h*q

You can have anything that you want.

2012-01-18T23:04:00.005-06:00

"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.

2012-01-09T12:45:00.000-06:00

"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

2012-01-06T12:49:00.001-06:00

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

I can look at anything and think of you.

2011-12-30T16:45:00.003-06:00

All quotes from I Wrote This For You

Understand that, the prisons you've built are of your own design.

Understand that, you should be the person you wanted to be when you woke up this morning.

Understand that, the world desperately wants to love you, if you'll let it.

Understand that, you deserve that love, even if you don't feel like it.

Understand that, love can hit a planet like a comet.

Understand that, the rain can unrain, if you want it to.

On other planets, they look up and wish upon you.

Because on other planets, you live on a star.

They'll tell you that you're the ground. Remember that you hold up the sky.

Don't settle for someone who doesn't give you things to say. Forever is a long time to make small talk.

When you can, let me know how long you're willing to miss me for.

I just wish you still made me nervous.

This one is about how music gets ruined by the people you're no longer with.

I keep thinking you already know. I keep thinking I've sent you letters that were only ever written in my mind.

Should any child be reading this in a history book, you should know that we loved. I hope that hasn't changed.

Today happened because you're here. The days seem to leave when you do.

If you think I can tell you what's going on inside my heart, you know even less about it than you think.

You die when you stop feeling. I will live forever.

And maybe something's missing in your mind. Maybe you don't work the same way everyone else does. Maybe you're just different. That would be good news.

When I am more than you can take, just give me back.

The world you love spins so fast, all I can do is throw words at it. And hope they become pictures.

You reach a certain age where you learn how to walk through a crowded party without stepping on anyone's feet. You reach a certain age where you learn how to wear the skin you've been given. You reach a certain age where you can look at your relationships to other people completely objectively. Apparently.

Nothing is faster than the speed of thought. I can look at anything and think of you.

I do not know how it ends. Just that I miss you, right before it does.

We're all just walking each other home.

2011-12-30T10:34:00.001-06:00

All quotes by Ram Dass

“Either you do it like it’s a big weight on you or you do it as part of the dance.”

“I would like my life to be a statement of love and compassion — and where it isn’t, that’s where my work lies.”

“We're all just walking each other home.”

“The quieter you become, the more you can hear.”

“We're fascinated by the words--but where we meet is in the silence behind them.”

“As long as you have certain desires about how it ought to be you can't see how it is.”

“The most exquisite paradox… as soon as you give it all up, you can have it all. As long as you want power, you can't have it. The minute you don't want power, you'll have more than you ever dreamed possible.”

“The heart surrenders everything to the moment. The mind judges and holds back.”

“In most of our human relationships, we spend much of our time reassuring one another that our costumes of identity are on straight.”

“Your problem is you are too busy holding on to your unworthiness.”

“I'm not interested in being a "lover." I'm interested in only being love.”

“The next message you need is always right where you are.”

“A feeling of aversion or attachment toward something is your clue that there's work to be done.”

You have nothing to prove to anybody.

2011-12-21T17:28:00.004-06:00

"Can You imagine? For example, what the trees do not only do in lightening storms or the watery dark of a summer's night or under the white nets of winter but now, and now, and now - whenever we're not looking. Surely you can't imagine they don't dance, from the root up, wishing to travel a little, not cramped so much as wanting a better view, or more sun, or just as avidly more shade - surely you can't imagine they just stand there loving every minute of it, the birds or the emptiness, the dark rings of the years slowly and without a sound thickening, and nothing different unless the wind, and then only in its own mood, comes to visit, surely you can't imagine patience, and happiness, like that."

--Mary Oliver

"And if these pictures have anything to say to future generations, it's this; I was here. I existed. I was young, I was happy, and someone cared enough about me in this world to take my picture."

--'One Hour Photo'

“I have less time, less tolerance for bullshit, more interest in good taste, more confidence in my own judgement. The culture with which I surround myself is a reflection of my personality and the circumstances of my life, which is in part how it should be.”

--Nick Hornsby

“I’ve tried so many times to think of a new way to say it— and it’s still I love you— love you— love you.”

--Zelda Fitzgerald

“I want to know you moved and breathed in the same world with me.”

--F. Scott Fitzgerald

“When she walked she carried herself like a ballet-dancer, not slumped down on her hips but held up in the small of her back.”

--F. Scott Fitzgerald, 'Tender is the Night'

“No one wants to admit we’re addicted to music. That’s just not possible. No one’s addicted to music and television and radio. We just need more of it, more channels, a larger screen, more volume. We can’t bear to be without it, but no, nobody’s addicted. We could turn it off anytime we wanted.”

--Chuck Palahniuk, 'Lullaby'

“I was wise enough to never grow up while fooling most people into believing I had.”

--Margaret Mead

“Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you."

--Annie Dillard

"The bitter taste of poor quality lingers long after the sweetness of the low price is gone."

--Unknown

“Real style is never right or wrong. It’s a matter of being yourself—on purpose.”

--G. Bruce Boyer, Gary Cooper: Enduring Style

"If you can't walk the red carpet in your own home, where then?"

--Carolyne Roehm

“Time wounds all heels.”

--Jane Ace

"Create your own visual style. Let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others."

--Orson Welles

"Real success is finding your lifework, in the work that you love."

--David McCullough

“You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet.”

--Tyler Durden, 'Fight Club'

“You alone are enough. You have nothing to prove to anybody.”

--Maya Angelou

"There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one."

--Kazuo Ishiguro

"Write drunk; edit sober."

--Ernest Hemingway

“She was looking into my eyes with that way she had of looking that made you wonder whether she really saw out of her own eyes. They would look on and on after every one else’s eyes in the world would have stopped looking.”

--Ernest Hemingway, 'The Sun Also Rises'

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”

--Marcel Proust

“We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.”

--E.E. Cummings

“The picture you have in your mind of what you’re about will come true. It’s kind of a thing you kinda have to keep to your own self because it’s a fragile feeling and you put it out there, somebody’ll kill it. So, it’s best to keep that all inside.”

--Bob Dylan

"Perhaps love is the process of gently leading you back to yourself."

--Antoine de Saint-Exupery

“It may be normal, darling; but I’d rather be natural.”

--Truman Capote

“When you eventually see through the veils to how things really are, you will keep saying again and again, this is certainly not like we thought it was.”

--Rumi

I never tried to be anything other than a dreamer.

2011-11-30T21:48:00.003-06:00

"The greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change her future by merely changing her attitude."

--Oprah Winfrey

“O! It’s nice to get up in the morning. But it’s nicer to stay in bed.”

--Harry Lauder

“I have had a holiday, and I'd like to take it up professionally."

--Kylie Minogue

"Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting."

--Cormac McCarthy

“Fashion isn’t just frocks. It’s how we do our houses, our gardens - it’s what we eat and drink.”

--Grace Coddington

“If you are all wrapped up in yourself, you are overdressed.”

--Kate Halverson

“I believe part of the process of figuring yourself out is a way of connecting the dots between the fabulous and influential people around us all, like some sort of hidden constellation—you only have to know where to look.”

--Ashley Olsen

“Long hair minimizes the need for barbers; socks can be done without; one leather jacket solves the coat problem for many years; suspenders are superfluous.”

--Albert Einstein

“All I’ve ever done is dream. That, and only that, has been the meaning of my existence. The only thing I’ve ever really cared about is my inner life. My greatest griefs faded to nothing the moment I opened the window onto my inner self and lost myself in watching. I never tried to be anything other than a dreamer. I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be. Anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed to be full of poetry. The only thing I ever loved was pure nothingness…”

--Fernando Pessoa

“I got my feet on the ground and I don’t go to sleep to dream.”

--Fiona Apple

“You will recognize your own path when you come upon it because you will suddenly have all the energy and imagination you will ever need.”

--Sara Teasdale

“I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.”

--Albert Camus

“I am still so naive; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?”

--Sylvia Plath

“How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.”

--Anais Nin

“That’s who you really like. The people you can think out loud in front of.”

--John Green

"Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we're quoting."

--John Green

“I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognized wiser than oneself.”

--Marlene Dietrich

“I wouldn't mind living my life capturing the moments of others.”

--Unknown

“If he wrote it he could get rid of it. He had gotten rid of many things by writing about them.”

--Ernest Hemingway, 'Fathers and Sons'

“It pains me to realize I’ll never get to actually live in these well written worlds, but at least I can stay for a little while.”

--Unknown

“I guess that’s the beauty of books. When they finish they don’t really finish.”

--Markus Zusak

“Stories you read when you’re the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you’ll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit.”

--Neil Gaiman

“Anyone who knows me, should learn to know me again;

For I am like the Moon,

you will see me with new face everyday.”

--Rumi

“I want to sing like the birds sing, not worrying about who hears or what they think.”

--Rumi

“Appreciate how rare and full of potential your situation is in this world, then take joy in it, and use it to your best advantage.”

--Dalai Lama

“As long as one keeps searching, the answers come.”

--Joan Baez

“Very little is needed to make a happy life. It is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.”

--Marcus Aurelius

“It is not about how others are or how society is. The most important thing is to ask yourself, “What should I do?” and “What can I do?” One who stands up with moral courage and conviction can change society and create waves of transformation around the world.”

--Daisaku Ikeda

“So I dressed with remaining ceramics, furniture and objects; so I placed a message in each, a small story, at times ironic and obviously wordless, but audible to those who believe in poetry.”

--Piero Fornasetti

always panting, forever distracted

2011-11-14T21:02:00.001-06:00

in the sleepiness of night I feel like I can say anything. you feel good drunk in the dark. you feel good in my dreams. you are still swelling and ghosting while I am waiting for you. I’ve tried to gather greater amounts of strength than fifths of vodka or offering clumsy poems to lonely people.

God, it’s so sad when the people don’t feel like poems anymore.

In high school I scrambled after them, waited and watched, fell in love with people who had no idea it was in me to be so brave. And what a dangerous thing it is to want someone against all the odds, right? How I listened tentatively to every person who poured secrets in hallways they didn’t know I was listening in. I could count on all your hands the strangers I’ve wanted to kiss.

But this isn’t about them. It’s about the things you’ve said to me in secret when you were younger, waiting for this world to gobble you up, spit your love out like sunflower seeds in summer when the days go on and on forever. How I like the way you move in your sleep. I like the way you touch the ends of my hair sometimes when you’re thinking about things I’m trying my hardest to figure out without asking. I’ve never wanted someone so much all of the time. Tell me this could chip the moon, this could send shivers down the spine of all those saps we ever loved before. Is it lonely to chase after things that you can only get so close to? tossing wishes into wells, these are the things that break days. guilt and moments you can’t have when you want them most, this is the stuff in jazz music and hope, the stuff that makes poets and fills notebooks. Tell me, could the chaos ever accept you too?

--likelava

Give up to grace.

2011-11-12T20:18:00.002-06:00

"Some of my best moments on earth have been spent with my dogs."

--Oprah Winfrey

“Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness.”

--Allen Ginsberg

“We all basically have a lot of magic; it’s only those of us who choose to accept it that really understand it. It’s there for everyone.”

--Stevie Nicks

“Raise your words, not your voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.”

--Rumi

“I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.”

--Ernest Hemingway

“The more you struggle to live, the less you live. Give up the notion that you must be sure of what you are doing. Instead, surrender to what is real within you, for that alone is sure….you are above everything distressing.”

--Spinoza

“The happiest of all lives is a busy solitude.”

--Voltaire

“Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.”

--Iris Murdoch

“And the rest is rust and stardust.”

--Vladimir Nabokov, 'Lolita'

"I have dined with kings, I've been offered wings, and I've never been too impressed."

--Bob Dylan

“You can’t give up something you really believe in for financial reasons. If you die by the roadside - so be it. But at least you know you’ve tried. Ten minutes in the music scene was the equal of one hundred years outside of it.”

--Robert Plant

“The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can’t be any large-scale revolution until there’s a personal revolution, on an individual level. It’s got to happen inside first.”

--Jim Morrison

“You think you’re lost without any place left to go, like you need one of those kisses long and slow. At first glance it’s not what it seems, but there’s some things that I just know, like you take two sugars with a splash of cream. Take a guess where I stand. Pick a number from one to two. Take a look at the back of your hand. Just like you know it, you know me too.”

--Dwight Yoakum, 'The Back of Your Hand'

“The goal in life is to discover that you’ve always been where you were supposed to be.”

--Aldous Huxley

“The quickest way to know a woman is to go shopping with her.”

--Marcelene Cox

“You’re thinking too much. Just let it flow.”

--E. Paluszak

“If you’re twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel— as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them—wherever you go.”

--Anthony Bourdain

“You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover is yourself.”

--Alan Alda

“When you are here and now, sitting totally, not jumping ahead, the miracle has happened. To be in the moment is the miracle.”

--Osho

“In my soul, I am still that small child who did not care about anything else but the beautiful colors of a rainbow.”

--Papiha Ghosh

“I promise myself that I will enjoy every minute of the day that is given me to live.”

--Thich Nhat Hanh

“All day I think about it, then at night I say it. Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing? I have no idea. My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that, and I intend to end up there. You are so weak. Give up to grace. The ocean takes care of each wave until it gets to shore.”

--Rumi

“If I had to live my life again, I’d make the same mistakes, only sooner.”

--Tallulah Bankhead

“The sign of intelligence is that you are constantly wondering. Idiots are always dead sure about every damn thing.”

--Jaggi Vasudev

“That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”

--Willa Cather

“Everyone has ocean’s to fly, if they have the heart to do it. Is it reckless? Maybe. But what do dreams know of boundaries?”

--Amelia Earhart

“The only people who ever get anyplace interesting are the people who get lost.”

--Henry David Thoreau

“Gastronomical perfection can be reached in these combinations: one person dining alone, usually upon a couch or a hill side; two people, of no matter what sex or age, dining in a good restaurant; six people, of no matter what sex or age, dining in a good home.”

--M.F.K. Fisher, 'An Alphabet for Gourmets'

“..But the moment I got back in my car I knew I would never see him again, ever. It suddenly seemed obvious to me that the whole world, especially Los Angeles, was designed to protect me from these people I was meeting. There was no law against knowing them, but it wouldn’t happen. LA isn’t a walking city, or a subway city, so if someone isn’t in my house or my car we’ll never be together, not even for a moment. And just to be absolutely sure of that, when I leave my car my iPhone escorts me, letting everyone else in the post office know that I’m not really with them, I’m with my own people, who are so hilarious that I can’t help smiling to myself as I text them back.”

--Miranda July, 'It Chooses You'

2011-10-30T20:08:00.002-05:00

sometimes

you have to take

a step or

two

back,

re-treat

take

a month

off

don’t

do anything

don’t

want to

do anything

peace is

paramount

pace is

paramount

whatever

you want

you aren’t going to

get

it by

trying too

hard.

--Charles Bukowski

Be willing to be split open.

2011-10-18T20:20:00.001-05:00

“No money is better spent than what is laid out for domestic satisfaction.”

--Samuel Johnson

“Empty pockets never held anyone back. Only empty heads and empty hearts can do that.”

--Norman Vincent Peale

“Here I am: a bundle of past recollections and future dreams knotted up in a reasonably attractive bundle of flesh.”

--Sylvia Plath

“Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray.”

--Rumi

“It’s the only time I feel like me, she said, & everyone else just thinks it’s dress up.”

--Brian Andreas

"Find out who you are and you will always be beautiful."

--Lou Doillon

“Every day, think as you wake up, today I am fortunate to have woken up, I am alive, I have a precious human life, I am not going to waste it, I am going to use all of my energies to develop myself, to expand my heart out to others, to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings, I am going to have kind thoughts towards others, I am not going to get angry, or think badly about others, I am going to benefit others as much as I can.”

--The Dalai Lama

“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.”

--Natalie Goldberg

“What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?”

--Ralph Ellison, 'Invisible Man'

“There are only two kinds of people in this world. The realists and the dreamers. The realists know where they are going and the dreamers have already been there.”

--Robert Orben

“Don’t let yourself feel worthless: often through life you will really be at your worst when you seem to think best of yourself; and don’t worry about losing your “personality,” as you persist in calling it: at fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon, and when you are my age you will give out, as I do, the genial golden warmth of 4 p.m.”

--F. Scott Fitzgerald, 'This Side of Paradise'

"Your life is always under construction. It is your job to learn how to untangle the threads and weave a tapestry that matches your desires."

--Dannye Williamsen

“It was one of those perfect autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.”

--P. D. James

“I believe in me. I’m a little screwed up but I’m beautiful.”

--Steve McQueen

For you.

2011-10-16T20:59:00.005-05:00

I started this blog for myself to keep quotes that I loved, never expecting so many of you to find me here. I just want to say thank you to everyone who has left a comment or sent me an email, reminding me that you're out there reading, too. Even though I don't always respond to each comment individually, I appreciate them all the same.

xo...Paige

2011-10-16T20:55:00.000-05:00

“Until I was 30, I dated only boys. I’ll tell you why: Men scared the sh*t out of me. Men know what they want. Men own alarm clocks. Men sleep on a mattress that isn’t on the floor. Men buy new shampoo instead of adding water to a nearly empty bottle of shampoo. Men make reservations. Men go in for a kiss without giving you some long preamble about how they’re thinking of kissing you. Men wear clothes that have never been worn by anyone else before […] At this point you might want to smack me and say: “Are you seriously just another grown woman talking about how she wants a man who isn’t afraid of commitment?” Let me explain! I’m not talking about commitment to romantic relationships. I’m talking about commitment to things—houses, jobs, neighborhoods. Paying a mortgage. When men hear women want a commitment, they think it means commitment to a romantic relationship, but that’s not it. It’s a commitment to not floating around anymore. I want a guy who is entrenched in his own life. Entrenched is awesome.”

--Mindy Kaling in Glamour Magazine

Your ship comes in because you’re the captain.

2011-10-04T10:07:00.001-05:00

“I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.”

--Roger Ebert

“Despite whoever created it, it’s my world, & the only one I’ve got. Might as well make the best of it, right? Might as well have a little fun while I’m here. Or a lot of fun. Might be dead tomorrow.”

--Ellen Hopkins

“If there is no wind, row.”

--Unknown

“This is a world where everybody’s gotta do something. Ya know, somebody laid down this rule that everybody’s gotta do something, they gotta be something. You know, a dentist, a glider pilot, a narc, a janitor, a preacher, all that … Sometimes I just get tired of thinking of all the things that I don’t wanna do. All the things that I don’t wanna be.”

--Charles Bukowski

“So now I have started living my own life. Imperfect and clumsy as it may look, it is resembling me now, thoroughly.”

--Elizabeth Gilbert

“Oh, it is wonderful to wake up in the morning with things to look forward to!”

--Dodie Smith, 'I Capture the Castle'

“I believe that one defines oneself by reinvention. To not be like your parents. To not be like your friends. To be yourself. To cut yourself out of stone.”

--Henry Rollins

“I will spread myself like wings. I am a billion tiny feathers. You have no idea what’s happened to me.”

--Dave Eggers

“Society goes on telling you, “This is right, and that is wrong”—that is conscience. It becomes ingrained, implanted in you. You go on repeating it. That is worthless; that is not the real thing. The real thing is your own consciousness. It carries no ready-made answers about what is wrong and what is right, no. But immediately, in what-ever situation arises, it gives you light —you know immediately what to do”

--Osho

“I do not think that I will ever reach a stage when I will say, ‘This is what I believe. Finished.’ What I believe is alive and open to growth.”

--Madeleine L’Engle

“When I work hard for something, I don’t like people telling me, Oh you’re so lucky. I aint lucky. Your ship comes in because you’re the captain.”

--Patti Smith

“The things we hate about ourselves aren’t more real than things we like about ourselves.”

--Ellen Goodman

“Because there’s nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline, no matter how many times it’s sent away.”

--Sarah Kay

“To believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. Enough labor for one human life.”

--Czeslaw Milosz, 'Learning'

“You only lose what you cling to.”

--Buddha

I disappear a lot.

2011-09-21T21:45:00.003-05:00

“The hurrier I go, the behinder I get.”

--The White Rabbit, 'Alice In Wonderland'

"Ever morning, until you dead in the ground, you gone have to make this decision. You gone have to ask yourself, "Am I gone believe what them fools say about me today?"

--Kathryn Stockett, 'The Help'

"Live each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of each."

--Henry David Thoreau

“The society teaches you, ‘Choose the convenient, the comfortable; choose the well-trodden path where your forefathers and their forefathers and their forefathers, since Adam and Eve, have been walking. Choose the well-trodden path. That is a proof— so many millions of people have passed on it, you cannot go wrong.’ But remember one thing: The crowd has never had the experience of truth. Truth has only happened to individuals. Whenever there are alternatives, beware: Don’t choose the convenient, the comfortable, the respectable, the socially acceptable, the honorable. Choose something that rings a bell in your heart. Choose something that you would like to do in spite of any consequences.”

--Osho

“So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half-asleep, even when they’re busy doing things they think are important. This is because they’re chasing the wrong things. The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.”

--Morrie Schwartz

“I want to be alone and I want people to notice me — both at the same time.”

--Thom Yorke

“An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.”

--Charles Bukowski

“Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.”

--Maya Angelou

“And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”

--F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Style is more character than clothes, more attitude than affluence. It’s you making visible your inner self. So forget what you learned about appearance not counting; you can no longer afford to be without style.”

--Hara Estroff Morano

“Sometimes the only company I want is that of a good book, a drink and a cashmere sweater.”

--Ashton Darian

“What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through.”

--Virginia Woolf

“We recognize our own mortality, and we are reminded that in the fleeting time we have on this earth, what matters is not wealth, or status, or power, or fame – but rather, how well we have loved, and what small part we have played in making the lives of other people better.”

--Barack Obama

“I think if you have a certain kind of taste, that comes through in the different things you do… I guess I put my personality in all my creative endeavours.”

--Sofia Coppola

“A big vocabulary. You want to wake up next to ‘smart’.”

--Darren Criss, on what he looks for in a lady

“Please, I want so badly for the good things to happen.”

--Sylvia Plath

“You just want to sit around and criticize everything and everybody. You don’t want to do anything. Nothing’s good enough for you.”

--Charles Bukowski

“Being noticed can be a burden. Jesus got himself crucified because he got himself noticed. So I disappear a lot.”

--Bob Dylan

“The problem is, after a week of intense googling, we’ve started to burn out on knowing the answer to everything. God must feel that way all the time. I think people in the year 2020 are going to be nostalgic for the sensation of feeling clueless.”

--Douglas Coupland

“We could slip away, wouldn’t that be better? Me with nothing to say and you in your autumn sweater.”

--Yo La Tengo!, 'Autumn Sweater'

“I think there’s a whole region of images and feelings inside us that rarely are given an outlet in daily life”

--Jim Morrison

“Age shouldn’t affect you. It’s just like the size of your shoes - they don’t determine how you live your life! You’re either marvelous or you’re boring, regardless of your age.”

--Steven Morrissey

“Every day I discover more and more beautiful things. It’s enough to drive one mad. I have such a desire to do everything, my head is bursting with it.”

--Claude Monet

“Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.”

--Mary Oliver, 'Evidence (part I)'

“Let’s borrow life preservers and jump over. I think we should do something spectacular. I feel that all our lives have been too restrained.”

--F. Scott Fitzgerald, 'Tender is the Night'

“I must learn to love the fool in me—the one who feels too much, talks too much, takes too many chances, wins sometimes and loses often, lacks self-control, loves and hates, hurts and gets hurt, promises and breaks promises, laughs and cries. It alone protects me against that utterly self-controlled, masterful tyrant whom I also harbor and who would rob me of my human aliveness, humility, and dignity but for my Fool.”

--Theodore I. Rubin

“Sometimes while I ride the subway I try to look at each person and imagine what they look like to someone who is totally in love with them.”

--Dean Spade, ‘For Lovers and Fighters’

“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”

--Harry Truman

“I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. When I leave town now I never tell my people where I am going. If I did, I would lose all my pleasure. It is a silly habit, I dare say, but somehow it seems to bring a great deal of romance into one’s life.”

--Oscar Wilde

There isn't enough of anything as long as we live.

2011-09-01T16:39:00.005-05:00

All quotes by author Raymond Carver

“Cool summer nights. Windows open. Lamps burning.

Fruit in the bowl. And your head on my shoulder.

These the happiest moments in the day.

Next to the early morning hours, of course.

And the time just before lunch. And the afternoon,

and early evening hours. But I do love these

summer nights. Even more, I think, than those other

times. The work finished for the day.

And no one who can reach us now. Or ever.”

"It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love."

"That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones."

"And did you get what

you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth."

"Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read."

"Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from."

"There isn't enough of anything

as long as we live. But at intervals

a sweetness appears and, given a chance

prevails."

It takes life to love Life.

2011-08-27T15:20:00.003-05:00

"What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness,

Anger, discontent and drooping hopes?

Degenerate sons and daughters, life is too strong for you--

It takes life to love Life."

--Lucinda Matlock

"There is something about the outside of a horse

that is good for the inside of a man."

--W. Churchill

“Caring is a powerful business advantage.”

--Scott Johnson

“What is your life about, anyway? Nothing but a struggle to be someone. Nothing but a running from your own silence.”

--Rumi

“You know the typical crowd, Wow, it’s Friday night, what are you going to do? Just sit there? Well, yeah. I’ve never been bothered with the need to rush out into the night. That’s all. Sorry for all the millions, but I’ve never been lonely. I like myself. I’m the best form of entertainment I have.”

--Charles Bukowski

“Is it really that bad if someone sees who you are? Why is it humans have a problem with letting someone else see that they are human?”

--Joseph Gogler

“I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.”

--Tropic of cancer

“You are the soul of the soul of the universe, and your name is Love.”

--Rumi

“Simply to be desired is not a high enough aspiration. Outfits that say little more than ‘look at my body’ should be outlawed from one’s wardrobe. English style has always been about expressing one’s intelligence, charm and views through one’s choice of image. Expressing who you are and what you want to be. If what you’re saying is just ‘be my boyfriend’ then you’re not saying much. Looking sexy should always come second to looking interesting - to look interesting is to look beautiful.”

--Luella’s Guide to English Style

“When things are good, say good things. When things are bad, say twice as many good things.”

--R. Todd Michael

“Just look at the animals, at the birds; nobody is worried, nobody is sad, nobody is frustrated. You don’t see a buffalo freaking out. He is perfectly contented chewing the same grass every day. He is almost enlightened. There is no tension; there is a tremendous harmony with nature, with himself, with everything as it is. Buffaloes don’t make parties to revolutionize the world, to change buffaloes into super buffaloes, to make buffaloes religious, virtuous. No animal is concerned at all with human ideas. And they all must be laughing: What has happened to you? Why can’t you be just yourself as you are? What is the need to be somebody else?

So the first thing is a deep acceptance of yourself.”

--Osho

“There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.”

--Jane Austen

“Passion is energy. Feel the power that comes from focusing on what excites you.”

--Oprah Winfrey

“Some women choose to follow men, and some women choose to follow their dreams. If you’re wondering which way to go, remember that your career will never wake up and tell you that it doesn’t love you anymore.”

--Lady Gaga

“I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.”
--Mark Twain

Love and be loved if at all possible.

2011-08-25T00:38:00.003-05:00

All quotes by author David Nicholls

"What are you going to do with your life?" In one way or another it seemed that people had been asking her this forever; teachers, her parents, friends at three in the morning, but the question had never seemed this pressing and still she was no nearer an answer... "Live each day as if it's your last', that was the conventional advice, but really, who had the energy for that? What if it rained or you felt a bit glandy? It just wasn't practical. The trick of it, she told herself, is to be courageous and bold and make a difference. Not change the world exactly, just the bit around you. Go out there with your double-first, your passion and your new Smith Corona electric typewriter and work hard at … something. Change lives through art maybe. Write beautifully. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved if at all possible.”

--'One Day'

"This is me.’" He handed her the precious scrap of paper. ‘Call me or I’ll call you, but one of us will call, yes? What I mean is it’s not a competition. You don’t lose if you phone first"

--'One Day'

"She was reaching the limits of how much its possible to change a man."

--'One Day'

"Em, we've known each other five or six years now, but two years properly, as, you know, 'friends', which isn't that long but I think I know a bit about you and I think I know what your problem is. Here it is. I think you're scared of being happy, Emma. I think you think that the natural way of things is for your life to be grim and grey and dour and to hate your job, hate where you live, not to have success or money or God forbid a boyfriend. In fact, I think I'll go further and say that I think you actually get a kick out of being disappointed and under-achieving, because it's easier, isn't it? Failure and unhappiness is easier because you can make a joke out of it."

--'One Day'

"She sometimes wondered what her twenty-two-year-old self would think of today's Emma Mayhew. Would she consider her self-centered? Compromised? A bourgeois sell-out, with her appetite for home ownership and foreign travel, clothes from Paris and expensive haircuts? Would she find her conventional, with her new surname and hopes for a family life? Maybe, but then the twenty-two-year-old Emma Morley wasn't such a paragon either: pretentious, petulant, lazy, speechifying, judgmental. Self-pitying, self-righteous, self-important, all of the selfs except self-confident, the quality that she always needed most."

--'One Day'

"You know what I can't understand? You have all these people telling you all the time how great you are, smart and funny and talented and all that, I mean endlessly, I've been telling you for years. So why don't you believe it? Why do you think people say that stuff, Em? Do you think it's a conspiracy, people secretly ganging up to be nice about you?"

--'One Day'

"...you feel a little bit lost right now about what to do with your life, a bit rudderless and oarless and aimless but that's okay that's alright because we're all meant to be like that at twenty-four."

--'One Day'

"Oh you know me. I have no emotions. I'm a robot. Or a nun. A robot nun."

--'One Day'

"And then some days you wake up and everything's perfect."

--'One Day'

"She had never been a proficient flirt. Her spasms of kittenish behaviour were graceless and inept, like normal conversation on roller skates."

--'One Day'

"Independence is the luxury of all those people who are too confident, and busy, and popular, and attractive to be just plain old lonely. And make no mistake, lonely is absolutely the worst thing to be. Tell someone that you've got a drink problem, or an eating disorder, or your dad died when you were a kid even, and you can almost see their eyes light up with the sheer fascinating drama and pathos of it all, because you've got an issue, something for them to get involved in, to talk about and analyse and discuss and maybe even cure. But tell someone you’re lonely and of course they’ll seem sympathetic, but look very carefully and you'll see one hand snaking behind their back, groping for the door handle, ready to make a run for it, as if loneliness itself were contagious. Because being lonely is just so banal, so shaming, so plain and dull and ugly."

--'Starter for Ten'

"No matter how predictable, banal and listless the rest of my life might be, you can guarantee that there'll always be something interesting going on with my skin."

--'Starter for Ten''

"If she does have a failing, and it's obviously only a tiny one, it's that she doesn't seem particularly curious about other people, or me, anyway."

--'A Question of Attraction: A Novel'

Saying yes begins things.

2011-08-16T11:11:00.004-05:00

“Only buy what you absolutely love…it doesn’t mean they have to be expensive, just that you love them. Then start to mix them up in as many looks as possible…the more time that goes by, the more editing you can do until you have a refined selection, and, every day you could literally wear a different outfit that is an expression of your personal style.”

--Norma Kamali

"I’m going to make everything around me beautiful - that will be my life.”
--E. D. W.

"Bad taste bothers me."

--Giorgio Armani

“You don’t make me feel like you used to.

That’s why I’m leaving

That’s why people leave each other

They come to their senses and get selfish again.”

--Henry Rollins, 'See a Grown Man Cry, Now Watch Him Die'

“It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”

--J.K Rowling

“There are the friends you meet for the occasional happy hour, and there are friends with whom you have longstanding Taco Tuesdays. Taco Tuesday means a bottle of wine for each person and peeling back the business-casual mask of the weekday while relaying mortifying tales of performed adulthood to one another. You hit reply all. You cried at your desk. You said “I love you” when you were unprepared or drunk or sober. Any day can be Taco Tuesday. These are the people who fill in your blanks. These are the right people.”

--The Hairpin, 'What We Have Going For Us'

"Why not go out on a limb? That's where the fruit is."

--Mark Twain

“Burnout brings strong emotions like anger, fear, jealousy and sadness. Use those feelings to light your creativity on fire.”

--Melissa Gorzela

"In the long run, every project I do is about living, about the flow of life, the riches of the family, where the sun sets, where the sun rises, the climate, the periphery of a building."

--Mike Meire'

"This was an industry that once thrived on exposure. Today I find that the most interesting people are hidden."

--Zac Efron

“She tries it on, like a dress.

She decides it doesn’t fit,

and starts to take it off.

Her skin comes, too.”

--Lola Haskins, 'Love'

“Why don’t you tell me that “if the girl had been worth having, she’d have waited for you?” No, sir, the girl really worth having won’t wait for anybody.”

--F. Scott Fitzgerald

“The happiest people are those who think the most interesting thoughts. Those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good company, good conversation, are the happiest people in the world. And they are not only happy in themselves, they are the cause of happiness in others.”

--William Phelps

"Cynics always say no. But saying yes begins things. Saying yes is how things grow. Saying yes leads to knowledge. “Yes” is for young people. So for as long as you have the strength to, say yes.”

--Stephen Colbert

Seize this very minute.

2011-08-07T01:22:00.001-05:00

“I love the way you can fall in love with a piece of literature; how words alone can get your heart doing that.”

--Laura Marling

“You have to find the right distance between people. Too close, and they overwhelm you, too far and they abandon you.”

--Hanif Kureishi

“The hardest period in life is one’s 20s. It’s a shame because you’re your most gorgeous and you’re physically in peak condition. But it’s actually when you’re most insecure and full of self-doubt. When you don’t know what’s going to happen, it’s frightening.”

--Helen Mirren in Esquire

"Cherish your solitude. Take trains by yourself to places you have never been. Sleep out alone under the stars. Learn how to drive a stick shift. Go so far away that you stop being afraid of not coming back. Say no when you don't want to do something. Say yes if your instincts are strong, even if everyone around you disagrees. Decide whether you want to be liked or admired. Decide if fitting in is more important than finding out what you're doing here."

--Eve Ensler

“If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery—isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.”

--Charles Bukowski

“I keep the telephone of my mind open to peace, harmony, health, love, and abundance. Then, whenever doubt, anxiety, or fear try to call me, they will keep getting a busy signal-and soon they’ll forget my number.”

--Edith Armstrong

"Seize this very minute; What you can do, or dream you can, begin it; Boldness has genius, power and magic in it."

--Johnston Wolfgang von Goethe

“You do the right thing even if it makes you feel bad. The purpose of life is not to be happy but to be worthy of happiness.”

--Tracy Kidder

“She remembered something a woman in Paris had told her once. A woman in her forties, much married, elegant, a little world-weary. ‘There is nothing easier in this world,’ this woman had claimed, ‘than getting a man to kiss you.’ ‘Oh really?’ Eva had said, ‘so how do you do that?’ ‘Just stand close to a man,’ the woman had said, ‘very close, as close as you can without touching - he will kiss you in one minute or two. It’s inevitable. For them it’s like an instinct - they can’t resist. Infallible.”

--William Boyd

“Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country."

--Anais Nin

careless in our summer clothes,

2011-08-01T22:49:00.001-05:00

Together, we wrote a letter: “Dear August, our muscles are tired.” Standing in the doorway, I caught the last glimpse of July, lazy heat hovering over the parked cars like restless ghosts. Sometimes, mostly when it’s early (or when my headphones can’t save me), I think about all of the people we’ve been with one another. All of those colors that bled us dry, turned us muddy like watercolor water. And in the knee-tall grass with your hands behind your back, I knew there’d always been something between us akin to the wonder that keeps the stars apart (forgive me if I’m paraphrasing). The yellow pins slowly stopped singing, but that’s okay. This was all delicate and harsh, like smoke rings I wore like proud diamonds even when they turned my finger green. I am writing a letter with all of those high altitude thoughts—the ones that made my fingers twitch as I moved backwards through time. But about July, and whatever came before it: I am waving goodbye. Ushering in the change that comes ahead with childlike calls to the backyard. Let’s be barefoot. Let’s give up what we know, not to have it taken away but to abandon it. “Dear July, you were a red herring. Dear August, here we are, please keep our roots from doubling back. Please keep us safe like a kiss on the corner of the mouth. Please don’t write us all off just yet.”
--jenna2step

Cut yourself out of stone.

2011-08-01T22:21:00.002-05:00

“Be proud of your mistakes. Well, proud may not be exactly the right word, but respect them, treasure them, be kind to them, learn from them. And, more than that, and more important than that, make them. Make mistakes. Make great mistakes, make wonderful mistakes, make glorious mistakes. Better to make a hundred mistakes than to stare at a blank piece of paper too scared to do anything wrong.”

--Neil Gaiman

“Never be in a hurry; do everything quietly and in a calm spirit. Do not lose your inner peace for anything whatsoever, even if your whole world seems upset."

--Saint Francis de Sales

“Isn’t elegance forgetting what one is wearing?”

--Yves Saint Laurent

“Never be the first to arrive at a party or the last to go home, and never, ever be both.”

--David Brown

"Be very, very careful what you put in that head because you will never, ever get it out.”

--Thomas Cardinal Wolsey

“I believe that one defines oneself by reinvention. To not be like your parents. To not be like your friends. To be yourself. To cut yourself out of stone.”

--Henry Rollins

“The truth is that there are a lot of people like you, us, with strange hobbies or talents or gifts and we try to hide it because we’re afraid that it makes us seem weird or it will turn people off, but that’s a mistake. What makes me unique has brought every person I love into my life.”

--Ned, 'Pushing Daisies'

“If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.”

--C.S. Lewis

“There is a voice inside of you, that whispers all day long, 'I feel that this is right for me, I know that this is wrong.' No teacher, preacher, parent, friend or wise man can decide what’s right for you— Just listen to the voice that speaks inside.”

--Shel Silverstein

“I will love you if you don’t marry me. I will love you if you marry someone else, your co-star, perhaps, or Y., or even O., or anyone Z. through A., even R. Although sadly I believe it will be quite some time before two women can be allowed to marry and I will love you if you have a child, and I will love you if you have two children, or three children, or even more, although I personally think three is plenty, and I will love you if you never marry at all, and never have children, and spend your years wishing you had married me after all, and I must say that on late, cold nights I prefer this scenario out of all the scenarios I have mentioned. That, Beatrice, is how I will love you even as the world goes on its wicked way.”

--Lemony Snicket, 'The Beatrice Letters'

You belong.

2011-07-26T21:51:00.002-05:00

"You should above all things be glad and young

For if you're young, whatever life you wear

it will become you; and if you are glad

whatever's living will yourself become."

--EE Cummings

“You have to get past the idea that music has to be one thing. To be alive in America is to hear all kinds of music constantly—radio, records, churches, cats on the street, everywhere music, man. And with records, the whole history of music is open to everyone who wants to hear it. … Nobody has to fool around with musty old scores, weird notation, and scholarship bullshit: you can just go into a record store and pick a century, pick a country, pick anything, and dig it, make it a part of you, add it to the stuff you carry around, and see that it’s all music.”

--Jerry Garcia

“Pick the day. Enjoy it — to the hilt. The day as it comes. People as they come… The past, I think, has helped me appreciate the present, and I don’t want to spoil any of it by fretting about the future.”

--Audrey Hepburn

"That is part of the beauty of literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong."

--F. Scott Fitzgerald

“When people are ready to, they change. They never do it before then, and sometimes they die before they get around to it. You can’t make them change if they don’t want to, just like when they do want to, you can’t stop them.”

--Andy Warhol

“Let’s face it, you’re either serious about what you’re doing or you’re not serious about what you’re doing. And you can’t mix the two. And life is short.”

--Bob Dylan on Creativity

"I like beginnings because they're so full of promise. The first page of a book, the first day of a job, the first time you buy yourself flowers, the first date with a new man, the first touch, the first kiss, the first kick of a good liquour, the first moment you hold your own baby. I like beginnings because I know there's always more to come."

--Shyma Perera, 'Bitter Sweet Symphony'

“Often a man wishes to be alone and a girl wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others … But we were never lonely and never afraid when we were together. I know that the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started. But with Catherine there was almost no difference in the night except that it was an even better time.”

--Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell To Arms

“We have an idea of a “summer book”. To be read on a beach, or in a hammock, or amid long grass. It promises pleasure and total immersion: if every few minutes you find yourself laying it flat upon your chest and wondering about lunch then it is probably not a summer book.”

--Zadie Smith

“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

2011-07-24T15:26:00.002-05:00

Tonight on the car ride home I leaned myself forward so I could see the stars better and turned the volume up while simon and garfunkle were playing. started yelling out the lyrics to “only living boy in new york” and felt really lost and really alive for the first time since high school. The other night I wrote about how my father is a man of minor miracles - realized today that I’m a girl of minor fiascoes. Thought about how I held you last week. It was the first time I ever held new life. I never knew what that felt like before. It made me nervous, thinking about what I was holding. This tiny little thing. God, you were beautiful. You were perfect. And it’s fucking tragic to me how these words lack the strength entirely to convey the feelings I’ve got criss-crossed behind them. Started to cry when I thought about the holes in your heart. Wondered if they were big enough to hold things like your mothers voice, the sticky sunlight of morning getting caught in the wax of the wings you left behind, the sound your grandmother made as she cried on the drive home. Or if maybe they’re too small for things like that. If maybe the only things they can hold are tiny handcrafted secrets I spend my days trying to build out of the dirt. How sometimes I find myself desperately trying to enjoy a moment, but my body feels to heavy for it. Like my heart’s stumbling all over the place, hands fumbling, thoughts all water-colored and messy. Trying so hard to notice the beauty in ordinary moments, to enjoy things slowly and without effort, admiring people who live so easily. I see some lovers making out by the lakefront, hear a boy playing guitar on a bench, make up a fake constellation out of some left-over stars and I’m trying to tell myself “enjoy this. you’re young and the world still has the ability to be lovely sometimes” but it’s like the feelings keep falling all over the place. Like they can’t get comfortable, breathing heavily under me. I try so hard to take things for what they are and love them even in their crookedness, in their almost poetic way of never being like I thought beautiful things were supposed to be. But my body’s just to heavy for it. Too clumsy to sit still for a goddamn second and love some moment serenely in the quiet symphony of summer’s eternity. Maybe you’re not the only one with holes in your heart burying quiet thoughts your mouth can’t even whisper yet.
--likelava

If you relax, it comes.

2011-07-21T18:27:00.002-05:00

"I like women who haven't lived with too many men. I don't expect virginity but I simply prefer women who haven't been rubbed raw by experience. There is a quality about women who choose men sparingly; it appears in their walk, in their eyes, in their laughter and in their gentle hearts. Women who have had too many men seem to choose the next one out of revenge rather than with feeling. When you play the field selfishly everything works against you: one can't insist on love or demand affection. You're finally left with whatever you have been willing to give which often is: nothing. Some women are delicate things, some women are delicious and wondrous. If you want to piss on the sun go ahead but please leave them alone."

--Charles Bukowski

“Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake.”

--Victor Hugo

“Sometimes I’m terrified of my heart; of its constant hunger for whatever it is it wants. The way it stops and starts.”

--Edgar Allan Poe

“You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.”

--Eckhart Tolle

“Any idiot can face a crisis - it’s day to day living that wears you out.”

--Anton Chekhov

“…she laughed, I love it when she laughs, although the truth is I am not in love with her…”

--Jonathan Safran Foer, 'Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close'

“Worrying is carrying tomorrow’s load with today’s strength- carrying two days at once. It is moving into tomorrow ahead of time. Worrying doesn’t empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength.”

--Corrie Ten Boom

“Don’t seek, don’t search, don’t ask, don’t knock, don’t demand – relax. If you relax, it comes. If you relax, it is there. If you relax, you start vibrating with it.”

--Osho

Fourth of July

2011-07-17T13:52:00.000-05:00

If I have any romantic notions left,
please let me abandon them here
on the dashboard of your Subaru
beside this container of gas station
potato salad and bottle of sunscreen.
Otherwise, my heart is a sugar packet
waiting to be shaken open by some
other man’s hand. Let there be another town
after this one, a town with an improbable Western
name—Wisdom, Last Chance—where we can get
a room and a six-pack, where the fireworks
end early, say nine o’clock, before it’s really
gotten dark enough to see them because
everyone has to work in the morning.
I’m not asking for love anymore.
I don’t care if I never see a sailboat again.
--Keetje Kuipers

I'll play you some songs that'll change your life.

2011-07-17T13:47:00.003-05:00

"I doubt that parents have an inkling of how deep a child's love goes. It is more thorough than adult love. I loved not only my parents: I loved their love."

--Josephine Humphreys, 'Rich In Love'

“When you feel that you are a lonely, put-upon, isolated little stranger confronting all this, you are under the influence of an illusory feeling, because the truth is quite the reverse. You are the whole works, all that there is, and always was, and always has been, and always will be.”

--Alan Watts

“I will remember the kisses our lips raw with love and how you gave me everything you had and how I offered you what was left of me.”

--Charles Bukowski

“I’m attracted to the extreme light and the extreme dark. I’m interested in the human condition and what makes people tick. I’m interested in the things people try to hide.”

--Johnny Depp

"My dad’s a gruff man, sarcastic in tone and short with dialog. But he’s also a man of minor miracles. Quiet in their presence but grand in their wake. He told me “C’mere and I’ll play you some songs that’ll change your life.” And they did. Not in obvious ways, but carefully. Quietly and entirely."

--likelava

“Learn to be quiet just as you learn to talk, because if talking guides you, being quiet protects you. By being quiet, you attain two characteristics: you are able to take knowledge from those more knowledgeable than you, and you are able to repel the ignorance of those more ignorant than you.”

--Abu adh-Dhiya

“I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”

--Robert Louis Stevenson

“Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong.”

--Ella Fitzgerald

“You won’t do it at the right time. You’ll be late. You’ll be early. You’ll get re-routed. You’ll get delayed. You’ll change your mind. You’ll change your heart. It’s not going to turn out the way you thought it would. It will be better.”

--Kate Moller

“This is a subtle truth: Whatever you love, you are.”

--Rumi

“I feel like your life is sort of always a battle between safety and freedom. You know: do you want to throw yourself into something head first, or do you want to be cautious?”

--Florence Welch, Nylon magazine

“Be thankful for what you have; you’ll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don’t have, you will never, ever have enough.”

--Oprah Winfrey

"So therefore I dedicate myself to myself, to my art, my sleep, my dreams, my labors, my suffrances, my loneliness, my unique madness, my endless absorption and hunger- because I cannot dedicate myself to any fellow being."

--Jack Kerouac

“A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.”

--Franz Kafka

Be in love with your life.

2011-06-25T22:50:00.004-05:00

"I chose my wife, as she did her wedding gown, for qualities that would wear well."

--Oliver Goldsmith

"It’s up to you to pump up your own heart. Get it real big. Then let everyone in."

--Kimya Dawson

“I always feel like I’m struggling to become someone else. Like I’m trying to find a new place, grab hold of a new life, a new personality. I guess it’s part of growing up, yet it’s also an attempt to reinvent myself. By becoming a different me, I could free myself of everything. I seriously believed I could escape myself- as long as I made the effort. But I always hit a dead end. No matter where I go, I still end up me. What’s missing never changes. The scenery may change, but I’m still the same old incomplete person. The same missing elements torture me with a hunger that I can never satisfy. I guess that lack itself is as close as I’ll come to define myself.”

--Haruki Murakami

“Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion.”

--Audrey Niffenegger

“The fortunate people - the truly fortunate - are not so much those who succeed in life as those who succeed in living. There are some who do both; many who do neither, and some who do either one, but not the other. Success in life, so called, can be overdone, but hardly success in living. It seems possible to succeed too much in various lines of attainment, legitimate and sincerely profitable in themselves, but success in living involves getting the most out of life, not in a day or a year or a decade, but in a lifetime. That involves living wisely, and you can’t live too wisely.

--Edward Sanford Martin, 'Too Much Success', 1908

“I have to be alone very often. I’d be quite happy if I spent from Saturday night until Monday morning alone in my apartment. That’s how I refuel.”

--Audrey Hepburn

“I want you for mine & mine forever. You & you only. I’l gladly give my heart for yours & at any time you wish we’ll make the exchange.”

--William Glass Meggs to his future wife, Miss Nellie Lang, April 1899

“… but, that’s what it’s all about. A toothless smile. A middle finger. A freshly gooey slice of Napoleon pizza and the bigger jeans you have to buy. The lingerie to feel sexy in and the moments you think, Sono solo, I am alone. It is imperfect. It is a combination of the tears you drown in each night and the wide-eyed, gasping-for-air, tears-rolling-down-your-cheek laughter you share with friends in the afternoon. It is life. It is wonderful. It all feels so right. Attraversiamo.”

--Elizabeth Gilbert, 'Eat Pray Love'

“I believe the nicest and sweetest days are not those on which anything very splendid or wonderful or exciting happens, but just those that bring simple little pleasures, following one another softly, like pearls slipping off a string.”

--L.M. Montgomery

“Forgive and give as if it were your last opportunity. Love like there’s no tomorrow, and if tomorrow comes, love again.”

--Max Lucado

“You say that you love rain, but you open your umbrella when it rains. You say that you love the sun, but you find a shadow spot when the sun shines. You say that you love the wind, but you close your windows when wind blows. This is why I am afraid, you say that you love me too.”

--William Shakespeare

“On the other side

I can see us waiting for

all we know we’ll be.”

--Tyler Knott Gregson

“‘You know, you’re a little complicated after all.”

“Oh no,” she assured him hastily. “No, I’m not really - I’m just a - I’m just a whole lot of different simple people.”

--F. Scott Fitzgerald, 'Tender Is the Night'

“That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it and think how different its course would have been. Pause, you who read this, and think for a long moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on that memorable day.”

--Charles Dickens, 'Great Expectations'

“You spend 99% of your life looking for the other 1%. But it’s worth it.”

--I Wrote This For You

“Be in love with your life. Every detail of it.”

--Jack Kerouac

“Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.”

--Jhumpa Lahiri

“Instead of looking at the past, I put myself ahead twenty years and try to look at what I need to do now in order to get there then.”

--Diana Ross

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”

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

“I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I’m gone which would not have happened if I had not come.”

--Salman Rushdie

So maybe I wanted to give you something more than a catalog

of non-definitive acts,

something other than the desperation.

Dear So-and-So, I'm sorry I couldn't come to your party.

Dear So-and-So, I'm sorry I came to your party

and seduced you

and left you bruised and ruined, you poor sad thing.

You want a better story. Who wouldn't?

--Richard Siken, Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out

“Where there is no struggle, there is no strength.”

--Oprah Winfrey

“Luxury has changed a lot. In the past it was eating in a three-star restaurant. Now it’s eating home-grown vegetables in a garden or somewhere on a mountain, or going to a small cottage where you find handmade cheese, and just having a taste of that in open air, that’s luxury now. In fashion it’s a bit the same. In the past, haute couture was luxury. And now finding a sweater in hand-spun cashmere somewhere in the hills of Nepal is far more exciting and luxurious.”

--Dries Van Noten

“My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while. I’m two, and both keep their distance — Siamese twins that aren’t attached.”

--Fernando Pessoa

“I don’t want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted just like that, and it didn’t mean anything? What then?”

--Neil Gaiman, 'Coraline'

all these words are just a matter of time

2011-06-25T22:47:00.002-05:00

This is our handmade hope. We brought it up from the dirt. Listen up tulip, this won’t be easy. Your hands will tremble when they’ve got nothing to hold. And all the things you love will find better ways to out run you. Do you want comfort or remorse? I can hear your ribs calling out, I can hear your voice getting caught between the bones - Our lips so close saying “I’m ready” - are you sure? You’ll never feel this young again, buttercup. No more coca cola, heat wave, bottle rocket, making out in the backseat of someone else’s truck past your curfew, no more loud and wild secrets to uproot you right where you’re standing. Can you see the storm brewing down the road?

This is what happens when the world doesn’t feel like flowers anymore.

Been building our moments into chandeliers out of shadows and glass beer bottles. Trying to bend the sound they make when they clang against one another. Trying to make it something like summers when we were younger and you could wake up without that ever dancing wonder of where you’ll be by tomorrow. That god awful gorgeous gleam of naivety. That milk pale place between one sound and another. You idiots, don’t you know we can’t just forget about these things one day? They think we’re scared when really we’re just experts at putting our hearts into things without people noticing. Home-grown experiences and chasing after the crooked parts of ourselves we see in strangers. We are broken and strange and wonderful. We are selfish and lonely. We are brave, we are sad, we are home-bound, closing our fists tight around one another and the words. God, the words never were enough, were they? Just keep saying my name, just keep telling yourself we’ll goddamn burn before we fade away. We will keep trying to dig ourselves into something that the memories and the feelings can’t drag us out of. The pine trees kissing the sky, the porch swing, the flowers, all our fears braided around them. Keep telling them “if you cross me, I’ll get you” keep saying “be kind, be strong, be true”

but that quiet corner of you always thinking about our collar bones missing loudly the way it used to feel when stars could fall into them if they wanted. I’m ready if you are.

--likelava

Just say it out loud.

2011-05-31T20:38:00.003-05:00

“Suddenly I realize

That if I stepped out of my body I would break

Into blossom.”

--James Wright, 'A Blessing'

“The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.”

--Terence McKenna

“Nothing will work unless you do.”

--Maya Angelou

“Life is never just one note. This is no different. …NO ONE - not one single person - on this earth is all alone with any feeling they have. Everyone has felt something similar at some time - and maybe they’re as scared of it as you are. Just say it! Just say it out loud.”

--o, world

“Admit what you’ve lost and live with the cost; at times it does hurt to be healed.”

--Brian Yorkey, 'Next to Normal'

“Everything has its own place and function. That applies to people, although many don’t seem to realize it, stuck as they are in the wrong job, the wrong marriage, or the wrong house. When you know and respect your Inner Nature, you know where you belong. You also know where you don’t belong.”

--The Tao of Pooh

“I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched.”

--Edgar Allan Poe

“A mind that is stretched to a new idea never returns to its original dimension”

--Oliver Wendell Holmes

“You’ve got to know the rules to break them. That’s what I’m here for, to demolish the rules but to keep the tradition.”

--Alexander McQueen

"Failing at something you love to do feels much better than succeeding at something you care nothing about."

--Dallas Clayton

“We need to remember what’s important in life: friends, waffles, and work. Or waffles, friends, work … doesn’t matter. But work is third.”

--Leslie Knope, 'Parks & Recreation'

“I meet you. I remember you. Who are you? You’re destroying me. You’re good for me. How could I know this city was tailor made for love? How could I know you fit me like a glove? I like you. How unlikely. How low all of a sudden. How sweet. You cannot know.”

--Hiroshima Mon Amour, Alain Resnais, 1959

“It’s your choice to decide what looks good on you. What world you fit in. What do you feel about that. And don’t be afraid of having to be one look. Be anything you want to be. And be many things.”

--Ralph Lauren

"I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought, there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it's true I'm here, and I'm just as strange as you."

--Frida Kahlo

“Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.”

--Charles Baudelaire

“At times it feels like music is an excuse to be a human. It feels like people need that excuse to go and put their arms in the air and sing their hearts out.”

--Marcus Mumford

“The more I think it over, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.”

--Vincent Van Gogh

“I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.”

--Vladimir Nabokov

“I can never say what I want to say. It’s been like this for a while now. I try to say something, but all I get are the wrong words-the wrong words or the exact opposite words from what I mean. I try to correct myself, and that only makes it worse. I lose track of what I was trying to say to begin with. It’s like I’m split in two and playing tag with myself. One half is chasing the other half around the big, fat post. The other me has the right words, but this me can’t catch her.”

--Haruki Murakami, 'Norwegian Wood'

“I have faith in the fact that, as I change, so will the things that I’m interested in, as long as I keep up my own change.”

--Michelle Williams in Interview Magazine

“I had always been kind of obsessed with making a home of my own and was always drawing rooms that I wanted to live in, down to pictures on the wall and the faces that would be in the photographs, and how the couches would be situated.”

--Michelle Williams in Interview Magazine

“…I would roll down the window and hang my head out like a dog, and let the 60-mile-an-hour wind slap me. It was the only way i could get the day off me.”

--Michelle Williams in Interview Magazine

“I still have a hard time giving up on the day and admitting exhaustion.”

--Michelle Williams in Interview Magazine

2011-05-12T11:21:00.000-05:00

... I’m thinking about last summer. About the road trip and the strangers and the mix cds and the state lines and how the stars looked different than the ones back home. From new Orleans to the north west coast. Nineteen had rough edges. It was bitter sweet, hard like sideways rain. But it had a handful of moments that shell shocked me. Knocked me out cold, completely ephermal. I spent more time chasing the moments than I did living them. Hindsight’s a tease. It’s just stepping back for a second to see all the things you could have spent loving deliberately, carefully. But instead you blinked in the face of them and now it’s too late. All that’s left is an outline, traces of feelings that are lost on you. 20 isn’t much different from 19. Everything just gets weird after awhile. You spend so much time thinking life is this elusive thing you just can’t ever catch. And then all of a sudden it smacks into you and and you’re desperately trying to convey to people who don’t understand that this isn’t careless, it’s delicate. It’s a little crooked and sort of fucking hopeless, but it’s yours and you’ve been building it with your hands hoping one day it would look like something you’re proud of. And maybe it’s useless and maybe it goes without saying, but God damn, I really hope it does one day. I hope so for everyone. ...
--likelava

2011-05-09T12:40:00.001-05:00

“Existence is not a problem to be solved, it is a mystery to be lived. And you should be perfectly aware what the difference is between a mystery and a problem. A problem is something created by the mind; a mystery is something which is there, not created by the mind. A problem has an ugliness in it, like disease. A mystery is beautiful. With a problem, immediately a fight arises. You have to solve it; something is wrong, you have to put it right; something is missing, you have to supply the missing link. With a mystery there is no question like that. The moon arises in the night…. It is not a problem, it is a mystery. You have to live with it. You have to dance with it. You have to sing with it, or you can be just silent with it. Something mysterious surrounds you.”
--Osho

You’re already home where you feel love

2011-05-09T12:33:00.003-05:00

“Mama once told me you, you’re already home where you feel love”

--The Head and the Heart, Lost In My Mind

“I began to draw an invisible boundary between myself and other people. No matter who I was dealing with. I maintained a set distance, carefully monitoring the person’s attitude so that they wouldn’t get any closer. I didn’t easily swallow what other people told me. My only passions were books and music.”

--Haruki Murakami, 'Sputnik Sweetheart'

“Socializing is as exhausting as giving blood. People assume we loners are misanthropes, just sitting thinking, ‘Oh, people are such a bunch of assholes,’ but it’s really not like that. We just have a smaller tolerance for what it takes to be with others. It means having to perform. I get so tired of communicating.”

--Anneli Rufus

“I think if you are really into words and poetry and situations of life, there is always a little kiss of sadness on everything you do… It’s just the kind of person who I am. I always look carefully beneath the outward appearance of things. I want to know what’s really going on in somebody’s heart.”

--Stevie Nicks

“‎Fashion is the armour to survive the reality of everyday life.”

--Bill Cunningham

“The quickest way to know a woman is to go shopping with her.”

--Marcelene Cox

“By 19, I had found my look. Oversize t-shirts, bike shorts, and wrestling shoes. To prevent the silhouette from being too baggy, I would cinch it at the waist with my fanny pack. I was pretty sure I would wear this look forever. The shirts allowed me express myself with cool sayings like ‘there’s no crying in baseball’ and ‘universität heidelberg,’ the bike shorts showed off my muscular legs, and the fanny pack held all my trolley tokens. I was nailing it on a daily basis. Find something like this for yourself as soon as possible.”

--Tina Fey, 'Bossypants'

“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”

--Albert Camus

“Someday, somewhere - anywhere, unfailingly, you’ll find yourself, and that, and only that, can be the happiest or bitterest hour of your life.”

--Pablo Neruda

“Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it’s much the same”

--Margaret Atwood, 'The Blind Assassin'

“There’s only one me

I have ever liked being;

the me that you see.”

--Tyler Knott Gregson

“How privileged you are, to be passionately

Clinging to what you love;

The forfeit of hope has not destroyed you.”

--Louise Gluck, 'October'

“I felt all inner development was ceasing, that all becoming and growing were being choked, because a single idea was filling my entire soul.”

--Ellen West

“I feel like we’re all wounded and we can carry wounds throughout our lives. It can be small incidents that happen, or the soul you’re born into. I’ve always thought I carried this heartbreak since the day I was born.”

--Lykke Li

“I am a dreamer. I know so little of real life that I just can’t help re-living such moments as these in my dreams, for such moments are something I have very rarely experienced. I am going to dream about you the whole night, the whole week, the whole year.”

--Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.”

--Rainer Maria Rilke

“I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.”

--James Baldwin

“Let nature do the freezing and frightening and isolating in this world. Let men work and love and fight it off.”

--Jack Kerouac

“I’m not a girl, nor will I ever be. But if I were a girl, I’d like to be Sofia. She’s very feminine. And she’s very quiet. But then, her movie’s done. She loves fashion and music and art and film, and she is able to combine them in a way that all seems to be quite natural. There’s nothing forced about it; she doesn’t have that gritty hunger to prove what she knows. There are certain people who have confidence and absolutely adore themselves and, five minutes around them, I just want to not be around them anymore. Sofia is confident in such a lovely way. It’s not aggressive or arrogant, and that’s a gift. I’m sure she works quite hard, but it all seems effortless.”

--Marc Jacobs on Sofia Coppola

moonlight in an orange grove and vanilla ice cream cones

2011-05-02T17:26:00.001-05:00

Everything feels like it’s overflowing. Like I’m chasing after the things that fill up each day and I can’t keep up with it all. Do you know this thing I’m talking about? I have these almost black outs, selective memory and freak moments where I don’t know how I got there. First I’m bike riding on the lake front thinking about that boy I wrote for and how he had night terrors, I see him walking down these grand empty rooms with old sheets covering the furniture. I’m hearing the bells of other bike riders, smiling at a tiny little black girl picking flowers on the side of the road and then the next thing I know I have a brown bag full of groceries wandering some aisle in whole foods, and then I’m throwing up in the lot next to Acadia, asking the french man how much he’s selling his post cards for, singing at the top of my lungs with you when the windows are rolled down on high way forty three, crying in my parent’s bathroom when no one is home and I don’t even know why I drove there in the first place. I keep finding myself in random moments and losing myself in the mess of living uncontrollably, helplessly, smiling even when I feel out of place, listening to people talk because I have nothing to say and I don’t believe in small talk. Handing out cigarettes to the homeless musicians on Decatur, waiting for you on the stairs like a goddamn child, wondering what kind of things you write about without me, if you still believe in the same things or if maybe they out grew you and the sad days you spend trying to out grow them. How me and Billy were holding those sticks out in front of us when we were exploring the abandoned homes on parker chapel road and it was the first time in months that I felt so good. Effortlessly happy. The smell of that newspaper from 1928 and when we snuck into that thin dark hallway to read all the restricted material in the library. And then I’m smoking a cigarette on someone else’s steps, I’m sitting in Warren’s passenger seat with my feet on the dashboard and a good song on the radio. Now you’re holding my hand and telling me how small I am. Like I don’t already know. Like I don’t feel it all the time. Like it’s not pressing up against me, mocking me, pointing out stars bigger than I am. But that’s okay. I take what I can get. And my ribcage rattles when the feelings grow louder. You can hear it like old cities breathing curse words and dog woods. If you listen carefully you can hear the ghosts of everything I’ve ever been. Are you listening?
--likelava

Laziness will not do.

2011-04-26T11:08:00.003-05:00

“Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.”

--Mark Twain

“I think there are people who want to be looked at. As a writer or observer, I’m more interested in looking.”

--Sofia Coppola

"Life is a whim of several billion cells to be you for a while."

--Groucho Marx

“Praise and blame, gain and loss, pleasure and sorrow come and go like the wind. To be happy, rest like a giant tree, in the midst of them all.”

--Buddha

“When so many are lonely, as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.”

--Tennessee Williams

"I want to get more familiar with you. I love you. I loved you when you came and sat on the bed--all that second afternoon was like warm mist--and I hear again the way you say my name--with that queer accent of yours. You arouse in me such a mixture of feelings, I don't know how to approach you. Only come to me--get closer and closer to me. It will be beautiful, I promise you."

--Henry Miller

"Where it all ends I can't fathom, my friends.

If I knew, I might toss out my anchor."

--Jimmy Buffett

“To love what you do and feel that it matters—how could anything be more fun?”

--Katharine Graham

“It ain’t dying I’m talking about, it’s living. I doubt it matters where you die, but it matters where you live.”

--Larry McMurtry, 'Lonesome Dove'

“So avoid using the word ‘very’ because it’s lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don’t use very sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason, boys - to woo women - and, in that endeavor, laziness will not do.”

--'Dead Poets Society'

“Start copying what you love. Copying, copying, copying. And at the end of the copy, you will find yourself.”

--Yohji Yamamoto

"…I love your feet only because they walked upon the earth and upon the wind and upon the waters, until they found me…"

--Pablo Neruda

“Be hole, be dust, be dream, be wind

Be night, be dark, be wish, be mind,

Now slip, now slide, now move unseen,

Above, beneath, betwixt, between.”

--Neil Gaiman

“I get my ideas out of my dreams…if you’re lucky enough to use something you see in a dream, it is purely original. It’s not in the world — it’s in your head. I think that is amazing.”

--Alexander McQueen

You feel like running, but life is on a stroll.

2011-04-22T18:33:00.005-05:00

All quotes by author Donald Miller

"I think this is when most people give up on their stories. They come out of college wanting to change the world, wanting to get married, wanting to have kids and change the way people buy office supplies. But they get into the middle and discover it was harder than they thought. They can't see the distant shore anymore, and they wonder if their paddling is moving them forward. None of the trees behind them are getting smaller and none of the trees ahead are getting bigger. They take it out on their spouses, and they go looking for an easier story."

"I can't do it. It would be like, say, trying to fall in love with somebody, or trying to convince yourself that your favorite food is pancakes. You don't decide those things, they just happen to you. If God is real, He needs to happen to me."

"I can no more understand the totality of God than the pancake I made for breakfast understands the complexity of me."

"Even our beliefs have become trend statements. We don’t even believe things because we believe them anymore. We only believe things because they are cool things to believe."

"My most recent faith struggle is not one of intellect. I don’t really do that anymore. Sooner or later you just figure out there are some guys who don’t believe in God and they can prove He doesn't exist, and there are some other guys who do believe in God and they can prove He does exist, and the argument stopped being about God a long time ago and now it’s about who is smarter, and honestly I don’t care."

"There is something beautiful about a billion stars held steady by a God who knows what He is doing. (They hang there, the stars, like notes on a page of music, free-form verse, silent mysteries swirling in the blue like jazz.) And as I lay there, it occurred to me that God is up there somewhere. Of course, I had always known He was, but this time I felt it, I realized it, the way a person realizes they are hungry or thirsty. The knowledge of God seeped out of my brain and into my heart. I imagined Him looking down on this earth, half angry because His beloved mankind had cheated on Him, had committed adultery, and yet hopelessly in love with her, drunk with love for her."

"It is always the simple things that change our lives. And these things never happen when you are looking for them to happen. Life will reveal answers at the pace life wishes to do so. You feel like running, but life is on a stroll."

"Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself."

"No, life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath…"

"I always thought the Bible was more of a salad thing, you know, but it isn't. It's a chocolate thing."

"I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made to figure things out, not to read the same page recurrently."

"I fell in love with books. Some people find beauty in music, some in painting, some in landscape, but I find it in words. By beauty, I mean the feeling you have suddenly glimpsed another world, or looked into a portal that reveals a kind of magic or romance out of which the world has been constructed, a feeling there is something more than the mundane, and a reason for our plodding."

"When you live on your own for a long time, however, your personality changes because you go so much into yourself you lose the ability to be social, to understand what is and isn't normal behavior. There is an entire world inside yourself, and if you let yourself, you can get so deep inside it you will forget the way to the surface. Other people keep our souls alive, just like food and water does with our body."

"I am something of a recluse by nature. I am that cordless screwdriver that has to charge for twenty hours to earn ten minutes use. I need that much downtime."

"The most difficult lie I have ever contended with is this: life is a story about me."

"Everybody wants to be fancy and new. Nobody wants to be themselves. I mean, maybe people want to be themselves, but they want to be different, with different clothes or shorter hair or less fat. It's a fact. If there was a guy who just liked being himself and didn't want to be anybody else, that guy would be the most different guy in the world and everybody would want to be him."

"I don't wonder anymore what I'll tell God when I go to heaven when we sit in the chairs under the tree, outside the city... I'll tell these things to God, and he'll laugh, I think and he'll remind me of the parts I forgot, the parts that were his favorite. We'll sit and remember my story together, and then he'll stand and put his arms around me and say, "well done," and that he liked my story. And my soul won't be thirsty anymore. Finally he'll turn and we'll walk toward the city, a city he will have spoken into existence a city built in a place where once there'd been nothing. "

“And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving and some coming home, some summer and some winter, some roses blooming out like children in a play. My hope is your story will be about changing, about getting something beautiful born inside of you about learning to love a woman or a man, about learning to love a child, about moving yourself around water, around mountains, around friends, about learning to love others more than we love ourselves…We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn’t it? I want to repeat one word for you: Leave. Roll the word around on your tongue for a bit. It is a beautiful word, isn’t it? So strong and forceful, the way you have always wanted to be. And you will not be alone. You have never been alone. Don’t worry. Everything will still be here when you get back. It is you who will have changed.”

I got a sweet little angel

2011-04-14T12:12:00.001-05:00

"You spend too much time reading, Spenser. You know more stuff that don't make you money than anybody I know."

--Robert B. Parker, 'Mortal Stakes'

“It takes a lot of forms … The world is being constantly circled as though by gulfstream forces, ideas, and creativity that want to be made manifest, and they’re looking for portals to come through in people, and if you don’t do it, they’ll go find someone else. So you have to convince it that you’re serious and you have to show it respect and you have to talk to it and let it know that you’re there.”

--Liz Gilbert, on creativity/genius/muses

“Happiness is not a big house… It’s being in each other’s way. That’s what brings memories.”

--Karina Gentinetta

“I know that I’m good inside. And if people don’t, I shouldn’t mind.”

--Laura Marling, Mama, How Far I’ve Come

"Leave early enough to be missed but stay long enough to be remembered."

--Lisa Taddeo

The days that make us happy make us wise.

“Enough of laziness and doing nothing! Open this notebook every day and write down half a page at the very least. If you have nothing to write down, then at least, following Gogol’s advice, write down that today there’s nothing to write. Always write with attention and look on writing as a holiday.”

--Daniil Kharms, Today I Wrote Nothing: Selected Writings

"Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul."

--Simone Weil

"To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul."

--Simone Weil

"Be content with what you have, rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you."

--Tzu

I got a sweet little angel,

I love the way she spreads her wings.

--B.B. King, Sweet Little Angel

“I love you, even if there isn’t any me, or any love, or even any life. I love you.”

--Zelda Fitzgerald

RAIN

2011-04-14T12:04:00.001-05:00

Suddenly this defeat.
This rain.
The blues gone grey
and browns gone grey
and yellow
a terrible amber.
In the cold streets
your warm body.
In whatever room
your warm body.
Among all the people
your absence.
The people who are always
not you.

I have been easy with trees
too long.
Too familiar with mountains.
Joy has been a habit.
Now
suddenly
this rain.
--via

My favorite thing is saying something true

2011-04-12T16:15:00.002-05:00

All quotes from StoryPeople

One of those rare bumblebees who agreed with the engineers about not being able to fly so he mainly sits around & watches the other bees work themselves to death.

If there is any secret to this life I live, this is it: the sound of what cannot be seen sings within everything that can. & there is nothing more to it than that.

I sometimes wake in the early morning & listen to the soft breathing of my children & I think to myself, this is one thing I will never regret & I carry that quiet with me all day long.

Only her skin between her life & a return to the great wide ocean

The birds brought seed & flowers & bits of brightly colored string & placed them in her hair while she slept so that she would remember the wild joy of spring when she finally awoke.

No hurt survives for long without our help, she said & then she kissed me & sent me out to play again for the rest of my life.

Of course I want to save the world, she said, but I was hoping to do it from the comfort of my regular life.

I'm not worried about ghosts in general, she said. Just the ones that are related to me.

I've always thought death was a lot like Christmas, he said. I can't wait to find out if being good the whole time was worth it.

Contains all the stuff I've decided to keep from the public for my own good

My favorite thing is saying something true, she said, but I'm a lot older than you & don't have to worry so much about my reputation.

I think of it as an opportunity to find out how much money means to me, she said. So far, it means a lot more than I think is probably healthy.

I don't know if I really believe in all the saints, she said, but I pray to them anyway. It makes every night feel more like a slumber party.

he looks fierce mainly because he hates the beginning of winter & the only thing that seems to help is gritting your teeth

I have a really great power suit she said, but I never wear it because no one talks to me on those days.

You have to not care either way about it, she told me, & when you wake up in the middle of the night with anxiety attacks, it's best to lie & say it's because you thought you heard something downstairs

Leaving a trail of destruction behind her even though her current affirmation is happy happy joy joy.

map of some places not discovered quite yet because when people get too close it stands up & trots away

I'll bet even an angel's butt itches if he has to do too much sitting on hard places.

It's hard to say the right words without practice, I said & she whispered in my ear, Say them as many times as you like & we practiced late into the night.

Someday, the light will shine like a sun through my skin & they will say, What have you done with your life? & though there are many moments I think I will remember, in the end, I will be proud to say, I was one of us.

this is a yo-yo that teaches everything there is to know about life, but it spins so fast it's all a blur & it takes a long time to figure out that that's exactly what it's trying to teach you

If you had to balance as much stuff as I do, she said, you'd take an hour in the bathroom every morning too.

I don't care if no one likes it, she said, unless no one likes it.

Every weekend, she went to the city & looked through the bones of the dead for old clothes & bits of fashion jewelry. She always seemed a bit tattered, but I didn't say much about it. I was still young & hadn't settled on a past I was comfortable with yet either.

places where the light & rain get in with no regard for your virtues or reputation

In the end, I think that I will like that we were sitting on the bed, talking & wondering where the time had gone.

she's prepared for almost any transportation mishap, as long as none of them require her to just sit still & think

My favorite thing

is being your lap

while we sit there

together & love

the whole world.

I'm just going to hide here in this paper bag until death comes, she said. It could be a long time, I said. There was a pause & then her head popped out. You think I should have a hobby while I wait? she said.

I know I promised I wouldn't complain, she said, but I'm not ready to start just yet.

The smallest things take up the most room in your heart.

2011-04-11T21:29:00.006-05:00

"Doubt everything. Find your own light."

--Siddhārtha Gautama

"One never learns how the witch became wicked."

--Gregory Maguire

"There's a million guys out there at a million bars having a million drinks about you tonight."

--Steven Tyler

You can have it if you want but someday I’ll make a better one.

--Lykke Li, I Know Places

“Shower, keep clean, enjoy colors and animals. People, if possible.”

--Sylvia Plath

“I automatically assume people won’t like me, so I don’t talk to them unless they approach me first. I can’t become a part of a crowd because I can’t get past that feeling that I don’t belong.”

--Stephanie Kuehnert

“I’ve been savin’ this money for a dee-vorce if ever I get a husband!”

--Annie, 'It’s a Wonderful Life'

“Dear God,” she prayed, “let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. Let me be gay; let me be sad. Let me be cold; let me be warm. Let me be hungry… have too much too eat. Let me be ragged or well dressed. Let me be sincere — be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar. Let me be honorable and let me sin. Only let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost.”

--'A Tree Grows In Brooklyn'

“You are a good person, though. I can tell that much from looking at you. I can tell these things after seven years of watching people come up and go here: there are people who can open their hearts and people who can’t. You’re one of the ones who can. Or, more precisely, you can if you want to.” “What happens when people open their hearts?” Cigarette dangling from her lips, Reiko clasped her hands together on the table. She was enjoying this, “They get better,” she said.”

--Haruki Murakami, 'Norwegian Wood'

“Anyway, I want a cat,” she said, “I want a cat. I want a cat now. If I can’t have long hair or any fun, I can have a cat.”

--Hemingway

“Why didn’t I learn to treat everything like it was the last time? My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future.”

--Jonathan Safran Foer, 'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close'

“One of my big concerns these past few years is that I’ve been losing the ability to feel things with the same intensity - the way I felt when I was younger. It’s scary - to feel your emotions floating away and just not caring.”

--Douglas Coupland

“'Sometimes,’ said Pooh, ‘the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.'”

--A.A. Milne

“We are the water

sitting so still and waiting

to be splashed into.”

--Tyler Knott Gregson

“I don’t change my handbag every season. I believe in the Yves Saint Laurent woman who either has her hands in the pockets of her pantsuit or is holding her lover’s hand. She doesn’t need a bag.”

--Carine Roitfeld

“Sweatpants are a sign of defeat. You lost control of your life so you bought some sweatpants.”

--Karl Lagerfeld

“I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.”

--Franz Kafka

“Certainly we talk to ourselves; there is no thinking being who has not experienced that. One could even say that the word is never a more magnificent mystery than when, within a man, it travels from his thought to his conscience and returns from his conscience to his thought. This is the only sense of the words, so often used in this chapter, “he said,” “he exclaimed”; we say to ourselves, we speak to ourselves, we exclaim within ourselves, without breaking the external silence. There is great tumult within; everything within us speaks, except the tongue. The realities of the soul, though not visible and palpable, are nonetheless realities.”

--Victor Hugo, 'Les Misérables'

“I am eternally, devastatingly romantic, and I thought people would see it because “romantic” doesn’t mean “sugary”. It’s dark and tormented — the furor of passion, the despair of an idealism that you can’t attain.”

--Catherine Breillat

“I wonder if four-leaf clovers have any insecurities about their deformity that could be healed with the knowledge that people value them.”

--Haley G Hoover

“Normally I didn’t see a great deal. I didn’t hear a great deal either. I didn’t pay attention. Strictly speaking I wasn’t there. Strictly speaking I believe I’ve never been anywhere.”

--Samuel Beckett

“As I grow to understand life less and less, I learn to love it more and more.”

--Jules Renard

“Nothing I like to do pays well.”

--Charles Portis, 'True Grit'

“It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.”

--Agnes Repplier

“Loneliness is something I’ve never been bothered with because I’ve always had this terrible itch for solitude.”

--Charles Bukowski

“The power of finding beauty in the humblest things makes home happy and life lovely.”

--Louisa May Alcott

“She was like the moon—part of her was always hidden away.”

--Dia Reeves

“Nothing makes a woman more beautiful than the belief that she is beautiful.”

--Sophia Loren

“I wonder what it is in women,” she said. “Whenever they find a big strong guy with a wide adolescent streak running through him, they get a powerful urge to hold his head in their laps.”

--Robert Parker

holding my breath with the wonder of it all.

2011-04-02T19:56:00.004-05:00

All quotes from StoryPeople

Why is the world so confusing? he said & I said it's only confusing if you believe it has to make sense & he looked at me & shook his head. I can't believe they let just anyone have children, he said.

Sitting there in your pajamas & all the time in the world & if I could keep any moment it would be this: watching you & holding my breath with the wonder of it all.

1: trying on new looks because the old ones take too long in the morning & everyone just thinks "O, she's wearing that old thing again" anyway 2: really small mirror so she doesn't have to take the shock all at once

Loving the sound of her own voice as long as she doesn't have to nag

She learned to love him before he thought it was even possible, so he didn't have a chance to hide & mess it up & while it was a little scary at times, mainly he could not even imagine the world without her there.

when he was three, he used to make cooking noises with his mouth & we would wake to the sound of bacon frying & eggs being stirred with a fork so we had some idea that food was in his future

melting in the slow heat of a summer night, damp with the dark air & thoughts of you

I'm sick & tired of all these judgmental people, she said, & I hope they burn in hell for it.

Are you a princess? I said & she said I'm much more than a princess, but you don't have a name for it yet here on earth.

Whenever I go on a trip, I think about all the homes I've had & I remember how little has changed about what comforts me.

finally stretching out into his life because it doesn't look like there are any real alternatives

Tied together by stuff too difficult to explain to someone new

There are things you do because they feel right & they may make no sense & they may make no money & it may be the real reason we are here: to love each other & to eat each other's cooking & say it was good.

I held out my hands & asked where I could help & somebody grabbed me & pointed me towards the future & said, You've got your work cut out for you & I said, isn't there anything easier? & he laughed & said you could dig around in the past, but it's just busywork & that made perfect sense so I shrugged & started right where I was, along with everyone else

cave filled with stuff that people will kill for, which only goes to show you how confused people are about important things

I've learned not to look too closely, she said. Otherwise I'd just keep finding out stuff that'd bug me & we'd never get along.

Does everyone seem taller than usual? she said & I said that's what usually happens when you stop pretending you don't care

We stood out on the porch before we went inside & she told me her secret. Pretend you're just visiting, she said. That way you'll forget that they're family.

I think my life would be easier, she said, if I could just get my selves to agree on something.

sending postcards to himself saying 'Wish you were here' so when he gets back home he doesn't forget

Death take me now & spare me the pain, she said. It was difficult for me to get that excited. Get a grip, I said, it's only aerobics.

They drove south one winter until they could stand outside with no coats on & we never saw them again.

My grandmother told me once that a city has enough windows for everybody. I still want to believe her.

What's that supposed to be? I said. That's a Christmas dragon, he said. If Santa rode around with this instead of all those reindeer I think it'd put real teeth in the naughty-or-nice thing.

You seem very calm for a woman who's getting married, I said & she nodded. It's on my to-do list, she said, so there's no point in agonizing about it

When do you get to be a grown-up? she said. When you can read & write & lie without laughing, I said & her eyes got big & she said she didn't know it was that hard

this is a world filled with love & other things that have the sense not to waste time talking about everything under the sun & see how it glows with no help from us whatsoever

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

2011-04-02T18:36:00.001-05:00

All quotes by Rumi

"My wish for you is that you fall into love like a burning coal that falls into water and keeps burning."

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

"When I am with you, we stay up all night.

When you're not here, I can't go to sleep.

Praise God for those two insomnias!

And the difference between them."

"Dance, when you're broken open. Dance, if you've torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you're perfectly free."

"Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form."

"Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground."

"In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art."

"My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that, and I intend to end up there."

"This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment. First to let go of life. Finally, to take a step without feet."

"A thousand half-loves must be forsaken to take one whole heart home."

"Let yourself be drawn by the stronger pull of what you truly love."

"Give up to grace. The ocean takes care of each wave 'til it gets to shore. You need more help than you know."

Leave the house before you find something worth staying in for.

2011-04-02T17:28:00.006-05:00

I thank you God

for most this amazing day;

for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of sky;

and for everything which is natural, which is

infinite, which is yes.

--E.E. Cummings

In each of us lie good and bad, light and dark, art and pain,

choice and regret, cruelty and sacrifice.

We’re each of us our own chiaroscuro, our own bit of illusion

fighting to emerge into something solid, something real.

We’ve got to forgive ourselves that.

I must remember to forgive myself.

Because there is a lot of grey to work with.

No one can live in the light all the time.

--Libba Bray, Gemma Doyle Trilogy

"It's more interesting to have just a picture of a small detail - then you can dream all the rest around it. Because when you see the whole thing, what is there to imagine?"

--Dries Van Noten

"Plant lots of flowers, so when you take the time to smell them, they'll be there."

--Bette Midler

There is shadow under this red rock,

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you.

--TS Eliot, The Waste Land

Everybody is somebody else's weirdo.

"Happiness? The color of it must be spring green…."

--Frances Mayes, American memoirist

"No Winter lasts forever; no Spring skips its turn."

--Hal Borland

"Nothing in the world is more common than unsuccessful people with talent, leave the house before you find something worth staying in for. "

--Banksy

“I mean, they say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time.”

--Banksy

“Because we grew up surrounded by big dramatic story arcs in books and movies, we think our lives are supposed to be filled with huge ups and downs! So people pretend there is drama where there is none.”

--Kurt Vonnegut

“Isn’t it strange that we talk least about the things we think about most.”

--Charles Lindbergh

“A career is born in public, talent in privacy.”

--Marilyn Monroe

“I don’t know what’s worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what you’ve always wanted to be, and feel alone.”

--Daniel Keyes, 'Flowers for Algernon'

“For everyone, there are those moments when you have great days with someone you wouldn’t expect to. Then you have to go back to your real lives, but it makes an impression on you.”

--Sofia Coppola

“The biggest scars are unseen and unremembered, always from a smile you forgot long ago. We would never get anything done otherwise.”

--Iain Thomas

“Here I am, a bundle of past recollections and future dreams, knotted up in a reasonably attractive bundle of flesh. I remember what this flesh had gone through; I dream of what it may go through. I record here the actions of optical nerves, of taste buds, of sensory perception. And, I think: I am but one more drop in the great sea of matter, defined, with the ability to realize my existence.”

--Sylvia Plath

“A year from now you will wish you had started today.”

--Karen Lamb

Because of you

I can feel

myself

slowly but

surely

becoming

the me

I have always

dreamed

being.

--Tyler Knott Gregson, 'Becoming'

“Well, after I’ve been to university, I’m going to be French, and I’m going to Paris, and I’m going to smoke and wear black, and listen to Jacques Brel, and I won’t speak. Ever.”

--'An Education'

“When you like your work, everyday is a holiday.”

--Frank Tyger

“People often ask me questions that I cannot very well answer in words, and it makes me sad to think they are unable to hear the voice of my silence.”

--Inayat Khan

“The music was too loud for us to talk. Once we got out of Jefferson Park, we rolled down the one window that worked so the world would know we had good taste in music.”

--Quentin Jacobsen, 'Paper Towns'

"I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world."

--Mary Anne Radmacher

“I think she was afraid to love sometimes. I think it scared her. She was the type to like things that were concrete, like the ocean. Something you could point to and know what it is. I think that’s why she always struggled with God. And I think that’s why she also struggled with love. She couldn’t touch it. She couldn’t hold on to it and make sure it never changed. But sometimes it’s those things you can’t touch that you need to hold on to the most.”

--Carrie Ryan

“I don’t want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic. I try to give that to people. I do misrepresent things. I don’t tell truths. I tell what ought to be truth.”

--Blanche DuBois, 'A Streetcar Named Desire'

“I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.”

--Vladimir Nabokov, 'Lolita'

“I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.”

--Eleanor Roosevelt

“Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we’re still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants. We put on display our framed photographs, our parchment diplomas, our silver-plated cups; we monogram our linen, we carve our names on trees, we scrawl them on washroom walls. It’s all the same impulse. What do we get from it? Applause, envy, respect? Or simply attention, of any kind we can get?

At the very least we want a witness. We can’t stand the idea of our own voices falling silent finally, like a radio winding down.”

--Margaret Atwood

"To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable; and wealthy, not rich; to study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly… to listen to stars and buds, to babes and sages, with open heart; await occasions, hurry never… This is my symphony."

--William Henry Channing

Are you the love letter unwritten?

The song left abandoned in the neck of the guitar?

Are you the moments that pass between strangers

as neither says “hello” ?

--Dallas Clayton, 'Be More'

Live without pretending, love without depending, listen without defending, speak without offending.

“There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.”

--Edith Wharton

“If you reach for the stars, all you’ll get are the stars, but we’ve found a whole new spin: if you reach for the heavens, you get the stars thrown in.”

--Mary Poppins, the Musical

2011-03-27T22:31:00.001-05:00

What better way to surface strength than to find yourself in someone else, so we peel back layers of one another's skin to see what's beyond the smoother texture, so we pick through parts of each other's brains to learn where the storm is coming from. Because I learn how I seem through the reflection in your eyes, because you learn how you speak through echoes in my ears. I am a soft atmosphere with a red hot core and it may burn your fingertips or singe your tongue, but it isn't about the destination, and you are an endless list of legends and biographies with a sharp edge and I may cut my corners or bleed myself dry, but it isn't about the rivers and streams, but the ocean.

You see, I am pulling out your hair to find the skin underneath it and I am testing the waters to see what breaks you, and you are softening the conversation to see what sends me to sleep and you are brewing up questions to see what makes me boil over

and it's quest fiction, and this is the call to adventure and I am tired but I am willing, so I am plunging. Do not catch me, do not cradle me, for I desire to see how far I must fall.
--Alexis Mire

Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.

2011-03-27T22:25:00.005-05:00

All quotes by author Haruki Murakami

“‘You’re here,’ I continued. ‘At least you look as if you’re here. But maybe you aren’t. Maybe it’s just your shadow. The real you may be someplace else. Or maybe you already disappeared, a long, long time ago. I reach out my hand to see, but you’ve hidden yourself behind a cloud of probablys. Do you think we can go on like this forever?’”

--'South of the Border, West of the Sun'

"If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking."

--'Norwegian Wood'

"But who can say what's best? That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives."

--'Norwegian Wood'

"Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?"

--'Sputnik Sweetheart'

"I dream. Sometimes I think that's the only right thing to do."

--'Sputnik Sweetheart'

"Here's what I think, Mr. Wind-Up Bird," said May Kasahara. "Everybody's born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I'd really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person. But I can't seem to do it. They just don't get it. Of course, the problem could be that I'm not explaining it very well, but I think it's because they're not listening very well. They pretend to be listening, but they're not, really. So I get worked up sometimes, and I do some crazy things."

--'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle'

"I have this strange feeling that I'm not myself anymore. It's hard to put into words, but I guess it's like I was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. That sort of feeling."

--'Sputnik Sweetheart'

"Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That's part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads - at least that's where I imagine it - there's a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in awhile, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you'll live forever in your own private library."

--'Kafka on the Shore'

"Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting."

"For both of us, it had simply been too enormous an experience. We shared it by not talking about it. Does this make any sense?"

--'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle'

M: So I made up my mind I was going to find someone who would love me unconditionally three hundred and sixty-five days a year.

W: Wow, and did your search pay off?

M: That's the hard part. I guess I've been waiting so long I'm looking for perfection. That makes it tough.

--'Norwegian Wood'

"Nobody likes being alone that much. I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all. It just leads to disappointment. "

--'Norwegian Wood'

"These days I just can't seem to say what I mean. I just can't. Every time I try to say something, it misses the point. Either that or I end up saying the opposite of what I mean. The more I try to get it right the more mixed up it gets. Sometimes I can't even remember what I was trying to say in the first place. It's like my body's split in two and one of me is chasing the other me around a big pillar. We're running circles around it. The other me has the right words, but I can never catch her."

--'Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories'

"I want you always to remember me. Will you remember that I existed, and that I stood next to you here like this?"

--'Norwegian Wood'

I don't want to be fated, I want to choose.

2011-03-08T20:26:00.000-06:00

All quotes by author Jeanette Winterson -- part two

"Do you wake up as I do, having forgotten what it is that hurts or where, until you move? There is a second of consciousness that is clean again. A second that is you, without memory or experience, the animal warm and waking into a brand new world. There is the sun dissolving the dark, and light as clear as music, filling the room where you sleep and the other rooms behind your eyes."

"While I can’t have you, I long for you. I am the kind of person who would miss a train or a plane to meet you for coffee. I’d take a taxi across town to see you for ten minutes. I’d wait outside all night if I thought you would open the door in the morning. If you call me and say ‘Will you…’ my answer is ‘Yes’, before your sentence is out. I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close."

"On more than one occasion I have been ready to abandon my whole life for love. To alter everything that makes sense to me and to move into a different world where the only known will be the beloved. Such a sacrifice must be the result of love... or is it that the life itself was already worn out? I had finished with that life, perhaps, and could not admit it, being stubborn or afraid, or perhaps did not known it, habit being a great binder. I think it is often so that those most in need of change choose to fall in love and then throw up their hands and blame it all on fate. But it is not fate, at least, not if fate is something outside of us; it is a choice made in secret after nights of longing. ... I may be cynical when I say that very rarely is the beloved more than a shaping spirit for the lover's dreams... To be a muse may be enough. The pain is when the dreams change, as they do, as they must. Suddenly the enchanted city fades and you are left alone again in the windy desert. As for your beloved, she didn't understand you. The truth is, you never understood yourself."

--'Sexing the Cherry'

"Hopeless heart that thrives on paradox; that longs for the beloved and is secretly relieved when the beloved is not there."

--'The Passion'

"She must find a boat and sail in it. No guarantee of shore. Only a conviction that what she wanted could exist, if she dared to find it."

--'Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit'

"The truth is that I’ve spent all my life with my binoculars trained on the Maybe Islands, a pristine place of fantasy that is really no better than the razor-rocks of misery. Maybe if I had stayed on the farm… maybe if I hadn’t gone with Spike… maybe if I could have lived more peaceably… maybe if I’d met the right person years ago, maybe if I hadn’t done this, or that or, its cousin, the other. Maybe, baby, the promised land was there and I missed it. Look at it glittering in the light. But the truth is I am inventing the maybe. I can only make the choices I make, so why torture myself with what I might have done, when all I can handle is what I have done. The Maybe Islands are hostile to human life."

--'The Stone Gods'

"But not all dark places need light, I have to remember that."

--'Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit'

"The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home."

"There it is; the light across the water. Your story. Mine. His. It has to be seen to be believed. And it has to be heard. In the endless babble of narrative, in spite of the daily noise, the story waits to be heard. Some people say that the best stories have no words. They weren't brought up to Lighthousekeeping. It is true that words drop away, and that the important things are often left unsaid. The important things are learned in faces, in gestures, not in our locked tongues. The true things are too big or too small, or in any case is always the wrong size to fit in the template called language."

--'Lighthousekeeping'

"I can't catch her by copying her, I can't draw her with a borrowed stencil. She is all the things a lover should be and quite a few a lover should not. Pin her down? She's not a butterfly. I'm not a wrestler. She's not a target. I'm not a gun. Tell you what she is? She's not Lot no. 27 and I'm not one to brag."

--'The World and Other Places: Stories'

"Walk with me, hand in hand through the neon and styrofoam. Walk the razor blades and the broken hearts. Walk the fortune and the fortune hunted. Walk the chop suey bars and the tract of stars. I know I am a fool, hoping dirt and glory are both a kind of luminous paint; the humiliations and exaltations that light us up. I see like a bug, everything too large, the pressure of infinity hammering at my head. But how else to live, vertical that I am, pressed down and pressing up simultaneously? I cannot assume you will understand me. It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear. Some story we must have. Stray words on crumpled paper. A weak signal into the outer space of each other. The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love."

--'Gut Symmetries'

"I don't know why it is that one kind of dark can be so different from another. Real dark is thicker and quieter, it fills up the space between your jacket and your heart. It gets in your eyes. When I have to be out late at night, it's not knives and kicks I'm afraid of, though there are plenty of those behind walls and hedges. I'm afraid of the Dark. You, who walk so cheerfully, whistling your way, stand still for five minutes. Stand still in the Dark in a field or down a track. It's then you know you're there on sufferance. The Dark only lets you take one step at a time. Step and the Dark closes round your back. In front, there is no space for you until you take it. Darkness is absolute. Walking in the Dark is like swimming underwater except you can't come up for air."

"Destiny is a worrying concept. I don't want to be fated, I want to choose."

--'Written on the Body'

"In the heat of her hands I thought, This is the campfire that mocks the sun. This place will warm me, feed me and care for me. I will hold on to this pulse against other rhythms. The world will come and go in the tide of a day but here is her hand with my future in its palm."

--'Written on the Body'

"Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough."

Do it from the heart or not at all.

2011-03-07T19:48:00.004-06:00

All quotes by author Jeanette Winterson -- part one

"What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home. I want to be held. I don't want you to come too close. I want you to scoop me up and bring me home at nights. I don't want to tell you where I am. I want to keep a place among the rocks where no one can find me. I want to be with you."

"There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other's names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name."

--'Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit'

"The Buddhists say there are 149 ways to God. I'm not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has had a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me. God is bigger, like my mother, easier to find, even in the dark. I could be anywhere, and since I can't describe myself I can't ask for help."

--'Sexing the Cherry'

"I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line."

--'Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit'

"Happy Valentines Day to those who have found love, in whatever shape or form, and to those who are still hunting, don’t give up. If you feel bad, send yourself a card. You must be worth it..."

"They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?"

"The body shuts down when it has too much to bear; goes its own way quietly inside, waiting for a better time, leaving you numb and half alive."

--'The Passion'

"It's hard to remember that this day will never come again. That the time is now and the place is here and that there are no second chances at a single moment."

"Love, they say, enslaves and passion is a demon and many have been lost for love. I know this is true, but I know too that without love we grope the tunnels of our lives and never see the sun. When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself. I lifted my hand in bewilderment and felt my cheeks, my neck. This was me. And when I had looked at myself and grown accustomed to who I was, I was not afraid to hate parts of me because I wanted to be worthy of the mirror bearer."

"Perhaps all romance is like that; not a contract between equal parties but an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life. Only a drama will do and while the fireworks last the sky is a different colour."

--'The Passion'

"Yes, we are [friends] and I do like to pass the day with you in serious and inconsequential chatter. I wouldn't mind washing up beside you, dusting beside you, reading the back half of the paper while you read the front. We are friends and I would miss you, do miss you and think of you very often. I don't want to lose this happy space where I have found someone who is smart and easy and doesn't bother to check their diary when we arrange to meet."

"Do it from the heart or not at all."

--'The Passion'

"She looked at me like I was crazy. Most of my lovers do, and that's partly why they love me, and partly why they leave."

"I don't know how to answer. I know what I think, but words in the head are like voices underwater. They are distorted."

--'Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit'

"Don’t lie. You know you like to view but not to buy. I have found that I am not a space where people want to live, at least not without decorating first. And that is the stubbornness in me: I do not want to be someone’s little home."

--'Gut Symmetries'

"Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights: the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like Braille. I like to keep my body rolled up away from prying eyes, never unfold too much, or tell the whole story."

I'm still here

2011-03-06T23:42:00.000-06:00

That’s you, drops of water and you’re on top of the mountain of success. But one day you start sliding down the mountain and you think wait a minute; I’m a mountain top water drop. I don’t belong in this valley, this river, this low dark ocean with all these drops of water. Then one day it gets hot and you slowly evaporate into air, way up, higher than any mountain top, all the way to the heavens. Then you understand that it was at your lowest that you were closest to God. Life’s a journey that goes round and round and the end is closest to the beginning. So if it’s change you need, relish the journey.
--charlotting

2011-03-06T23:38:00.000-06:00

January has issues with her mother, February is always talking about things he wants to do while March does them, April eats sweets and May pays for them, June is the oldest but not the wisest and July always has an opinion on everything. August never stops trying do the right thing, even if he doesn’t always know what that is. September once saw something so sad, she never stopped crying. October holds the lift for anyone, vice-presidents and street-sweepers alike (for his memory, not for theirs) and November makes fun of him for this. December is tired but always hopeful. He has never once stopped believing.

Monday’s obviously a bastard, quite literally as dad can’t remember what or who he was doing. Tuesday’s temperamental but ok as long as you stay on her good side. Wednesday doesn’t say much and Thursday sometimes hums just to break the silence. They’re in love. Friday’s always wasted and she and Saturday hold each other tightly until their delirium fades.

But Sunday, Sunday knows she’s the end. But she closes her eyes, and she pretends with all the strength in her tiny heart that really, she’s the dawn.
--I Wrote This For You

This is where you belong.

2011-03-06T23:31:00.002-06:00

“I mean, Jesus, who even gives a fuck about sex?! People act like it’s the most important thing humans do, but come on. How can our sentient fucking lives revolve around something slugs can do. I mean, who you want to screw and whether you screw them? Those are important questions, I guess. But they’re not that important. You know what’s important? Who would you die for? Who do you wake up at five forty-five in the morning for even though you don’t even know why he needs you?”

--John Green

“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.”

--Lao Tzu

“The trouble with so many of us is that we underestimate the power of simplicity. We have a tendency it seems to over complicate our lives and forget what’s important and what’s not. We tend to mistake movement for achievement. We tend to focus on activities instead of results. And as the pace of life continues to race along in the outside world, we forget that we have the power to control our lives regardless of what’s going on outside.”

--Robert Stuberg

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

--Sylvia Plath

“Perhaps we don’t like what we see: our hips, our loss of hair, our shoe size, our dimples, our knuckles too big, our eating habits, our disposition. We have disclosed these things in secret, likes and dislikes, behind doors with locks, our lonely rooms, our messy desks, our empty hearts, our sudden bursts of energy, our sudden bouts of depression. Don’t worry. Put away your mirrors and your beauty magazines and your books on tape. There is someone right here who knows you more than you do, who is making room on the couch, who is fixing a meal, who is putting on your favorite record, who is listening intently to what you have to say, who is standing there with you, face to face, hand to hand, eye to eye, mouth to mouth. There is no space left uncovered. This is where you belong.”

--Sufjan Stevens

“You can tell how smart people are by what they laugh at.”

--Tina Fey

“As soon as I say this, everyone will take the piss. It’s just, I think… part of me is always looking for someone to turn around, buy me a drink, give me a hug and say it’s all right… because I just go off on one. For days I can’t talk to people. And it shocks me because I’m still doing it. I want to be alone and I want people to notice me — both at the same time.”

--Thom Yorke

“Loving you has never been the problem. What’s troubling me is how loving you may never be enough.”

--Megan McCafferty

"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder. Help someone’s soul heal. Walk out of your house like a shepherd."

--Rumi

If everyone's thinking alike, then someone isn't thinking.

"And all I loved, I loved alone."

--Edgar Allen Poe

"There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning."

--Louis L'Amour

"That's when you know for sure somebody loves you. They figure out what you need and they give it to you, without you asking."

--Adriana Trigiani

blown out candles

2011-01-07T22:35:00.001-06:00

i would like to wake up one day and say “today is the day i will not be afraid to start over.” i’m so afraid at being bad at something before i’m good at it. i’m so afraid of embarrassing myself, at not being good at something i love, something that could have made me happy. so many of us choose other roads because the one we had been following was vague and compromising. because it meant we had to make mistakes in front of people. it meant we had to show everyone that we are not intrinsically good at the one thing that makes us happy. it meant we might have to stop and start all over again. it meant we had to be vulnerable. and nobody likes being vulnerable. because it’s so much better to feel safe. but at what cost? there are a lot of mistakes i’m terrified to make, but there are a lot of mistakes i’m terrified are going to cost me more if i never make them. if i never risk it all for something important to me. if i never do the things i wanted to do just because i would be really fucking bad at it for a while. i don’t want to be afraid anymore. i don’t want to be terrified of shame anymore. i don’t want to hold back just because people might not think i’ll make it or because it might not mean anything to them. i don’t want to waste anymore time being afraid of all the things that could have been right for me. the things that could have made me the person that i wanted to be. this is our only shot. don’t you get that? this is our only shot to be happy. we have to make these mistakes. we have to embarrass ourselves sometimes, we have to do what we love even when nobody else loves it back. and sometimes it’s going to be really fucking hard. sometimes it’s going to seem really hopeless. but we have to never be ashamed. we have to never be afraid to start over. we have to, don’t you see that we have to? because if we don’t then all of our dreams mean nothing. this is our only shot.
--likelava

perfect timing.

one day i will find the right words and they will be simple

2011-01-07T21:48:00.000-06:00

It begins and ends with and without it. he wrote that sprawled out on the floor of my room. I convinced myself that new places would stave off old ghosts. I was wrong. I run and they follow. I hide and they find me. I speak slow and carefully hoping they won’t catch me. they can hear me whispering. I leave and a part of you comes after me. chases me. holds me in the palm of the darkest parts of you where i don’t dare try to look. knows me in places where words cannot go. don’t forget this yet. it’s still midnight and the feelings are young, new born and helpless. don’t forget that morning when all our moments snuck between us, found us soft and whole in all the wrong places. found our wide open spaces where nothing else could reach. but i’ll love you until my hands bleed. I will love you in ways that only the crumbling streets of your country would understand. as willing and openly. as brokenly and goddamned hopelessly. i write these poems about abandoned moments we tried our damnedest to share. i write about warm and sad souls that thread together when no one else is looking. I write about things I have known and things I still don’t. I write about people I have burned holes through hoping I’ll always have a place to hide my hands when they start to shake – when I can’t shake this fever, when I can’t shake these ghosts, when I can’t escape these words so I hide them in the notches of your spine. i keep them tucked beneath your voice box so every word you say is said with a piece of me. i keep carrying these secret things we all try to save for someone who’s hands are strong enough. are your hands strong enough for me? sometimes i stay up late at night making knots on strings. i make one knot for you and one knot for me. people do the strangest things when they’re lonely. and i know that these goddamn knots will never reach each other. i know there will always be these great gaps between us, rivers and winds between us, bitter roads and disconnected moments between us. i know. but i like to think that at least we’re both apart of the same string, right? so one knot for you, one knot for me, and i don’t mind if there are other knots between us sometimes. as long as we’re apart of the same string.
--likelava

Paul Thek's 96 Sacraments

2011-01-05T14:48:00.001-06:00

to wake up
to breathe
to touch the earth
to pee
to wash
to prepare breakfast
to eat breakfast
to do the dishes
to clean up
to write a letter
to mail the letter
to go out
to see the sun
to do the shopping
to talk with some people
to buy a paper
to come home
to go to work
to work
to have work
to have lunch
to notice the light changing
to see a cat
to see a dog
to stop for a rest
to go home for dinner
to talk with a neighbor
to talk with a neighbor's child
to kiss someone
to eat dinner
to eat dinner with friends
to eat dinner with children
to eat dinner alone
to have dinner with someone
to think of love
to think of hope
to think
to dream, sing praises!
to plan
to write a poem
to read a poem
to forget bad things
to sing
to sing with someone
to hold hands
to hold anything
to hug
to get on a boat
to go somewhere
to eat a snack
to not eat a snack
to give away some money
to replace some technological education with some spiritual education
to see an island
to go swimming
to see somebody worse off
to see somebody better off
to go swimming nude
to make love in the daytime
to make love in the daytime with someone you love
to eat a peach
to comb your hair
to find a way to grow feathers
to satisfy all hunger in the world
to avoid dominations and dominating
to never stray
to be innocent of corruption
to not think (at least now and then)
to worship in another's church, in another way
to fly away into the air, high as a chicken, come back
to grow
to practice
to be just
to be stronger than you were
to understand a bit more
to like the ups & downs
to feel okay in spite of it all
to feel good knowing all the worst
to avoid being forced into defiance
to avoid emotional escalation
to forget the way
to make the way

--via

p.s. - Happy New Year! xo.

You let me drift off at the tips of your fingers.

2010-12-16T22:10:00.001-06:00

I want cathedrals, strong and tall, to write my story on. I’ll write yours too, in my tiny and tall handwriting, deep like the Grand Canyon and right there to fill the gaps where mine goes missing—the places I forgot to take it all in. I crawl into my own head where everything looks two shades darker, and don’t pull up the curtains of my eyelids to let the light in because once it struck me blind and dumb, and I got scared. I don’t want to settle back down in the throne of my foolishness. Once you met me there and pointed me to the daylight and I’ve been wandering ever since, sun-stung and following awe like I could catch it and keep it right in my pocket, there next to my heart. You let me drift off at the tips of your fingers—you spoke me to sleep. Now the canary in my throat is always singing a yellow tune, because of you. And my fingers weave futures absentmindedly, my mind wanders ‘cross oceans and up mountain passes where I thought I’d meet you. I measured the steps, and turned on my heel to scribble it down for later, I mapped it for you strong and clear, napkins, novels, dashed lines to draw you closer—a place I thought I’d will parallel lines to cross. They were close, I thought, and then they drew away from each other. I think they were just scared when they heard something unfamiliar rattling towards them, which I’ve learned how to sense from a mile away, because I’m very much the same. But I mapped it for you, dear. I measured, I turned, I crossed the x’s and lassoed the moon to light your way. I’ll meet you there, I think. I’ll show you where and what I wrote, and the places I left open for the second sunrise, the third. I measured, I turned.
--jenna2step

Forget yourself.

2010-12-16T22:06:00.004-06:00

"We're so inconsistent about what we let kill ya. "Smoking? Must be eradicated. Marijuana? Zero tolerance." But there's lots of ways to kill yourself. You know what I think kills you? Stress, and being a workaholic, and never getting laid, and, uh, McDonalds, and staying mad at people, and lying for a living, and three-martini lunches, and the all-American breakfast, and whatever the fuck Elvis was doing. That's what kills you."

--Bill Maher

"I don't even want to be rich I just want to be alone."

--John Darnielle

“Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.”
--William Faulkner

"Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”

--Franz Kafka

“I had no motives, no incentives to exert myself, no duties. Life tasted horribly bitter. I felt that the long-standing disgust was coming to a crisis and that life pushed me out and cast me aside. I walked through the grey streets in a rage and everything smelt of moist earth and burial… How had I, with the wings of youth and poetry, come to this? Art and travel and the glow of ideals—and now this! How had the paralysis crept over me so slowly and furtively, this hatred against myself and everybody, this deep-seated anger and obstruction of all feelings, this filthy hell of emptiness and despair.”

--Hermann Hesse, 'Steppenwolf'

“It’s not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.”

--Stephen Fry

“How does one become a butterfly?” she asked pensively. ”You must want to fly so much that you are willing to give up being a caterpillar.”

--Trina Paulus

“I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.”

--Anaïs Nin

"I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, or flesh and bone, fiber and liquids--and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination--indeed, everything and anything except me."

--Ralph Ellison

“I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is not an apology, but a life. It is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding. My life should be unique; it should be an alms, a battle, a conquest, a medicine.”

--Ralph Waldo Emerson, 'Self-Reliance'

“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

“I have never liked working. To me a job is an invasion of privacy.”

--Danny Mc Goorty

"Tell the story of your life, and somewhere along the line take off your pants."

--Andy Warhol

“They make it look so easy, connecting with another human being. It’s like no one told them it’s the hardest thing in the world.”

--Dexter Morgan

“The chill of what I won’t feel gnaws at my present heart.”

--Fernando Pessoa

“Your own nature will triumph. We are all born with our natures…And I think back over my own life and I realize that my own nature -the core me- essentially hasn’t changed over all these years. When I wake up in the morning, for those first few moments before I remember where I am or when I am, I still feel the same way I did when I woke up at the age of five.”

--Douglas Coupland

“I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing, as though I had wings.”

--Mary Oliver, 'Starlings in Winter'

“Sometimes I come to hate people because they can’t see where I am. I’ve gone empty, completely empty and all they see is the visual form: my arms and legs, my face, my height and posture, the sounds that come from my throat. But I’m fucking empty. The person I was just one year ago no longer exists, drifts spinning slowly into the ether somewhere way back there.”

--David Wojnarowicz

“Because there was a hunger in me to see everything and do everything. I wanted to be everyone I saw. I wasn’t enough for me.”

--Sidney Sheldon

“Words, I think, words are all you need for love—you say them and then just for the hell of it your heart rises and spills over into them. My idea in a love affair is that if everyone makes enough declarations, one of them is bound to come true. Words are interesting in that way.”

--Lorrie Moore, 'Anagrams'

“Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.”

--Henry Miller

"I am the most tired woman in the world. I am tired when I get up. Life requires an effort I cannot make. Please give me that heavy book. I need to put something heavy like that on top of my head. I have to place my feet under the pillows always, so as to be able to stay on earth. Otherwise I feel myself going away, going away at a tremendous speed, on account of my lightness. I know that I am dead. As soon as I utter a phrase my sincerity dies, becomes a lie whose coldness chills me. Don’t say anything, because I see that you understand me, and I am afraid of your understanding. I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe.”

--Anaïs Nin

empty and warm

2010-11-24T18:23:00.000-06:00

for once i don’t want to talk about remembering. i want to talk about being. i want to talk about breathing. i want to talk about seeing and feeling. i want to talk about questioning and believing. how sometimes i can feel things changing right beneath me. how sometimes i have dreams of all the people who i have lost. that’s the tricky thing about loving someone. it doesn’t always stop when it should. when a soul dies or a person moves on. people expire but the feeling doesn’t. it lingers, phantom-limbed and without argument. you try to hide it in places you hope you’ll never look. but it sneaks up on you. it wakes up next to you. it curls inside your arms and you hold it like the way you’ve always known. i want to talk about some of these things i never say. some of the things that have too many gaps to try and fit my fingers around them and show you in between my careful palms. there are these dark places i try not to go because i’ve been there before and it’s not always easy to leave. there are these stars i see sometimes and i wonder what they’re thinking when they’re patiently staring back at me. how many wars have they seen? how many gods and kings, how many nameless feelings, how many people have they watched fall to their knees hoping for a sign that these lights missing their arms will never give. how many moments have they burned through. have i been burning too? if there is a heaven and a hell will i only spit on them both and take another road? what have i been burning for? i see them, moonstruck and raw. they wink happily, indifferently. through genocide and poverty and inequality. through hope, through young love, through those gorgeous little moments we all forget when we get too old. i try to be angry sometimes, i try because everything starts to feel so fucking hopeless. but i see these stars on cold nights and i wonder how something could be so beautiful and brave. i wonder how lucky i really am. i have so much time to learn how to love everything in life before i get too old. how rare and wonderful it is to be this young, to be this healthy, to be this free, to be this alive.
--likelava

i awoke and at times birds fled

2010-11-19T19:55:00.000-06:00

i know the house you grew up in isn’t far from here. i don’t go there because i know it’s filled with ghosts. i write about you a lot and you don’t even know it. it’s hard sometimes. to say things i know you’ll never hear. i know a lot of things. like how to break a fence so that you can sneak into someone else’s pool. i know how to put it back together again quickly when it’s almost dawn and their porch lights just flickered on. i know how to pull the tail off a crawfish just right. i know that venus is the brightest planet in the sky. i know some things first hand. that the first thing you forget about a person is their voice. that sometimes you make wishes on people like they’re lost stars. how you find yourself alone at night starting to hope that when they finally fall to the earth you can collect them in the ruffles of your skirt. but sometimes they burn out before they even get that close.

i know that these knees i hold are only nineteen years old. but some of me is older.

you told me once that you loved my eye lashes and the face i made when the boys were yelling in the street and i was mystified. i’m always mystified. when real life for a fraction of a second actually feels like real life. like i know one day i’ll die and never get these things back. how sometimes summer can make a moment sizzle right before it fades.

you always sizzled just before you started to fade.

it’s hard not to cry when i think of thompson road in the passenger seat of that car you stole and your hand rolled cigarettes with their ashes floating out the window. i was electrified, i was terrified, i was young and that lonely highway didn’t mind. you were blue eyed and lovedrunk. i was fascinated. i was wide eyed and willing. i was whole and now i’m wilting. but i’m still fascinated, i’m still wide-eyed, i’m still reeling. i’m still pulling at what pleated pieces of you i’ve got left in the bottom of my pockets

because you found me and you changed me.

you were summer storms, you were swollen and sunburned, and i followed you where ever your lightening decided to strike. sometimes i tell people about you like it doesn’t hurt. like this isn’t hard. like it’s just lint, just loose change, some backyard apologies, some long lost stars we tried to collect in our collarbones once, some bottom of the ninth summer we forgot by the fall. we dug our selves a grave, took everything this world gave, never regretted a goddamn thing, we loved like it couldn’t break even when it did.

seven years. i only had you for seven years. but i did not cry. i did not mind. i was mesmerized. i felt something. it’s gone now, but it comes back in flashes. you dancing in the kitchen, getting lost in destin, the tangles in your hair, the long drive from texas, when you let me fall asleep in the space between your shoulder and your neck, when you told me i made you feel safe. you’re gone now. you’ve been gone for a long time. but i know i felt something. i didn’t cry because i know for the rest of our lives that at least once there was a moment in the middle when we felt something.
--likelava

felt wrong not to swing

2010-11-19T19:49:00.001-06:00

i know a boy who changed a part of me he’s never even seen. we were sitting indian style on those wood floors, listened to them creak like poetry in between your words. we sat in awe at the way your hands could say the things your voice could not. you smelled like weed and we tasted like beer. you turned the lights off and played music for us in the dark, said you didn’t want us to listen - you wanted us to feel. i’m always meeting people who are trying to get me to feel, like i don’t know how and they can show me the way. you spoke like you had the secrets of the universe. we all want secrets. we all follow anyone we think has the secrets. i knew a girl once with a broken heart. she used to make me come up with poems off the top of my head. i’d just end up telling her all my favorite words. i’m always giving people adjectives even though they’re all looking for verbs. one day she didn’t hurt anymore. and i stopped telling her poetry when she got so lonely she thought she would cry. i know a lot of people i fell half in love with once. i can’t remember most of their names. it doesn’t mean they weren’t important. sometimes the most important things in this life don’t need names. sometimes strangers can see us in ways no one else ever could. i hope you all know this feeling. if not now, i hope you find a moment where the experience strikes you. i hope you are startled by this life sometimes. i hope sometimes you look up at night and realize, even if just for a single second, there is an entire universe out there - and you are apart of it. you are apart of this. we are a part of this together. i hope you find the courage to keep going when you want to stop. i hope you find the strength to lose it all and start over again. sometimes i start to think that we’re just lights everyone can feel and when we hit a certain shadow, when we find a certain color, we bend into them and make this world apart of us in a way it was never supposed to be. what a happy accident it is to live, you know. what a happy accident this life is sometimes. like some handful of colors you never thought would go together.
--likelava

in the morning through the window shade

2010-11-19T19:44:00.001-06:00

there are moments in this life that are exceptional and rare. and i know we had too much vodka, but the water was so warm, the night felt so good on our fingers. everything was crooked but sometimes it’s easy to pretend it’s all okay, it’s all alright. so we leaned against the edge with our hands cupped next to our eyes. you looked like summer, with that lonely gleam, with that half smile. you said “on the count of three we’re going to look up and forget everything.” you always do things like that. take any chance to kiss regret goodbye, to leave this life behind. and after that i heard your voice but couldn’t make out the words. all i could think of is the way you held my hand underwater once. the way the stars were wet and brave. shook above us in that fucking sky we’re always trying to touch. and when i heard you shout the number one i got really scared. i felt so goddamn ashamed. because i wasn’t ready to forget. i wasn’t that brave. i wanted to remember when you told me secrets in the backyard. the way we all waded in the water with these thoughts lit up like sparklers. how you made all of us love you but it was never enough. and it always fucking hurt, this life always fucking hurts, but i am dazzled by it and i can’t help but hold it close. i can’t help but want to live even if i don’t know why. i can’t help but love this life without effort sometimes, if only for just a second, for just some cracked and crooked moment. this is hard for me. it’s hard to not be fascinated and scared when you know that your last chance to live is also your first. and all of a sudden you’re already shouting “two” and i’m thinking about the snowballs in the chinese take out boxes on plum street and the way the sun light pressed against your neck, and how your eyelashes were so close to mine. i’m thinking about the water splashing against my face when we sat too close to the waves and i laughed at the sky but all of a sudden i felt this surge of emotion and just started to cry right there. i had to turn quick before you saw and knew that i was really this fucking broken, that i was really this ugly. that i feel so many things at once and sometimes i need to know that i’m not the only one. that other people feel so fucking crazy and alone sometimes. and then you’re whispering with our mouthes barely above the water and all i can see is you crying in the theatre and all i can see is the way you looked at me when i told you that we’re all just burning buildings. but now you’re telling me about the tumor that they found in your head and i’m trying not to listen but then you’re shouting the number three and for a second, for just a second, i really did forget everything. and i was just warm water. i was dust in between the stars. i was something without moments, without thoughts, without a stupid little life, without a crooked little heart. and the second i snapped back i saw your face. and i was trying not to cry, because if i forgot everything i would never know that there are moments in this life that are exceptional and rare. i would never know what it was like to love something so fucking much that it doesn’t even matter if it’s not yours. all you know is you cannot, under any goddamn circumstances, ever let it go.
--likelava

I am prepared for amazing things to happen.

2010-11-13T23:45:00.004-06:00

"Got you. You're mine now. For the rest of the day, week, month, year, life. Have you guessed who I am? Sometimes I think you have. Sometimes when you're standing in a crowd I feel those sultry, dark eyes of yours stop on me. Are you too afraid to come up to me and let me know how you feel? I want to moan and writhe with you and I want to go up to you and kiss your mouth and pull you to me and say "I love you I love you I love you" while stripping. I want you so bad it stings. I want to kill the ugly girls that you're always with. Do you really like those boring, naive, coy, calculating girls or is it just for sex? The seeds of love have taken hold, and if we won't burn together, I'll burn alone."

--Bret Easton Ellis, 'The Rules of Attraction'

You never really existed

and neither did I

I am just a thought in your dreams

and you are a dream in my thoughts

We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under: the first category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, in other words, for the look of the public. That is the case with the German singer, the American actress. The second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes. They are the tireless hosts of cocktail parties and dinners. Then there is the third category, the category of people who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love. And finally there is the fourth category, the rarest, the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers.

"If I had a straw

I’d suck wax into my mouth, let it pool,

take shape. As tired as I am, who knows

when they’d find me, sleeping with a replica

of empty space on my tongue. After a while,

sleep comes so hard and fast you can feel

like you are falling. Everybody knows that."

--Josh Bell, 'Meditation on Insomnia'

“What is happiness? It’s the reflection of a sunbeam: you see it playing on the wall, sitting in your palm, but as soon as you clench your fist, it slips out of your hand and darts about your face and fingers.”

--Nina Lugovskaya

“Inside the heart of each and every one of us there is a longing to be understood by someone who really cares. When a person is understood, he or she can put up with almost anything in the world.”

--Ed Hird

“Give yourself up to find yourself again.”

--Li Mu Bai, 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon'

“I let almost no one know me, and I lost the chance to know and learn from most of my peers. It took years after I’d graduated from Amherst to realize that people were actually far more complicated and interesting than books, that almost everyone else suffered the same secret fears and inadequacies as I, and that feeling alone and inferior was actually the great valent bond between us all. I wish I’d been smart enough to understand that when I was an adolescent.”

--David Foster Wallace

“Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him. It was music. I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization.”

--Kurt Vonnegut

“I don’t want to have to do this living. I just walk around. I want to be swept off my feet, you know? I want my children to have magical powers. I am prepared for amazing things to happen. I can handle it.”

--'Me & You & Everyone We Know'

“Think about your life, think about the person you want to be & just start being that person. Let the places that you go add to the person you are, but don’t let them replace it — never let the place you’re from, the place you’re at or the places you’re going become the most interesting thing about you. Don’t do that.”

--James Nord

We contain our own future.

2010-11-09T13:52:00.002-06:00

All quotes by author Barbara Kingsolver

"The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away."

"Listen. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. In perfect stillness, frankly, I've only found sorrow."

"Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer."

"When we traded homemaking for careers, we were implicitly promised economic independence and worldly influence. But a devil of a bargain it has turned out to be in terms of daily life. We gave up the aroma of warm bread rising, the measured pace of nurturing routines, the creative task of molding our families' tastes and zest for life; we received in exchange the minivan and the Lunchable."

"It's what you do that makes your soul."

"What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive. You keep your eyes open, you see this damned-to-hell world you got born into, and you ask yourself, 'What life can I live that will let me breathe in & out and love somebody or something and not run off screaming into the woods?"

"Solitude is a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to prey, a beginning or an end. Every choice is a world made new for the chosen."

"There's such a gulf between yourself and who you were then, but people speak to that other person and it answers; it's like having a stranger as a house guest in your skin."

"Your dreams, what you hope for and all that, it's not separate from your life. It grows right up out of it."

"Listen. Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember."

"The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes."

"There is a strange moment in time, after something horrible happens, when you know it's true, but you haven't told anyone yet."

"There were two things about Mama. One is she always expected the best out of me. And the other is that then no matter what I did, whatever I came home with, she acted like it was the moon I had just hung up in the sky and plugged in all the stars. Like I was that good."

"But I've swallowed my pride before, that's for sure. I'm practically lined with my mistakes on the inside like a bad-wallpapered bathroom."

"Thanks for this day, for all birds safe in their nests, for whatever this is, for life."

"If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life."

"At some point in my life I'd honestly hoped love would rescue me from the cold, drafty castle I lived in. But at another point, much earlier I think, I'd quietly begun to hope for nothing at all in the way of love, so as not to be disappointed. It works. It gets to be a habit."

"As long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer's long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn't touch me. Only when I stopped did the slick, dark stuff of it come floating around my face, catching my arms and throat till I began to drown. So I just didn't stop."

"Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It's everyone's, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet."

"I've about decided that's the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you're a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench."

"It's the one thing we never quite get over: that we contain our own future."

"It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time."

"Now I'm starting to think he wasn't supposed to be my whole life, he was just this doorway to me."

"Wake up now, look alive, for here is a day off work just to praise Creation: the turkey, the squash, and the corn, these things that ate and drank sunshine, grass, mud, and rain, and then in the shortening days laid down their lives for our welfare and onward resolve. There's the miracle for you, the absolute sacrifice that still holds back seed: a germ of promise to do the whole thing again, another time. . . Thanksgiving is Creation's birthday party. Praise harvest, a pause and sigh on the breath of immortality."

"Every one of us is called upon, perhaps many times, to start a new life. A frightening diagnosis, a marriage, a move, loss of a job...And onward full-tilt we go, pitched and wrecked and absurdly resolute, driven in spite of everything to make good on a new shore. To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another--that is surely the basic instinct...Crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is."

"If you ask me, when something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can."

"She is inhumanly alone. And then, all at once, she isn't."

"For if there is any single thing that everyone hopes for most dearly, it must be this: that the youngest outlive the oldest."

"She would just be catching up when I'd go again, swimming farther out into life because I still hadn't found a rock to stand on."

"Children can be your heartache. But that doesn't matter, you have to go on and have them . . . it works out."

"My life is a pitiful, mechanical thing without a past, like a little wind-up car, ready to run in any direction someone points me."

"The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don't know."

Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence.

2010-11-06T20:32:00.003-05:00

“Art is the reason I get up in the morning, but the definition ends there. It doesn’t seem fair that I’m living for something I can’t even define.”

--Ani DiFranco

“You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”

--Jim Rohn

“There’s just some stuff I like, and some of that stuff is shallow, and I don’t fucking care.”

--Ryan Adams

“Don’t you, when strangers and friends come to call, straighten the cushions, kick the books under the bed and put away the letter you were writing? How many of us want any of us to see us as we really are? Isn’t the mirror hostile enough?”

--Jeanette Winterson

“I hate the idea that someone out there hates me. I even hate that Al-Qaeda hates me. I think if they got to know me they wouldn’t hate me.”

--Pam, 'The Office'

“You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.”

--Woodrow Wilson

“The unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwelling on himself and start paying attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence. When you’re unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. You get to take yourself oh so very seriously.”

--Tom Robbins, 'Jitterbug Perfume'

"Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have."

--Steve Jobs

“There’s a thin sheet of glass between me and life. However clearly I see and understand life, I can’t touch it.”

--Fernando Pessoa, 'The Book of Disquiet'

“I’d woken up early, & I took a long time getting ready to exist.”

--Fernando Pessoa, 'The Book of Disquiet'

the colors bright red and baby blue

2010-11-06T20:30:00.001-05:00

you used to sing blues songs to me when i’d cry into your sheets. i hear voodoo child playing now and i think of safe places, i think of your young face and when daddy had a beard. i think of the pink azaleas in bloom, our feet dangling off the porch and our eyes fading orange with the afternoon. i hear castles made of sand and i think of all the scars left still like quiet stars on the inside of your palms and how foggy your eyes could get sometimes. i see the pale shadows of what used to be freckles right beneath your lashes and i ache with this burning softness that tells me my home isn’t a place, it’s a person. you taught me things, quiet things, careful things, important things. you showed me how to paint with watercolors. you showed me how to catch dragonflies. taught me how to love a thunderstorm, read me books out loud and we’d whisper my favorite parts together.“second to the right,’ said peter, ‘and then straight on till morning.” i smell chicory coffee sometimes and i can almost see your cigarette in your left hand, i can hear my footsteps running down the hallway, i can feel the warmth of summer wrapping around me. you showed me how to listen. and that showed me how to love. you said once “we’re all broken baby. but you are more than these broken parts.” and you were right. i cried until the stars sunk into the light hiding behind the night, but you were right. i am soft and careening and nothing can stop me. this world cannot stop me. no one can stop me. because i know how to love a thunderstorm. and i can catch a dragonfly. because my mother taught me how to paint with watercolors. because i know how to listen. and i know how to love. and sometimes when i’m about to cry i start singing quietly to myself “and so castles made of sand fall in the sea, eventually.” because we’re all broken but we are more than these broken parts.

and my skin will rot but my energy will not. my heart will stop but my soul will not. my hopes will turn to ash but my ghost will not. my bones can break but my matter cannot. my moments will end but their marrow will not. one day i will die, but there are parts of me that cannot.
--likelava

torches together.

2010-11-06T20:26:00.000-05:00

We’re a little too tired to speak sometimes and our eyes only stare back like half-moon slivers in the inky sky. I think we’re pulling at each other like tides until we find some way to balance each other out. I can feel the glow of your ropes around my wrists and I think I’ll let you pull me up with you, and when we both run away, back to the sea, I hope we get to move as one. I like the way you’re dark like my house when I come in from outside and how my eyes have to readjust to you every time I see you again. You’re some shadow—a silhouette—on the edges of my vision and you break through my sun-soaked eyes every time. There’s something about the way you don’t care that I wear floral print while I listen to hardcore on my record player or eat all of the grapes or stay up the whole night talking your ear off. There’s something about the way you’re unafraid to bare your pale parts even though I know you think that people favor the dark. Or for the the ways you know how to untangle the worry I am always braiding into myself, for the songs you wrote and the words you spoke and how I’m used to slamming myself into people who feel like brick walls and you feel like a warm bath after a cold day—or maybe more like a cold shower after a hot one. I like the way I’m used to the searing sun and all of its aching heat and you’re more like moonlight, the way you carry the same torch that I do and how we’re well on our way down the dark and uneven path. I know I’m a little bit soft, a little too afraid, and maybe you’re rough like rock—gritty like sand. I guess we’re both a little crooked, a little weird, a little discontent, but I like the honesty in anxiety and I think the moonlight illuminates strengths that no other light can.
--jenna2step

We must do extraordinary things.

2010-11-06T20:00:00.003-05:00

All quotes by author Dave Eggers

"We are unusual and tragic and alive."

"Still though, I think if you're not self-obsessed, you're probably boring."

"But everyone disappears, no matter who loves them."

"All I ever wanted was to know what to do."

"We have advantages. We have a cushion to fall back on. This is abundance. A luxury of place and time. Something rare and wonderful. It's almost historically unprecedented. We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to."

"You invite things to happen. You open the door. You inhale. And if you inhale the chaos, you give the chaos, the chaos gives back."

"All we really want is for no one to have a boring life, to be impressive, so we can be impressed."

--On the friends we choose

"In all my life I'd never been approached this way, the car pulling up, the 'Where you going?' It was something I wish had happened hundreds of times. I was a looker - someone who looked over at every car at every traffic light, hoping something would happen, and almost never finding anyone looking back - always everyone looking forwards, and every time I felt stupid. Why should people look at you? Why should they care?"

"At that moment I was sure. That I belonged in my skin. That my organs were mine and my eyes were mine and my ears, which could only hear the silence of this night and my faint breathing, were mine, and I loved them and what they could do."

"People are strange, but more than that they're good. They're good first then strange."

Tetris

2010-11-04T22:49:00.001-05:00

“Things go so fast, so many new things that you just don’t know where to put them, and while you’re deciding where to put them there are even more things and then they build up and then they get bigger and then there’s no space and it is like Tetris and you have been waiting so long for a long piece but there hasn’t been a long piece and the pile is getting higher and you have been saving a space and you think how you could really use a long piece and how much it would help and clear up so many things but the screen is getting full and then there’s only one row left and you know if the next piece isn’t a long piece then there will be no way and it will be game over and then the next piece appears and it’s coming so fast and the crazy music is making you tense and making you frantic and you’re tapping the spacebar and flipping around and now you see the new piece and oh how you hope it’s a long piece but then you see the new piece and you see it’s not a long piece but instead another square piece and there’s just no space for a square piece dammit why’d they never let you have a long piece you saved a space and waited so long and played it so well and it was all you ever needed and don’t you know it would have fit so well in the space you kept open but now the space is blocked and if you want to go on you’ll need to start another game but there’s a chance you’re all out of credits.”
--Jonathan Harris

baby blue sedan

2010-10-22T21:42:00.001-05:00

I’ve been (barely) living, slow like clock hands during the final stretch; a hiccup in time. Currently spending all of my time staring at maps, measuring the distance, the difference, praying my feet will find solid ground before momentum knocks me completely down, writing, you, writing you. West coast weather, southern boys, yawning, staying awake all night. Forgetting what it’s like to not be anxious or to not miss someone or to not be so tired all of the time. Life is pretty funny sometimes. More often than most people want to realize, I think. Some people just don’t get its sense of humor, that’s how I see it. Because it’s not always “haha” funny, it’s not always “keeling over on the bookstore floor ‘til your eyelashes are glistening with tears” funny. Sometimes it’s “walking all night in the rain with a broken flashlight and a broken heart and sleeping on the front porch till the morning comes to wake you up” funny. Sometimes it’s a series of ironic somethings that have you feeling like the universe is playing pranks on you. Currently wishing I was doing anything but wasting all of this time wondering. Currently letting my tongue roll the ‘r’ in risky like it doesn’t terrify me. Currently, Baby Blue Sedan, I am doing the best that I can.
--jenna2step

hot and cold ghosts

2010-10-22T21:38:00.001-05:00

all of the things i’ve got aren’t quite what they once were. have you ever swam in the mississippi before? have you ever bought strawberry preserves from a great white porch off the side of the road? have you ever counted the stars that make up the little dipper on the shore of the gulf of mexico? have you ever stolen walnuts from your neighbors tree in november when the leaves are warm and gold? sometimes i opened my eyes to yours being full of smoke, to fevers and rivers and secrets i’ve never told. i used to know a boy that called me darlin. we ate sweet potato fries in the back of your pick-up with all of the dreamy static stuck between us and a cigarette pressed against your lips when you told me “c’mere baby.” and i kept thinking “bury me here in your backseat, bury me here in the sweet tasting autumn heat, bury me in the backyard underneath the leaves and let the stars build a grave out of me, bury me in a place where it’s safe to stay for a little while longer and no one will ever have to know” i forget most of it now. i forget a lot of things. but sometimes i can still hear your always slightly out of tune guitar strings. the way your wild blue eyes cut everything they saw into quarters. i figured one day i’d be replaced by a pack of cigarettes, a fifth of vodka, another girl in your passenger seat, and those nights that’ll keep secrets better than any of your friends. but you caught me sunstruck and right where you wanted me. you caught me watching from the cracks of your broken windows, you caught me hiding where i was smiling into your sheets when you told me stories about achilles regretting everything and how you used to think that the red spots you saw when you closed your eyes were souls trapped between this life and whatever was waiting for us on the other side. remember that tuesday in summer when a boy died driving home one night? i was quiet for days. i kept wondering what he saw right before he passed. i always think about those kind of things. about how maybe the end is just across the bed spread. i forget what day it was or what shirt you were wearing or what i had said. but i remember it was four in the afternoon and i loved you. that’s when you asked me if i was ready to leave and never look back. “alls you gotta do is get in the truck, darlin.”
--likelava

I'm just a vessel waiting to be filled

2010-10-22T13:21:00.002-05:00

All quotes from Story People

Whatever you do, she said, don't wait too long or you'll have to start from the very beginning & those new bodies are always kind of a crapshoot.

I've read a lot of books, so I know bunches of stuff that sounds like it could be true.

The surprising thing is that a beehive hairdo in marble is not that much heavier than the real thing.

I'm just a vessel waiting to be filled, she said as long as it mixes well with the stuff already in here

He wouldn't eat lobster the first time. He said it looked too dangerous & he couldn't be sure it wasn't watching from the astral plane or wherever lobsters went when they tired of being food items.

I can imagine it working out perfectly, I said. I can't, she said & I said no wonder you're so stressed.

I will stop complaining when I'm dead, she said, so I got out my day planner & told her I'd love to pencil that in

Getting as comfortable as possible in the moments before she has to be anxious again

This is a story that usually I write in white ink, but most people miss it & start to read too much into it & think it says something about life they couldn't figure out themselves. So, now I write only with stuff people can read & say things as clearly as I can. Like this: don't believe anyone who writes with white ink on white paper. They have too much to hide.

frustrated because it's going too fast to see but if you could see it, it wouldn't make any sense because you'd be looking too close

I know I don't go to church as often as I should, she said, but I still wear pantyhose & that should count for something.

secure in the knowledge that it's hard to ruin mashed potatoes

How do you know? she said & the answers fell like feathers, or the first snowflakes of November, Light & without words I looked in her eyes & smiled. You just know, I said.

I was going to live simply & give away all my money to the poor, she said, until I figured out then I'd be poor, so the simple thing was just to keep it. I like it when things make sense like that, she added.

white noise

2010-10-21T18:49:00.000-05:00

you are fucking up. there are rules to this. you do not get caught up. you do not knot things around yourself. this is what happens when you do. don’t ever fucking do this again. you have to keep yourself at a safe distance. because there are no priorities, there are only options. you do not open these kinds of doors because they will always close behind you. that means that both the danger and the excitement exist on the peripheral. that makes the doses small, but it also keeps the ball in your court. this is the only way the game can be played. you have to cut out all of the factors which could gather between you and what you want. this is the way these things work. and what you want can never, at any time, be more valuable to you than what you already have. it can only be some glimmering possibility on the side that you will either take without ever needing or easily shrug off without ever regretting. this is the way it works. these are the rules. and nobody else will ever understand them the same way as you. but this is the only way.
--likelava

on letting go.

2010-10-21T18:45:00.001-05:00

Winter found my bones early this year. I’ve been shivering for a week straight, standing on my front porch wishing the sun would light a fire under my skin and make me warm again. I didn’t think I would cry this much, but every morning the salt clinging to my eyelashes greets the day, and I am trying so hard to just wipe it away. We agreed on this: goodbye. But my body’s got a memory that my muscles keep and there are places where you plucked the rocks out of me. They found their way back and now I’m heavy with all the weight I learned to love without. My fingers don’t want to uncurl themselves from the promises we tucked under each other’s loose edges, the places I let you pick apart with your quiet Latin fire—the parts of me you pried upwards. I wanted to keep us safe, close at hand and unchanging, but you’re not mine. I wrapped my winter heart up inside your summer bones and found a home; now I’m cold. Crying into the bend of my elbow like the world won’t know and I can trick sleep into finding me, I was wrong. You were wronged. And I will miss you at my right hand, the gaps you filled, the months you spent, the parts of me I let you keep. I said “my heart is breaking, Bird” and you stuttered something chaotic but beautiful, like bird wings, fluttering.
--jenna2step

Gravity was a form of nostalgia.

2010-10-21T18:35:00.004-05:00

All quotes by author Lorrie Moore

"I count too heavily on birthdays, though I know I shouldn't. Inevitably I begin to assess my life by them, figure out how I'm doing by how many people remember; it's like the old fantasy of attending your own funeral: You get to see who your friends are, get to see who shows up."

--'Anagrams'

"I missed him. Love, I realized, was something your spine memorized. There was nothing you could do about that."

--'Anagrams'

"When she packed up to leave, she knew that she was saying goodbye to something important, which was not that bad, in a way, because it meant that at least you had said hello to it to begin with..."

--'Birds of America: Stories'

"She was not good on the phone. She needed the face, the pattern of eyes, nose, trembling mouth... People talking were meant to look at a face, the disastrous cupcake of it, the hide-and-seek of the heart dashing across. With a phone, you said words, but you never watched them go in. You saw them off at the airport but never knew whether there was anyone there to greet them when they got off the plane. "

--'Like Life'

"I was too fresh from childhood. Subconsciously, my deepest brain still a cupboard of fairy tales, I suppose I believed that if pretty woman was no longer pretty she had done something to deserve it. I had a young girl's belief that this kind of negative aging would never come to me. Death would come to me - I knew this from reading British poetry. But the drying, hunching, blanching, hobbling, fading, fattening, thinning, slowing? I would just not let that happen to moi."

"I tried not to think about my life. I did not have any good solid plans for it long-term - not bad plans either, no plans at all - and the lostness of that, compared with the clear ambitions of my friends (marriage, children, law school), sometimes shamed me. Other times in my mind I defended such a condition as morally and intellectually superior - my life was open and ready and free - but that did not make it any less lonely."

"Love is a fever," she said. "And when you come out of it you'll discover whether you've been lucky - or not."

--'A Gate at the Stairs'

"Love is the answer, said the songs, and that's OK. It was OK, I supposed, as an answer. But no more than that. It was not a solution; it wasn't really even an answer, just a reply."

--'A Gate at the Stairs'

"Beauty could not love you back. People were not what they seemed and certainly not what they said. Madness was contagious. Memory served melancholy. The medieval was not so bad. Gravity was a form of nostalgia. There could be virtue in satirizing virtue. Dwight Eisenhower and Werner von Braun had the exact same mouths. No one loved a loser until he completely lost."

--'A Gate at the Stairs'

they looked like strong hands.

2010-10-20T18:58:00.002-05:00

We woke with leaves in our hair. I don’t remember what month it was, but I know the sun stung us and we both squinted our eyes like we didn’t understand. Your arms were sturdy like the limbs of an old tree I couldn’t ever find. Somewhere past the cemetery, somewhere past the maple that fell during that lightning storm, somewhere past the tall weeds and blackberries, you hid like a secret garden. There were times I just barely caught you disappearing into it, but the entrance closed just as soon as I talked myself into following you.

This is a chalky metaphor for all of things you kept from me. You used to call me out like that, always taking the words I grew like vines across my meaning and unbraiding them, flattening them out. “You are trying to say you’re afraid.” “You wrote this about loss.” “This is a letter to say you’re leaving, isn’t it?” Paring down my branches and just pulling down the fruit, you made my dimensions flat. I let you unknot me and you got lost in the strands.
--jenna2step

goodbye blue sky

2010-10-20T18:55:00.000-05:00

some nights are harder than others. sometimes you try to drive down the high way and get lost in the headlights. you try to avoid the feeling, you try to tell yourself that after the first few minutes it’s all just self-inflicted, right? but when you get home you know that all you can do is plug in your headphones and get lost in it. i’m lost in it right now. because in your front yard you told me i was pretty. and when i laughed in the dark, i could see you out the corner of my eye smiling at me. you forget to lie in all of the moments that could have helped you distance yourself from this. that was your first mistake. i shook on the sidewalk, maybe from the cheap beer, but maybe from the way you and your brothers all have the same eyes. i opened my palms up to you to show you light pink lines and plumes of smoke. i told myself that this is the worst kind of secret. but the worst secrets are the ones you keep the closest. it makes them misleading. it makes them feel safe when they’re not. these things are just so hard sometimes. it’s hard to give pieces of yourself to people and watch them walk away with them. because one day that season would be gone forever, and what would i have to remember it by? what do i have to remember you by? will you remember me? will you remember me in the warm red light of the cigarette you lit for me when i told you “i know this is going to end soon. i’m not afraid.” but i was, i am, i wasn’t ready yet. i’ve always been very good at appearing as though i am calm and composed when underneath it my thoughts are wild and burning. when the morning came i felt you on my neck. sometimes my guts would start to ache from the confines of this fog. sometimes i awoke and heard you singing my name and other words that i couldn’t make out down the hallway. you showed me the eye of mars. you told me how jupiter has a hurricane that circles the planet year round. when i left i didn’t tell you goodbye. i’ve never been very good at those. but i think you already know. please remember me. i know this will get buried beneath other things. and that’s okay, i’ll be okay. but when you hear goodbye blue sky by pink floyd i hope you think of me secretly. and this is a very dangerous secret. that makes everything we ever had deceiving. but it also keeps it safe in a way that the truth never would.
--likelava

We are little haunted houses.

2010-10-20T18:42:00.004-05:00

"Go, girl, seek happy nights to happy days."

--Shakespeare

"It seems all too common that people lose sight of their dreams, but you were never the type to follow the norm anyway."

--Damin

“I was sand, I was snow—written on, rewritten, smoothed over.”

--Margaret Atwood, 'The Blind Assassin'

We all have dreams in our heads, words in our mouths, stories on our skin and ghosts in our hearts. We are little haunted houses. Dreaming. Dreaming. Dreaming.

--endofmarch

"Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring--it was peace."

--Milan Kundera

"I find it a huge strain to be responsible for my tastes and be known and defined by them."

--Jonathan Franzen, 'Strong Motion'

"Imagine that human existence is defined by an Ache: the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe; of our desires forever outnumbering our means of satisfying them."

--Jonathan Franzen, 'How to Be Alone: Essays'

"Nothing got inside the head without becoming pictures."

--Jonathan Franzen, 'The Corrections'

“I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.”

--Franz Kafka

“Pick what you love to do, and the success will come.”

--Rachel Zoe

“Who am I? I am who I am and tomorrow someone else entirely. You are too nostalgic, you want memory to secure you, console you. The past is a bore. What matters is only oneself and what one creates from what one has learned. Imagination uses what it needs and discards the rest.”

--Janet Fitch

“That was the thing about words, they were clear and specific—chair, eye, stone—but when you talked about feelings, words were too stiff, they were this and not that, they couldn’t include all the meanings. In defining, they always left something out.”

--Janet Fitch

“I travel light. I think the most important thing is to be in a good mood and enjoy life, wherever you are.”

--Diane Von Furstenberg

"She thought with a sort of pride that she had no place anywhere. Normal people think I belong with them. But I couldn’t stay an hour among them. I need to live out there, on the other side of the wall. But they don’t want me there."

--Jean-Paul Sartre, 'The Room'

"My business is words. Words are like labels, or coins, or better, like swarming bees. I confess I am only broken by sources of things; as if words were counted like dead bees in the attic, unbuckled from their yellow eyes and their dry wings. I must always forget how one word is able to pick out another, to manner another, until I have got something I might have said… but did not."

--Anne Sexton

I will never crack my knuckles again.

2010-10-14T13:44:00.002-05:00

I haven’t a bone in my body that doesn’t speak in whispers, they all grind and crack as if they are trying to communicate with one another, sending electric shocks through a system of wiring in my body to convey subliminal messages under my skin. My joints are land mines, I can see it now, a crack of a knuckle and suddenly a thousand anatomical secrets come pouring from the creases in my palm. What a spectacle, what a sight, a fit of magic to move myself to believe in a higher power. What a thrill, what a mess, to have secrets all over the floor at my feet, but for their electricity to die out before they can even reach the ground. A dead spark, a wet match, a short circuit. What’s the use? I would rather keep the static stored. To achieve this, I will have to cusp my hands together lightly, I will have to be careful not to crack my spine too rapidly, or a mess of electric shock might come bursting out of my neck. I will have to be gentle and fragile and tender, because these secrets my cells tell one another can burn holes into the back of someone’s head, can strip me of my sense of common things, can leave just as quickly as it comes. I will be quiet, I will listen and I will catch the slight buzz that occurs at each point of concentration, and I will not create a crack. I will never crack my knuckles again.
--Lexi Mire

aisle nine

2010-10-13T23:06:00.002-05:00

these things are always broken into halves. they’re never whole or sated or completely there. it’s always half-empty and craving. there are parts of this that i’ve kept because maybe i was too selfish to let them belong to the backseat of your friend’s car or at the foot of your bed or in some abandoned moment you’d forget about later when the feelings were slender with all of their petals picked. the kinds of things i wish i could have just left with you because maybe then that would mean they weren’t that important to me. and when i tip toed across your hardwood floors i stood in the cracked door way for a second just fucking marveling at the way the whole place smelled like you. i know this is dangerous. i feel it too. i know that it’s volatile and uncompromising. and i know about pressing up against the rules just enough to crack them without letting them break. i know about letting the boundaries bend when they should have had you folded already. i know that sometimes you want pieces of people even though it’s erratic and impulsive and the consequences are heavy and waiting. so we try our hardest to walk into other empty spaces where we can let ourselves love someone quietly and without this shell shocked quality and we’re careful not to touch in splintering places where we’re swallowed in all the soft yellow noise. because sometimes you accidentally want people that just aren’t right for you. but sometimes you fill in the gaps with your own cracks and you say in soundless moments “okay. i’m in.”
--likelava

The bitter so bitter you gave up the sweet.

2010-10-09T19:15:00.002-05:00

“We’re too much ourselves. Afraid of letting go of what we are in case we’re nothing, and holding on so tight we lose everything else.”

--Clive Barker

“There’s power in numbers. It takes a village. Say it however you want, but the truth is that we cannot go through this life alone. Some of us are lucky enough to be born in the vicinity of our tribe; others will have to travel far and wide it, as I did. But I truly believe that whoever you are…there’s a place for you to fit in… The road to your dreams is sometimes dark, and it’s sometimes magical, but The Wizard of Oz had one thing right: it’s ultimately about the journey and the characters who accompany you on it, not about the destination.”

--Kelly Cutrone

"This is an important lesson to remember when you're having a bad day, a bad month, or a shitty year. Things will change: you won't feel this way forever. And anyway, sometimes the hardest lessons to learn are the ones your soul needs most. I believe you can't feel real joy unless you've felt heartache. You can't have a sense of victory unless you know what it means to fail. You can't know what it's like to feel holy until you know what it's like to feel really fucking evil. And you can't be birthed again until you've died."

--Kelly Cutrone, 'If You Have to Cry, Go Outside: And Other Things Your Mother Never Told You'

"After all, you can't truly be happy if you've never known pain. You can't truly feel joy if you've never felt heartbreak. You can't know what it's like to be filled unless you've been empty."

--Kelly Cutrone, 'If You Have to Cry, Go Outside: And Other Things Your Mother Never Told You'

“Growth demands a temporary surrender of security.”

--Gail Sheehy

Once again, she asked me what I meant. And again, my heart was in my words, but the explanation made no sense. Typical me.

“Where’s my heart at? Aw. Um, in my chest. I think it’s in there—on the right hand side. Sometimes it’s in my mouth and sometimes I can feel it in my stomach, when I get really nervous. So it’s pretty physical.”

--Florence Welch, when asked where her heart is at

What people don't understand about being a genius

Is that it is hard

It creeps inside of you and you can't relate

The world is the thing you cannot master

You really can't

You try to work for people

You let the people down

--Dorothea Lasky, 'Own Life'

"It’s only when you’ve lost someone that you realize the nonsense of that phrase “It’s a small world”. It isn’t. It’s a vast, devouring world, especially if you’re alone."

--Clive Barker, 'Books of Blood 2'

"That was what she really wanted. To forget so thoroughly she'd never have another memory again, the bitter so bitter you gave up the sweet."

--Janet Fitch, 'Paint It Black'

"Here, here is my dark world. You carry it for a change. I'm out."

--Janet Fitch

"I wonder which is preferable, to walk around all your life swollen up with your own secrets until you burst from the pressure of them, or to have them sucked out of you, every paragraph, every sentence, every word of them, so at the end you’re depleted of all that was once as precious to you as hoarded gold, as close to you as your skin - everything that was of the deepest importance to you, everything that made you cringe and wish to conceal, everything that belonged to you alone - and must spend the rest of your days like an empty sack flapping in the wind, an empty sack branded with a bright fluorescent label so that everyone will know what sort of secrets used to be inside you?"

--Margaret Atwood

"She was extending a hand that I didn’t know how to take, so I broke its fingers with my silence."

--Jonathan Safran Foer

"I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. There is not any part of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surfaces of the water."

--D. H. Lawrence

“I have no advice for anybody; except to, you know, be awake enough to see where you are at any given time, and how that is beautiful, and has poetry inside. Even places you hate.”

--Jeff Buckley

"Your head’s like mine, like all our heads; big enough to contain every god and devil there ever was. Big enough to hold the weight of oceans and the turning stars. Whole universes fit in there! But what do we choose to keep in this miraculous cabinet? Little broken things, sad trinkets that we play with over and over. The world turns our key and we play the same little tune again and again and we think that tune’s all we are."

--Grant Morrison, 'The Invisibles'

"Believe me, nothing is more beautiful than to carry out crazy ideas. I’d like my whole life to be one single crazy idea."

--Milan Kundera, 'Farewell Waltz'

there are no legible signs

2010-10-09T19:05:00.002-05:00

everything out of context starts to get so strange. drinking the kind of coffee that i used to hate, finding the little pile of change you pulled from out my pockets before you did the laundry, noticing the smell of smoke on my fingers and it smells safe, it smells like a sort of home i’ve always known. october came quick and it feels so familiar and so different. sometimes these things just sort of sneak up on you. when you realize you’re not seventeen anymore. when you walk into a room full of people and for once you’re not questioning whether they notice you - whether they should notice you, whether they notice you noticing them, and the endless list of who am i and who are they and more importantly who am i to them. when you’re doing things that scare you because maybe these are the things that help make you. when you still love a boy that’s not a stranger anymore, when he still loves you even though he’s seen you without your hair brushed or a shirt on or in his jeans the next morning when you go to grab the paper or right after you cried because things got hard and you weren’t ready. these things just sneak up on you. when you realize that all this time you were so used to life building it’s self around you and suddenly one day it occurs to you that maybe you’ve been building your own all along.
--likelava

The sun made me feel like a restless country girl even though I'd never been on a farm.

2010-10-09T14:09:00.002-05:00

All quotes by author Michelle Tea

"Maybe if everyone walked around being in touch with each other’s hidden pain it could work out and even be beautiful, but it doesn’t feel safe to be the only compassionate person on the planet."

--'Rose of No Man’s Land'

"You try to be good, to be good and loving and nice and not hard, not tough, a sweet nice girl, not ugly, not full of ugliness, but people make it impossible."

"You are right where you should be

now act like it"

--'The Beautiful: Collected Poems'

"This is growing up, having to stomp out love, this is how people turn terrible."

"How do you make a girl know she's beautiful? What is the system for that, what do you show her, how do you give her a new set of eyes and turn her face back to the mirror?"

"it just breaks

a man's heart, watching

a girl so involved with her life,

without him like that."

"We entered the cool cave of the practice space with all the long-haired, goateed boys stoned on clouds of pot and playing with power tools. I tossed my fluffy coat into the hollow of my bass drum and lay on the carpet with my worn newspaper. A shirtless boy came in and told us he had to cut the power for a minute, and I thought about being alone in the cool black room with Joey. Let's go smoke, she said, and I grabbed the cigarettes off the amp. She started talking to me about Wonder Woman. I feel like something big is happening, but I don't know what to do about it. With The Straight Girl? I asked in the blankest voice possible. With everything. Back in the sun we walked to the edge of the parking lot where a black Impala convertible sat, rusted and rotting, looking like it just got dredged from a swamp. Rainwater pooling on the floor. We climbed up onto it and sat our butts backward on the edge of the windshield, feet stretched into the front seat. Before she even joined the band, I would think of her each time I passed the car, the little round medallions with the red and black racing flags affixed to the dash. On the rusting Chevy, Joey told me about her date the other night with a girl she used to like who she maybe liked again. How her heart was shut off and it felt pretty good. How she just wanted to play around with this girl and that girl and this girl and I smoked my cigarette and went Uh-Huh. The sun made me feel like a restless country girl even though I'd never been on a farm. I knew what I stood for, even if nobody else did. I knew the piece of me on the inside, truer than all the rest, that never comes out. Doesn't everyone have one? Some kind of grand inner princess waiting to toss her hair down, forever waiting at the tower window. Some jungle animal so noble and fierce you had to crawl on your belly through dangerous grasses to get a glimpse. I gave Joey my cigarette so I could unlace the ratty green laces of my boots, pull them off, tug the linty wool tights off my legs. I stretched them pale over the car, the hair springing like weeds and my big toenail looking cracked and ugly. I knew exactly who I was when the sun came back and the air turned warm. Joey climbed over the hood of the car, dusty black, and said Let's lie down, I love lying in the sun, but there wasn't any sun there. We moved across the street onto the shining white sidewalk and she stretched out, eyes closed. I smoked my cigarette, tossed it into the gutter and lay down beside her. She said she was sick of all the people who thought she felt too much, who wanted her to be calm and contained. Who? I asked. All the flowers, the superheroes. I thought about how she had kissed me the other night, quick and hard, before taking off on a date in her leather chaps, hankies flying, and I sat on the couch and cried at everything she didn't know about how much I liked her, and someone put an arm around me and said, You're feeling things, that's good. Yeah, I said to Joey on the sidewalk, I Feel Like I Could Calm Down Some. Awww, you're perfect. She flipped her hand over and touched my head. Listen, we're barely here at all, I wanted to tell her, rolling over, looking into her face, we're barely here at all and everything goes so fast can't you just kiss me? My eyes were shut and the cars sounded close when they passed. The sun was weak but it baked the grime on my skin and made it smell delicious. A little kid smell. We sat up to pop some candy into our mouths, and then Joey lay her head on my lap, spent from sugar and coffee. Her arm curled back around me and my fingers fell into her slippery hair. On the February sidewalk that felt like spring."

there's got to be something better than in the middle

2010-10-05T21:23:00.001-05:00

i write these lullabies for sleepy towns, about how the people in them are careful secrets buried with their half-naked feelings, their unspoken word poetry. i smoke cigarettes when no one else is around, blowing smoke in the direction of some stranger’s ghosts, remembering the time i walked across the golden gate bridge and how cold san francisco was in july. that was the summer when i lost the flecks of light that used to hide in the dark parts of your careful eyes. last fall i still felt the smirk of potential hanging around here. but then you left and sometimes i think about driving by the place where we used to climb through windows and dream under those soft mississippi sounds. there’s something dangerous about a person who reminds you of yourself. but there’s also something dangerous about never doing the stupid things. never believing in shooting stars and wish bones and mood rings, in regretting the thought that maybe you could be anything you’d let yourself be. have we always been this broke without ever knowing it? have i always been this punch drunk and left-turned when a pink knuckled sunrise has me hoping all the planets just aligned, has me thinking we could cast our shadow puppets where the past forgot where it belonged. we crushed the night’s bones between our palms touching saying “fuck it,” and my dress hung wet and cold above the shore with my ankles shaking right next to yours when you told me “i think that if you touched me right now you could feel my nightmares.” everything used to always be a helpless secret away from smacking together right in front of our young and proud faces. and i’ve got a lot of secrets, these half naked feelings i kept even when the moment left and you were already getting with new people while i lingered on for just a little bit longer. i have a lot of dark places none of you will ever know about. i’m crowded and overshadowed with ghosts, with these burning words kaleidescoped on to quiet parts of me. and i’m afraid of a lot of things, i carelessly burn through moments when i could have felt something, moments where maybe in the middle we could have felt the same thing. but i’ve got a lot of loose teeth for memories and i’m always pulling at them just to remember they can still bleed. and i’m always squinting at the dust inbetween the stars thinking “that’s what i’m made of, what am i so afraid of.” i’m afraid of miscalls and mistakes that won’t make me into the person i want to be but will keep me between the same set of goddamn parenthesis i’ve been trapped between since i turned seventeen. i’m afraid of the dark parts of me none of you have ever seen. i’m afraid of a lot of things. and i just need to know that i’m not just some careful secrets, i’m not just unspoken word poetry. i need to know that i am my potential, i am my own ellipses, and i can still become whatever i am willing to be.
--likelava

blue mornings, and keeping you in mind.

2010-10-01T18:51:00.002-05:00

I am a blue morning ripe and tired. The universe caught itself in the tangles of my hair and I know not how to get it out, so we struggle with one another. I am a cigarette, half-smoked, discarded early on—before I could blacken a lung or mutate a cell. In my dreams I am stretch armstrong with arms so long I can reach you. Oh, the Rockies are blocking my ears with built up clouds, but I can still feel you pulling there at the center of my chest. Coffeehouse crybaby, backyard saint, midnight warrior, barely joyous broken thing. We share the same troubled hopes, the same winking sky. Once, I wrote a poem on my tongue so you couldn’t see it, because I wanted you to taste it. Foolish me, I suppose I should have known that your lips would never meet mine. I’ve made so many promises that I’ll come find you—get to you—that I worry I might spend the rest of my life in transit. Not an obligation, but a voluntary movement. I am a heart. I am a cloudy head for thinking. Brick wall, waterfall, backlot demon calling my name. You said you hated the way that everything always feels so melancholy and I shot a silent prayer to my darkened ceiling that you would find your smile.

I was never taught to keep things at arms length, so when I see a spark, a flame, a flash, a silent moon glowing in the midnight sky, I am always trying to wrap my arms around it or swallow it whole. I’m either falling in love with strangers and daydreaming about running away or crying my pillowcases black and giving up. I would throw out my back if it meant carrying your troubles—eternal optimist with her feet dipped in something resembling the realistic. I want the best for everyone I’ve ever met and cry over broken hearts that aren’t my own. She told me that it was just an excuse to forget about my own problems, and hell, you know, she was probably right but I don’t think I can stop wanting to try and make you smile. I was taught to love with everything I’ve got, to bear the troubles of the people whose names I hold in my heart. I do not know any better—I only know that you are worth my creaking knees and aching back. It’s a preoccupation or perhaps a long-standing romance with the entire Universe. Always falling for underdogs and stars right on the brink of burning out because there’s something attractive in their glow. There’s just something so attractive in their glow. I wrote this keeping you in mind, I hope you know.
--jenna2step

Talking to people makes me feel like sleeping.

2010-10-01T18:46:00.002-05:00

“When small drops began to fall and darken the world in penny-shaped circles, no one around him scurried for cover. For lonely people, rain is a chance to be touched.”

--Simon Van Booy, 'The Secret Lives of People in Love: Stories'

"Language is like looking at a map of somewhere. Love is living there and surviving on the land."

--Simon Van Booy

"When obliged to exert myself, I am ignorant what to do! when forced to speak, I am at a loss for words; and if any one looks at me, I am instantly out of countenance. If animated with my subject, I express my thoughts with ease, but, in ordinary conversations, I can say nothing- absolutely nothing; and, being obliged to speak, renders them insupportable."

--The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Book 1.

"What if a demon were to creep after you one night, in your loneliest loneliness, and say, this life which you live must be lived by you once again and innumerable times more; and every pain and joy and thought and sigh must come again to you, all in the same sequence. The eternal hourglass will again and again be turned and you with it, dust of the dust! Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse that demon? Or would you answer, never have I heard anything more divine?"

--Friedrich Nietzsche

“She’s never where she is,” I said. “She’s only inside her head.”

--'White Oleander'

“Thus inevitably does the universe wear our color, and every object fall successively into the subject itself. The subject exists, the subject enlarges; all things sooner or later fall into place. As I am, so I see; use what language we will, we can never say anything but what we are.”

--Emerson

“Why do I torture myself by keeping it all a big secret?”

--Helga G. Pataki

“You grow up readin’ about pirates and cowboys and spacemen and stuff, and jus’ when you think the world’s all full of amazin’ things, they tell you it’s really all dead whales and chopped-down forests and nucular waste hangin’ about for millions of years.”

--Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, 'Good Omens'

Once a year, she remembers that she is insignificant. Then she forgets again, because more than she is insignificant, she is forgetful.

"Isolation has carved me in its image and likeness. The presence of another person - of any person whatsoever - instantly slows down my thinking, and while for a normal man contact with others is a stimulus to spoken expression and wit, for me it is a counterstimulus, if this compound word be linguistically permissible. When all by myself, I can think of all kinds of clever remarks, quick comebacks to what no one said, and flashes of witty sociability with nobody. But all of this vanishes when I face someone in the flesh: I lose my intelligence, I can no longer speak, and after half an hour I just feel tired. Yes, talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly and imaginary friends, only the conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real and substantial, and in them intelligence gleams like an image in a mirror.”

--Bernardo Soares, 'The Book of Disquiet' - Entry 49

“I hate listening to people’s dreams. It’s like flipping through a stack of photographs. If I’m not in any of them, and nobody’s having sex, I just… don’t care.”

--'It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia'

“To understand me, you’ll have to swallow a world.”

--Salman Rushdie

"I don't think I'm tangible to myself. I mean, I think one thing today and I think another thing tomorrow. I change during the course of a day. I wake up and I'm one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I'm somebody else. I don't know who I am most of the time. It doesn't even matter to me."

--Bob Dylan