“I want you to tell me about every person you’ve ever been in love with. Tell me why you loved them, then tell me why they loved you. Tell me about a day in your life you didn’t think you’d live through. Tell me what the word “home” means to you and tell me in a way that I’ll know your mother’s name just by the way you describe your bed room when you were 8. See, I wanna know the first time you felt the weight of hate and if that day still trembles beneath your bones. Do you prefer to play in puddles of rain or bounce in the bellies of snow? And if you were to build a snowman, would you rip two branches from a tree to build your snowman arms? Or would you leave the snowman armless for the sake of being harmless to the tree? And if you would, would you notice how that tree weeps for you because your snowman has no arms to hug you every time you kiss him on the cheek? Do you kiss your friends on the cheek? Do you sleep beside them when they’re sad, even if it makes your lover mad? Do you think that anger is a sincere emotion or just the timid motion of a fragile heart trying to beat away its pain? See, I wanna know what you think of your first name. And if you often lie awake at night and imagine your mother’s joy when she spoke it for the very first time. I want you tell me all the ways you’ve been unkind. Tell me all the ways you’ve been cruel. See, I wanna know more than what you do for a living. I wanna know how much of your life you spend just giving. And if you love yourself enough to also receive sometimes. I wanna know if you bleed sometimes through other people’s wounds.”

--Andrea Gibson

Reading is bliss.

All quotes by author Nora Ephron

“Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.”

“Maybe young women don’t wonder whether they can have it all any longer, but in case if you are wondering, of course you can have it all. What are you going to do? Everything, is my guess. It will be a little messy, but embrace the mess. It will be complicated, but rejoice in the complications. It will not be anything like what you think it will be like, but surprises are good for you. And don’t be frightened: you can always change your mind. I know: I’ve had four careers and three husbands.”

"Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim."

“I don’t think any day is worth living without thinking about what you’re going to eat next at all times.”

“And then the dreams break into a million tiny pieces. The dream dies. Which leaves you with a choice: you can settle for reality, or you can go off, like a fool, and dream another dream.” 

--'Heartburn'

What wonderful thing didn't start out scary?

All quotes by author Isaac Marion from the book 'Warm Bodies'

“In my mind I am eloquent; I can climb intricate scaffolds of words to reach the highest cathedral ceilings and paint my thoughts. But when I open my mouth, everything collapses.” 

“You should always be taking pictures, if not with a camera then with your mind. Memories you capture on purpose are always more vivid than the ones you pick up by accident.” 

“There is no ideal world for you to wait around for. The world is always just what it is now, and it's up to you how you respond to it.” 

“What wonderful thing didn't start out scary?” 

“It frustrates and fascinates me that we'll never know for sure, that despite the best efforts of historians and scientists and poets, there are some things we'll just never know. What the first song sounded like. How it felt to see the first photograph. Who kissed the first kiss, and if it was any good.”

After all, you can’t think all the time.

All quotes by fashion legend Diana Vreeland

“There’s only one very good life and that’s the life you know you want and you make it yourself."

“There’s only one thing in life, and that’s the continual renewal of inspiration.”

“I think when you’re young you should be a lot with yourself and your sufferings. Then one day you get out where the sun shines and the rain rains and the snow snows and it all comes together.”

“Prohibition. Insane idea. Try to keep me from taking a swallow of this tea and I’ll drink the whole pot.”

“Still, my dream in life is to come home and think of absolutely nothing. After all, you can’t think all the time."

“If you think all the time every day of your life, you might as well kill yourself today and be happier tomorrow.”

“To be contented—that’s for the cows.”

“The best time to leave a party is when the party’s just beginning. There’s no drink that kills except the drink that you didn’t want to take, as the saying goes, and there’s no hour that kills except the hour you stayed after you wanted to go home.”

“Travel is little beds and cramped bathrooms. It’s old television sets and slow Internet connections. Travel is extraordinary conversations with ordinary people. It’s waiters, gas station attendants, and housekeepers becoming the most interesting people in the world. It’s churches that are compelling enough to enter. It’s McDonald’s being a luxury. It’s the realization that you may have been born in the wrong country. Travel is a smile that leads to a conversation in broken English. It’s the epiphany that pretty girls smile the same way all over the world. Travel is tipping 10% and being embraced for it. Travel is the same white T-shirt again tomorrow. Travel is accented sex after good wine and too many unfiltered cigarettes. Travel is flowing in the back of a bus with giggly strangers. It’s a street full of bearded backpackers looking down at maps. Travel is wishing for one more bite of whatever that just was. It’s the rediscovery of walking somewhere. It’s sharing a bottle of liquor on an overnight train with a new friend. Travel is “Maybe I don’t have to do it that way when I get back home.” It’s nostalgia for studying abroad that one semester. Travel is realizing that “age thirty” should be shed of its goddamn stigma.”

--Nick Miller, 'Isn’t It Pretty To Think So?'

My hair is being pulled by the stars again.

“Everything you want is coming. Relax and let the universe pick up the timing and the way. You just need to trust that what you want is coming, and watch how fast it comes.”

--Abraham Hicks

“We are all ordinary. We are all boring. We are all spectacular. We are all shy. We are all bold. We are all heroes. We are all helpless. It just depends on the day.”

--Brad Meltzer

“I’m restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.”

--Anaïs Nin

“The best thing about paperbacks (apart from the smell, of course) is that when a little jewel of a sentence grabs you, you can underline it. […] Underlining something in your book is the original ‘interactive’ media. Think of it as a hyperlink that redirects to your own thoughts, and like a hyperlink, it can leave the rest of the story behind and open up a new window of ideas, insights, musings.”

--Evan Robertson

“It wasn’t until I started reading and found books they wouldn’t let us read in school that I discovered you could be insane and happy and have a good life without being like everybody else.”

--John Waters

“Hurt the right person, and you’ll be wrong all your life.”

--Unknown

"Maybe there's something you're afraid to say, or someone you're afraid to love, or somewhere you're afraid to go. It's gonna hurt. It's gonna hurt because it matters."

--John Green

“Your first kiss isn’t as important as your last. The math test really didn’t matter. The pie really did. The stuff you’re good at and the stuff you’re bad at are just different parts of the same thing. Same goes for the people you love and the people you don’t—and the people who love you and the people who don’t. The only thing that mattered was that you cared about a few people. Life is really, really short.”

--Ethan Wate, 'Beautiful Chaos'

"Your task is not to seek love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it."

--Rumi

“I love you because the entire universe conspired to help me find you.”

--Paulo Coelho

“Before I die, I want to be somebody’s favorite hiding place, the place they can put everything they know they need to survive, every secret, every solitude, every nervous prayer, and be absolutely certain I will keep it safe. I will keep it safe.”

--Unknown

“I’m yours for ever—for ever and ever. Here I stand; I’m as firm as a rock. If you’ll only trust me, how little you’ll be disappointed. Be mine as I am yours.”

--Henry James, 'The Portrait of a Lady'

“But it’s not enough to be in love. It’s about how you spend your days, what you do together, who you choose as friends, and most of all it’s what work you do… Better to break both our hearts now than watch them wither away over time.”

--Helen Simonson, 'Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand'

“I just thought it was so romantic—the idea that you don’t need to be loved in return in order to love something or someone. Love can come from you. It doesn’t have to be reciprocal. People love their cars. People love all kinds of things, and they really love them. And we don’t really value that kind of love because it’s not a real, reciprocal kind of love, but it’s real love to them.”

--Ryan Gosling on his amazing film, Lars and the Real Girl

“‎Don’t expect to get anything back, don’t expect recognition for your efforts, don’t expect your genius to be discovered or your love to be understood. Act because you need to act.”

--Paulo Coelho

"The magic occurs when what we do mixes with who we are and is cooked in the heat of what we believe."

--Jerry Colonna

“You’ve felt it, haven’t you? Those feelings that seem to get so big in your chest, like something is so beautiful it aches?”

--Heather Anastasiu, 'Glitch'