wandering mind. And I’m not anything that you think I am.”

--Syd Barrett

“If I’ve learned one lesson from all that’s happened to me, it’s that there is no such thing as the biggest mistake of your existence. There’s no such thing as ruining your life. Life’s a pretty resilient thing, it turns out.”

--Sophie Kinsella

“Being effortless is the coolest thing in the world.”

--Stella McCartney

“Dress for the story that you’d like to have people know about you before you even open your mouth.”

--Rachel Roy

“Have you ever analyzed things to the degree where you can’t really remember the difference between what’s real and what you’ve created in your head?”

--Edie Sedgwick

"We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy."

--Joseph Campbell

“It’s about misunderstandings between people and places, being disconnected and looking for moments of connection. There are so many moments in life when people don’t say what they mean, when they are just missing each other, waiting to run into each other in a hallway.”

--Sofia Coppola (trying to explain what lost in translation is about)

"So each had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some affection, some hobby, or at least some remote and distant hope…"

--Thomas Hardy, 'Tess of the D’Urbervilles'

"You deserve more than just somebody who’s nice to you. I think that so often these days, niceness seems like it should be enough because it seems like such a rare quality but when you get inside of it, you think, ‘mmmm … I can be pretty nice to myself.’ What about these other things?"

--Michelle Williams

“I love things that are old and beautiful and tell a story, even if it’s a sad one.”

--Michelle Williams

“I want love to be simple. I want to trust without thinking. I want to be generous with my affection and patience and love unconditionally. It is easier to love a person with their flaws than to weed through them. I want to love the whole person, not parts; and this is how I want to be loved.”

--Jewel Kilcher

“There is a mysterious force which draws together those who constantly think of each other. Fools call it “coincidence.”

--Cecil B. DeMille

"Our eyes are glued to the screen, but our thoughts are glued to the spot where our elbows are touching."

--Sonya Sones, 'Stop Pretending'

“I’ve remembered about buttercups, stink bugs and the stars. I read. And I’m finally getting some real writing done for the first time in months. It’s hard to find anything to say about life without immersing yourself in the world, but it’s also just about impossible to figure out what it might be, or how best to say it, without getting the hell out of it again.”

--Tim Kreider

“Don’t forget - no one else sees the world the way you do, so no one else can tell the stories that you have to tell.”

--Charles de Lint, 'The Blue Girl'

“You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight.”

--Elizabeth Gilbert, 'Eat, Pray, Love'

“You don’t need to explain your dreams. They belong to you.”

--Paulo Coelho

“It is untrue that bravery can be measured by a lack of fear. It takes guts to tremble. It takes tremble to love.”

--Unknown

“One day, you’re 17 and you’re planning for someday. And then quietly, without you ever really noticing, someday is today. And then someday is yesterday. And this is your life.”

--'One Tree Hill'

“You will be stupid. You will worry your parents. You will question your own choices, your relationships, your jobs, your friends, where you live, what you studied in college, that you went to college at all… If that happens, you’re doing it right.”

--Ira Glass

“When you find peace within yourself, you become the kind of person who can live at peace with others.”

--Peace Pilgrim

“The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherfucking shit out of love.”

--Cheryl Strayed, 'Tiny Beautiful Things'

“What I hate is ignorance, smallness of imagination, the eye that sees no farther than its own lashes.”

--Normand Elli, 'Egyptian Book of the Dead'

"Life has many ways of testing a person's will, either by having nothing happen at all or by having everything happen all at once."

--Paulo Coelho

“Sometimes you don’t need to talk things out. Sometimes, with the right person, things just need some time to percolate on their own, without the messy lunge and parry of discussion to hinder them.”

--Jonathan Tropper, 'Everything Changes'

Back in 1958, John Steinbeck, author of East of Eden, The Grapes of Wrath, and Of Mice and Men, got a letter from his teenage son Thom, in which Thom confessed that he had fallen desperately in love with a girl named Susan at his boarding school.

Steinbeck wrote this wise and wonderful letter back to him the same day...

New York

November 10, 1958

Dear Thom:

We had your letter this morning. I will answer it from my point of view and of course Elaine will from hers.

First -- if you are in love -- that's a good thing -- that's about the best thing that can happen to anyone. Don't let anyone make it small or light to you.

Second -- There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you -- of kindness and consideration and respect -- not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn't know you had.

You say this is not puppy love. If you feel so deeply -- of course it isn't puppy love.

But I don't think you were asking me what you feel. You know better than anyone. What you wanted me to help you with is what to do about it -- and that I can tell you.

Glory in it for one thing and be very glad and grateful for it.

The object of love is the best and most beautiful. Try to live up to it.

If you love someone -- there is no possible harm in saying so -- only you must remember that some people are very shy and sometimes the saying must take that shyness into consideration.

Girls have a way of knowing or feeling what you feel, but they usually like to hear it also.

It sometimes happens that what you feel is not returned for one reason or another -- but that does not make your feeling less valuable and good.

Lastly, I know your feeling because I have it and I'm glad you have it.

We will be glad to meet Susan. She will be very welcome. But Elaine will make all such arrangements because that is her province and she will be very glad to. She knows about love too and maybe she can give you more help than I can.

And don't worry about losing. If it is right, it happens -- The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.

Love,

Fa

Summer Solstice

I wanted to see where beauty comes from
without you in the world, hauling my heart
across sixty acres of northeast meadow,
my pockets filling with flowers.
Then I remembered,
it’s you I miss in the brightness
and body of every living name:
rattlebox, yarrow, wild vetch.
You are the green wonder of June,
root and quasar, the thirst for salt.
When I finally understand that people fail
at love, what is left but cinquefoil, thistle,
the paper wings of the dragonfly
aeroplaning the soul with a sudden blue hilarity?
If I get the story right, desire is continuous,
equatorial. There is still so much
I want to know: what you believe
can never be removed from us,
what you dreamed on Walnut Street
in the unanswerable dark of your childhood,
learning pleasure on your own.
Tell me our story: are we impetuous,
are we kind to each other, do we surrender
to what the mind cannot think past?
Where is the evidence I will learn
to be good at loving?
The black dog orbits the horseshoe pond
for treefrogs in their plangent emergencies.
There are violet hills,
there is the covenant of duskbirds.
The moon comes over the mountain
like a big peach, and I want to tell you
what I couldn’t say the night we rushed
North, how I love the seriousness of your fingers
and the way you go into yourself,
calling my half-name like a secret.
I stand between taproot and treespire.
Here is the compass rose
to help me live through this.
Here are twelve ways of knowing
what blooms even in the blindness
of such longing. Yellow oxeye,
viper’s bugloss with its set of pink arms
pleading do not forget me.
We hunger for eloquence.
We measure the isopleths.
I am visiting my life with reckless plenitude.
The air is fragrant with tiny strawberries.
Fireflies turn on their electric wills:
an effulgence. Let me come back
whole, let me remember how to touch you
before it is too late.
--Stacie Cassarino

Love her, love her, love her!

“Sometimes when you meet someone, there’s a click. I don’t believe in love at first sight but I believe in that click.”

--Ann Aguirre, 'Blue Diablo'

“One of the most amazing things that can happen is finding someone who sees everything you are and won’t let you be anything less. They see the potential of you. They see endless possibilities. And through their eyes, you start to see yourself the same way. As someone who matters. As someone who can make a difference in this world.”

--Susane Colasanti, 'So Much Closer'

“You can keep as quiet as you like, but one of these days somebody is going to find you.”

--Haruki Murakami

“I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember… I’ll be different, but somewhere lost inside me there’ll always be the person I am tonight.”

--F. Scott Fitzgerald, 'Magnetism'

“You will always be my always.”

--David Levithan

“Love her, love her, love her! If she favors you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to pieces,—and as it gets older and stronger it will tear deeper,—love her, love her, love her!”

--Charles Dickens, 'Great Expectations'

“I wish I’d done everything on Earth with you.”

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

“You’re the line that ties me to things I don’t understand..”

--Julia Stone, 'The Line that Ties Me'

“I will remember your small room, the feel of you, the light in the window, your records, your books, our morning coffee, our noons, our nights, our bodies spilled together, sleeping, the tiny flowing currents, immediate and forever. Your leg, my leg, your arm, my arm, your smile and the warmth of you who made me laugh again.”

--Charles Bukowski

“I sat there for three hours and did not feel the time or the boredom of our talk and its foolish disconnection. As long as I could hear his voice, I was quite lost, quite blind, quite outside my own self.”

--Anais Nin