“I’m not saying that at some point love isn’t staying up until 2am phone calls or stealing kisses when you least expect it, or instantly falling for each other’s favorite songs because it is, or at least that’s what the lead up to it feels like, but real love, is so much more. It’s going out at 12am to get something to eat for your wife who can’t get out of bed, it’s listening to them as they explode with vulnerability on your living room couch talking about how they were only so young when their parents passed on. It’s remembering how someone likes their coffee in the morning without asking—without ever asking, it’s visiting someone in the hospital knowing the last thing you want to do is see them in that condition, it’s wanting to be with that person despite everything, the future, the past, and everything in between, it’s the intimate things that you don’t even realize involve such intimacy, but they do, in secret, like the pinky promises you two made behind your back, to love one another for always, in the time you thought you were in love, when you were actually just on your way to it.”
--52hearts

I want to be somebody’s favorite hiding place

“That’s what people do who love you. They put their arms around you and love you when you’re not so lovable.”

--Deb Caletti

“Sometimes you’ve got to be able to listen to yourself and be okay with no one else understanding.”

--Christopher Barzak

“Gracious, soft-voiced girls, who were brought up on memories instead of money.”

--F Scott Fitzgerald, 'The Ice Palace'

"Don’t be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen."

--George Saunders

“I’m the kind of person who likes to be by himself. To put a finer point on it, I’m the type of person who doesn’t find it painful to be alone. I find spending an hour or two every day running alone, not speaking to anyone, as well as four or five hours alone at my desk, to be neither difficult nor boring. I’ve had this tendency ever since I was young, when, given a choice, I much preferred reading books on my own or concentrating on listening to music over being with someone else. I could always think of things to do by myself.”

--Haruki Murakami, 'What I Talk About When I Talk About Running'

“We gotta start teaching our daughters to be somebodies instead of somebody’s.”

--Kifah Shah

“Lately I’ve been thinking about who I want to love, and how I want to love, and why I want to love the way I want to love, and what I need to learn to love that way, and who I need to become to become the kind of love I want to be…and when I break it all down, when I whittle it into a single breath, it essentially comes out like this: Before I die, I want to be somebody’s favorite hiding place, the place they can put everything they know they need to survive, every secret, every solitude, every nervous prayer, and be absolutely certain I will keep it safe. I will keep it safe.”

--Andrea Gibson

Fall in love with the back of your cereal box.

“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.”

--Edward Abbey

“I believe in the power of words, the heat that whiskey settles into my being, and that god willing there is a man out there that will love all the good and bad that is inside me.”

--Kat Keegan

“What on earth can you do on this earth but catch at whatever comes near you, with both your hands, until your fingers are broken?”

--Tennessee Williams

“Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.”

--Ernest Hemmingway

“It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living, I want to know what you ache for. It doesn’t interest me how old you are, I want to know if you are willing to risk looking like a fool for love, for your dreams, for the adventure of being alive. I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine. It doesn’t interest me where you live or how rich you are, I want to know if you can get up after a night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and be sweet to the ones you love. I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and truly like the company you keep in the empty moments of your life.”

--Jon Blais

“I know it sounds a little fussy and a little ridiculous, but finding your own rhythm is one of the most important things you can discover about yourself. And you have to observe it. As actors, we’re all encouraged to feel that each job is the last job. They plant some little electrode in your head at an early stage and you think, Be grateful, be grateful, be grateful. So, it’s not without a sense of gratitude that I work. But I couldn’t do this work at all unless I did it in my own rhythm. It became a choice between stopping and taking the time I needed."

--Daniel Day-Lewis

“It’s not hard to decide what you want your life to be about. What’s hard, she said, is figuring out what you’re willing to give up in order to do the things you really care about.”

--Shauna Niequist, 'Bittersweet'

“You’ll open me up like an orange, leaving a mess of pulp and sticky peels everywhere. Certain parts of my personality will be extracted and I’ll find myself feeling stuff I never knew was possible. It’s strange to think how many things we’re capable of without really knowing it until we have a proper catalyst — something or someone to bring it to the surface. Dig, dig, dig. No, you might need to dig a little deeper. I have a lot of crap sticking on top of the good stuff.”

--I want to know you, thought catalog

“Good taste, I am convinced, can be acquired through environment and education; the eye can be disciplined to differentiate between good and bad by a constant looking process.”

--Stanley Marcus

“She had not simply assured him that she loved him, but had gone so far—in answer to his question, what she loved him for—as to explain what for. She told him that she loved him because she understood him completely, because she knew what he would like, and because everything he liked was good. And this seemed to him perfectly clear.”

--Leo Tolstoy, 'Anna Karenina'

““Think how you love me,” she whispered. “I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember.” “You’ll always be like this to me.” “Oh no; but promise me you’ll remember.” Her tears were falling. “I’ll be different, but somewhere lost inside me there’ll always be the person I am tonight.””

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

“Pay attention, don’t let life go by you. Fall in love with the back of your cereal box.”

--Jerry Seinfeld

“We are very good at preparing to live, but not very good at living. We know how to sacrifice ten years for a diploma, and we are willing to work very hard to get a job, a car, a house, and so on. But we have difficulty remembering that we are alive in the present moment, the only moment there is for us to be alive.”

--Thich Nhat Hanh

"The most important thing in life, is to do what you love -- and what makes you happy. At the end of the day, your actions should reflect your -- Your business, your music, your photography, your friends -- your life."

--Andre Supa

Take it from me - choke those little bad days. Choke ‘em down to nothing.

“Everyone who terrifies you is sixty-five percent water. And everyone you love is made of stardust, and I know sometimes you cannot even breathe deeply, and the night sky is no home, and you have cried yourself to sleep enough times that you are down to your last two percent, but nothing is infinite, not even loss. You are made of the sea and the stars, and one day you are going to find yourself again.”

--Finn Butler

“There’s nothing more intimate in life than simply being understood… And understanding someone else.”

--Brad Meltzer, 'The Inner Circle'

“March 4th, the only day that is also a sentence”

--John Green

“Someone said, ‘You never regret a baby or a swim,’ and I always think that about a walk, as well.”

--Nigella Lawson

“Don’t plant your bad days. They grow into weeks. The weeks grow into months. Before you know it, you got yourself a bad year. Take it from me - choke those little bad days. Choke ‘em down to nothing.”

--Tom Waits

“In the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you.”

--Buddhist Saying

“The chicest thing is when you don’t exist on Google.”

--Phoebe Philo

“When I first met you, I felt a kind of contradiction in you. You’re seeking something, but at the same time, you are running away for all you’re worth.”

--Haruki Murakami

“Get all dressed up, do [your] makeup, and stay at home.”

--Andre Leon Talley, on the most decadent thing a person could do

“You must love in such a way that the person you love feels free.”

--Thich Nhat Hanh

“Only the strong go crazy. The weak just go along.”

--Assata Shakur

“The moment you fall in love feels like it has centuries behind it, generations - all of them rearranging themselves so this precise, remarkable intersection could happen. In your heart, in your bones, no matter how silly you know it is, you feel that everything has been leading to this, all the secret arrows were pointing here, the universe and time itself crafted this long ago, and you are just now realizing it, you are just now arriving at the place you were always meant to be.”

--David Levithan, 'Every Day'

“I notice you, I want to say. Even when no one else does, I do. I will.”

--David Levithan, 'Every Day'

“You’ll need coffee shops and sunsets and road trips. Airplanes and passports and new songs and old songs, but people more than anything else. You will need other people and you will need to be that other person to someone else, a living breathing screaming invitation to believe better things.”

--Jamie Tworkowski

“This is the real secret of life—to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.”

--Alan Watts

“You should bring something into the world that wasn’t in the world before. It doesn’t matter what that is. It doesn’t matter if it’s a table or a film or gardening — everyone should create. You should do something, then sit back and say, “I did that.”

--Ricky Gervais

“Don’t chase money, or fame, or power. Enjoy cultivating friendships, earn respect by showing respect, and be happy. A business is only as strong as its people, and it is in relationships that life finds true value.”

--Ethan Newton

Life just swallows you up, doesn't it?

All quotes by author Simon Van Booy

“He thinks I suffer from depression. But I’m just quiet. Solitude and depression are like swimming and drowning. In school many years ago, I learned that flowers sometimes unfold inside themselves.” 

--'Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories'

“You were unsure which pain is worse -- the shock of what happened or the ache for what never will.” 

--'Everything Beautiful Began After'

“I want to do things for people they will never forget. Maybe that’s the best thing I can do in life.” 

--'The Secret Lives of People in Love'

“The most significant conversations of our lives occur in silence.” 

--'Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories'

“I don’t see the point of truth anymore, it causes just as much heartbreak as lying.” 

--'The Secret Lives of People in Love'

“We see in others what we want and what we fear.” 

--'Everything Beautiful Began After'

“For some people, life is the process of knocking through walls to get out. For others, it is the building of walls.” 

--'The Secret Lives of People in Love'

“Hands have their own language.” 

“Coincidences mean you're on the right path.” 

--'Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories'

“Actually, years mean nothing. It's what's inside them.” 

--'Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories'

“Love requires imagination more than experience.” 

--'Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories'

“The love of a man is like a drop of color into something clear.” 

--'Everything Beautiful Began After'

“Should you ever feel too lonely...listen for the roar of the sea - for in it are all those who've been and all those who are to come.” 

--'The Coming and Going of Strangers'

“It’s true the people we meet shape us. But the people we don’t meet shape us also, often more because we have imagined them so vividly. There are people we yearn for but never seem to meet.” 

--'The Secret Lives of People in Love'

“I want to feel it somehow happened like that because things happen for a reason. I want to believe this more than anything because if it were just an accident, then God must have died before he could finish the world.” 

--'The Secret Lives of People in Love'

“You can’t put a price on the rituals of love, because you never know what will happen next. I suppose fear is part of the excitement and we can’t have one without the other.” 

--'Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories'

“But sometimes, when confronted by something of unfathomable beauty, the bars of the cage around us begin to tremble. So I ran away to protect myself and remained a prisoner.” 

--'The Secret Lives of People in Love'

“I suppose the key to a good life is to gently overlook the truth and hope that at any moment we can all be reborn.” 

--'The Secret Lives of People in Love'

“Life just swallows you up, doesn't it? Just swallows you up with its everyday things.” 

--'The Secret Lives of People in Love'

Love is not about possession. Love is about appreciation.

“Let someone love you just the way you are – as flawed as you might be, as unattractive as you sometimes feel, and as unaccomplished as you think you are. To believe that you must hide all the parts of you that are broken, out of fear that someone else is incapable of loving what is less than perfect, is to believe that sunlight is incapable of entering a broken window and illuminating a dark room.”

--Marc Hack

“People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that’s what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A soul mate’s purpose is to shake you up, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light can get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you have to transform your life…”

--Unknown

“I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do.”

--Audre Lorde

“I don’t know a perfect person. I only know flawed people who are still worth loving.”

--John Green

“The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.”

--Ernest Hemingway

“If there is such a thing as marriage, it takes place long before the ceremony: in a car on the way to the airport; or as a gray bedroom fills with dawn, one lover watching the other; or as two strangers stand together in the rain with no bus in sight, arms weighed down with shopping bags. You don’t know then. But later you realize — that was the moment. And always without words.”

--Simon Van Booy, 'Love Begins in Winter'

“We were together. I forget the rest.”

--Walt Whitman

“Eventually soulmates meet, for they have the same hiding place.”

--Robert Brault

“At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.”

--Albert Schweitzer

“I have been loving you a little more every minute since this morning.”

--Victor Hugo, 'Les Misérables'

“‎One of the deepest feminine pleasures is when a man stands full, present, and unreactive in the midst of his woman’s emotional storms. When he stays present with her, and loves her through the layers of wildness and closure, then she feels his trustability, and she can relax…”

--Osho

“If you love a flower, don’t pick it up. Because if you pick it up it dies and it ceases to be what you love. So if you love a flower, let it be. Love is not about possession. Love is about appreciation.”

--Osho

“We all have the potential to fall in love a thousand times in our lifetime. It’s easy. The first girl I ever loved was someone I knew in sixth grade. Her name was Missy; we talked about horses. The last girl I love will be someone I haven’t even met yet, probably. They all count. But there are certain people you love who do something else; they define how you classify what love is supposed to feel like. These are the most important people in your life, and you’ll meet maybe four or five of these people over the span of 80 years. But there’s still one more tier to all this; There is always one person you love who becomes that definition. It usually happens retrospectively, but it happens eventually. This is the person who unknowingly sets the template for what you will always love about other people, even if some of these loveable qualities are self-destructive and unreasonable. The person who defines your understanding of love is not inherently different than anyone else, and they’re often just the person you happen to meet the first time you really, really, want to love someone. But that person still wins. They win, and you lose. Because for the rest of your life they will control how you feel about everyone else.”

--Chuck Klosterman, 'Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story'

The People You Will Fall In Love With In Your 20s

You will fall in love with someone who annoys you, whose orgasm face looks and feels pathetic. Despite all of this, there’s something keeping you drawn to them, something that makes you want to protect them from the harsh world. What you fail to realize, however, is that you are the harsh world. You aren’t their noble protector — you are someone to be protected from but it takes a lot of dates, a lot of nights where you question whether or not you are actually a good person, for this to ever resonate with you. When it’s over and whatever love is left is put back in the fridge like a sad plate of leftovers, you will finally understand that you have the power to hurt someone. You can either hurt them or love them and it’s up to you to decide what kind of role you would like to take on in future relationships. What feels more comfortable — being the one who loves more or being the one who’s loved less?

You will fall in love with someone who’s cold and always seemingly pushing you away. When all is said and done, they will be forever known as the one person you couldn’t get to love you. Unfortunately, it will hurt and sting worse than the good ones, the ones that chopped up your meat for you and picked out an eyelash from your eye and were nice to your mother, because love often feels like a game we need to win. And when we lose, when we realize we couldn’t get what we ultimately desired from a person, it makes us feel like a failure and erases all the memories of those who loved us in the past. It’s a permanent smudge on your love resume.

You will fall in love with someone for one night and one night only. They’ll come to you when you need them and be gone in the morning when you don’t. At first, this will make you feel empty and you’ll try to convince yourself that you could’ve loved this person for longer than a night, but you can’t. Some people are just meant to make cameo appearances, some are destined to be a pithy footnote. That’s okay though. Not every person we love has to stick around. Sometimes it’s better to leave while you’re still ahead. Sometimes it’s better to leave before you get unloved.

You will fall in love with the old couple down the street because to you they represent the impossible: a stable, long-lasting love. You’re trying to get someone to like you for more than ten minutes. A monogamous “never get sick of ya” love seems unfathomable. “What’s your secret, sir? Do you just say yes a lot?”

You will fall in love with smells, the good and the bad kind. You will want to wear your lovers shirt because it makes you feel close to them and you’re okay with being that PYSCHO who is legitimately sniffing their shirt in public. You will fall in love with sweat, certain perfumes, the smell of the season in which you fell in love. This particular love smells like fall. It smells like Halloween and a roaring fire and leaves and fog and mist and candy and food and family and whiskey and sex and the lint that collects on sweaters. When it ends, if it ends, you will never experience another fall without thinking of him, her, it. The memories will stick to the ground like a mound of leaves and will only dissipate when the weather drops.

You will fall in love with your friends. Deep, passionate love. You will create a second family with them, a kind of tribe that makes you feel less vulnerable. Sometimes our families can’t love us all the time. Sometimes we’re born into families who don’t know how to love us properly. They do as much as they can but the rest is up to our friends. They can love you all the time, without judgement. At least the good ones can.

This is where I’m supposed to tell you that you will fall in love with The One, a person who isn’t too cold or too nice. Their “O” face is perfectly fine and they’re not afraid to show how much they love you. This person is supposed to wait for us at the end of the twentysomething road as some kind of reward for all the heartache and loneliness. We deserve them. We’ve earned this kind of love.

So fine. You’re going to fall in love with The One. You’re going to fall in love with someone who will make sense beyond college or a job or a particular season. They’ll make sense forever and won’t ever want to leave you behind. I’m telling you this not because it’s true but because it NEEDS to be true. Everyone is entitled to this kind of love, so why not? Have it. It’s yours. Blow out the candles on your 30th birthday, holding their hand, and let out an exhale that’s been waiting for ten years. Do it. Now.

--Ryan O’Connell

I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life.

"Finding your passion isn't just about careers and money. It's about finding your authentic self. The one you've buried beneath other people's needs."

--Kristin Hannah, 'Distant Shores'

"There is no shame in being hungry for another person. There is no shame in wanting very much to share your life with somebody."

--Augusten Burroughs

“And I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more.”

--Franz Kafka

“For you, a thousand times over.”

Khaled Hosseini, 'The Kite Runner'

“Sorrow is how we learn to love. Your heart isn’t breaking. It hurts because it’s getting larger. The larger it gets, the more love it holds.”

--Rita Mae Brown, 'Riding Shotgun'

“The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.”

--Albert Ellis

"We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures."

--Thornton Wilder

“The end of a trip leaves me with a sad aftertaste the same as the end of a novel… When I am returning from a trip, the best part is not going through the airport or getting home, but the taxi ride in between: you’re still traveling, but not really.”

--Édouard Levé

“I just try things. And the things I like, sometimes they work, and sometimes they don’t. You can look at pictures where I just look terrible. But the older I get, the more I know what works. It’s for the better.”

--Andre3000

“I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life—and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.”

--Georgia O’Keefe

“It’s just that I feel so sad these wonderful nights. I sort of feel they’re never coming again, and I’m not really getting all I could out of them.”

--F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I have more memories than if I’d lived a thousand years.”

--Charles Baudelaire, from “Spleen (II)”, in “The Flowers of Evil”, trans. William Aggeler

“I’ve got a bad case of the 3:00 am guilts - you know, when you lie in bed awake and replay all those things you didn’t do right? Because, as we all know, nothing solves insomnia like a nice warm glass of regret, depression and self-loathing.”

--D.D. Barant, 'Dying Bites'

“If you read one book a week, starting at the age of 5, and live to be 80, you will have read a grand total of 3,900 books, a little over one-tenth of 1 percent of the books currently in print.”

--Lewis Buzbee, 'The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop'

“The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.”

--Fernando Pessoa

“Nothing is more alienating to anyone unaccustomed to it than hearing one’s own voice played back on a tape recorder. What the apparatus records - what the objectified ‘others’ hear - is not what resonates inside my head when I speak. The recording makes me conscious that I have no true voice. Instead, I have two voices that do not harmonize, that contradict each other: an interior voice and an exterior one. Others never hear me just as I hear myself. Moreover, this splitting of the voice, or opacity of voice to speaker, can never be directly represented. I can never communicate to another person the sound of my inner voice.”

--Gillian Wearing

Stop being who you were and become who you are.

"Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not."

--James Joyce

"Who ran to help me when I fell,
And would some pretty story tell,
Or kiss the place to make it well?
My mother."
--Ann Taylor

“Home is the result of intersecting lives. It is the secondary color created by individuals in relationships… Yes, home is the landscape of people, places, and things upon which we live out life—but it is mostly about people. That is why home can be a suburban neighborhood, or a struggling farm, or a ship at sea, or a war-torn nation. After all, home is where hearts are.”

--Austin Sailsbury in Kinfolk Magazine, Volume V: In Search of Home

“Your body is the house you grew up in, how dare you try to burn it to the ground.”

--Sierra Demulder

“Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It’s like the tide going out, revealing whatever’s been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future.”

--Margaret Atwood, 'Cat’s Eye'

“Going barefoot is the gentlest way of walking and can symbolize a way of living — being authentic, vulnerable, sensitive to our surroundings. It’s the feeling of enjoying warm sand beneath our toes, or carefully making our way over sharp rocks in the darkness. It’s a way of living that has the lightest impact, removing the barrier between us and nature.”

--Adele Coombs, 'Barefoot Dreaming'

“This is why it hurts the way it hurts. You have too many words in your head. There are too many ways to describe the way you feel. You will never have the luxury of a dull ache. You must suffer through the intricacy of feeling too much.”

--Iain Thomas

“I am very particular about what I like and the way things fit. I think that is the difference between people who are stylish and who aren’t - being very particular.”

--Binki Shapiro for StyleLikeU

“If you had a person in your life treating you the way you treat yourself, you would have gotten rid of them a long time ago.”

--Cheri Huber, 'There Is Nothing Wrong With You'

“That is why it is so important to let certain things go. To release them. To cut loose. People need to understand that no one is playing with marked cards; sometimes we win and sometimes we lose. Don’t expect to get anything back, don’t expect recognition for your efforts, don’t expect your genius to be discovered or your love to be understood. Complete the circle. Not out of pride, inability or arrogance, but simply because whatever it is no longer fits in your life. Close the door, change the record, clean the house, get rid of the dust. Stop being who you were and become who you are.”

--Paulo Coehlo

I like simple things.

“Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures.”

--Henry David Thoreau

“But sometimes you have to be brave. Sometimes you have to show people what’s important in life.”

--Sophie Kinsella, 'I’ve Got Your Number'

“I am learning to see. I don’t know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn’t stop where it once used to.”

--Rainer Maria Rilke

“I’m not trying to do something different, I’m trying to do the same thing but in a different way.”

--Vivienne Westwood

“My dear, I think of you always and at night I build myself a warm nest of things I remember and float in your sweetness till morning.”

--Zelda Fitzgerald to F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1931

“Life is not a having and a getting, but a being and a becoming.”

--Myrna Loy

“Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.”

--Dalai Lama XIV

“I love you and it’s getting worse.”

--Joseph Morris

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

--Starra Neely Blade

“Every season is likeable, and wet days and fine, red wine and white, company and solitude. Even sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life, can be full of dreams; and the most common actions—a walk, a talk, solitude in one’s own orchard—can be enhanced and lit up by the association of the mind. Beauty is everywhere, and beauty is only two finger’s-breadth from goodness.”
--Virginia Woolf, 'Montaigne'

"It is a miracle if you can find true friends, and it is a miracle if you have enough food to eat, and it is a miracle if you get to spend your days and evenings doing whatever it is you like to do, and the holiday season--like all the other seasons--is a good time not only to tell stories of miracles, but to think about the miracles in your own life, and to be grateful for them."

--Lemony Snicket, 'The Lump of Coal'

“But luxury has never appealed to me, I like simple things, books, being alone, or with somebody who understands.”

--Daphne du Maurier

“Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet…”

--Alain de Botton

Enjoy it while it lasts.

“My advice is to go ahead and wear an apron when you’re cooking dinner. Always send a handwritten thank you note on your personal stationary. Enjoy tea served from an actual tea pot. Put your cigarettes in a case. Dream. Dress up when you go out. Be polite. Believe in art and its incredible power to reach across ethnic and social boundaries to enhance our souls. Ditch the handhelds when you’re out. Listen to Mozart. Watch “It Happened One Night”. Live elegantly. And enjoy it while it lasts.”

--Unknown

"You can't help it. Sometimes you just look at someone and realize that they are one of the best things that ever happened in your life."

--Unknown

“You are, at once, both the quiet and the confusion of my heart.”

--Franz Kafka

“Make sure you marry someone who laughs at the same things you do.”

--J.D.Salinger

“Find a woman who makes you feel more alive. She won’t make life perfect but she’ll make it infinitely more interesting. And then love her with all that’s in you.”

--Gayle G. Roper, 'Shadows on the Sand: A Seaside Mystery'

"The number one rule in relationships, from what I hear, is to never just leave."

--Frank Ocean

“In relationships, the little things are the big things.”

--Stephen Covey

“Fight for one another, not with one another.”

--Mark Driscoll

“Why should you worry about the future? You don’t even know the present properly. Take care of the present and the future will take care of itself.”

--Ramana Maharshi

“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.”

--Buddha

“I never change, I simply become more myself.”

--Joyce Carol Oates

“That is why it is so important to let certain things go. To release them. To cut loose. People need to understand that no one is playing with marked cards; sometimes we win and sometimes we lose. Don’t expect to get anything back, don’t expect recognition for your efforts, don’t expect your genius to be discovered or your love to be understood. Complete the circle. Not out of pride, inability or arrogance, but simply because whatever it is no longer fits in your life. Close the door, change the record, clean the house, get rid of the dust. Stop being who you were and become who you are.”

--Paulo Coehlo

Talk about your joys.

“No matter how often I think I can’t stand it anymore, I always do. There is no alternative. I don’t fall, I don’t foam at the mouth, faint, collapse or die. It’s the same for all of us. You can’t get out of the inside of your own head. Something keeps you going. Something always does.”

--Janice Galloway, 'The Trick Is to Keep Breathing'

“Talking about our problems is our greatest addiction. Break the habit, talk about your joys.”

--Rita Schiano

“The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is there’s no ground.”

--Chogyam Trungpa

"And I say to my heart: rave on."

--Mary Oliver

“We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life.”

--Steve Jobs

"Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well worn path."

--Steve Jobs

“To acquire knowledge should not be our first aim, but rather to rid ourselves of ignorance – which is false-knowledge.”

--Wei Wu Wei

“Let me be, was all I wanted. Be what I am, no matter how I am.”

--Henry Miller, 'Stand Still Like the Hummingbird'

“The thing I’m most afraid of is me. Of not knowing what I’m going to do. Of not knowing what I’m doing right now.”

--Haruki Murakami

“What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.”

--Sylvia Plath

“It’s a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can’t eat for eight hours; he can’t drink for eight hours; he can’t make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work.”

--William Faulkner

"The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience."

--Harper Lee, 'To Kill A Mockingbird'

“It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about.”

--Albert Camus

“Being must be felt. It can’t be thought.”

--Eckhart Tolle

“To hell with them. Nothing hurts if you don’t let it.”

--Ernest Hemingway

“We would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright.”

--Ernest Hemingway

"Knowing people is overrated. Understanding people is underrated."

--@sacca

“People inspire you, or they drain you — pick them wisely.”

--Hans F. Hansen

“I don’t want people to matter to me too much. Sometimes it hurts too much to think about them. Ones you love who don’t love you, ones who are dead or hate you, ones who you think about but never get to be with. I like people but when I get too close, it fucks me up and I can’t get things done.”

--Henry Rollins

“Sometimes our light goes out, but is blown again into instant flame by an encounter with another human being.”

--Albert Schweitzer

“There are only so many of us born at a time and we are thrown into the world to find each other, to find the other ones who don’t think you’re strange, who understand your jokes, your smile, the way you talk. There are only so many of us born at a time and we only have so long to find each other before we die. But we have to try.”

--I Wrote This For You

“A soul connection is a resonance between two people who respond to the essential beauty of each other’s individual natures, behind their facades, and who connect on this deeper level. This kind of mutual recognition provides the catalyst for a potent alchemy. It is a sacred alliance whose purpose is to help both partners discover and realize their deepest potentials. While a heart connection lets us appreciate those we love just as they are, a soul connection opens up a further dimension — seeing and loving them for who they could be, and for who we could become under their influence. This means recognizing that we both have an important part to play in helping each other become more fully who we are….A soul connection not only inspires us to expand, but also forces us to confront whatever stands in the way of that expansion.”

--John Welwood

My hair is being pulled by the stars again.

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

--Abraham Hicks

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

--Brad Meltzer

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

--Anaïs Nin

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

--Evan Robertson

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

--John Waters

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

--Unknown

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

--John Green

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

--Ethan Wate, 'Beautiful Chaos'

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

--Rumi

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

--Paulo Coelho

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

--Unknown

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--Paulo Coelho

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

--Jerry Colonna

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

--Heather Anastasiu, 'Glitch'

What is done in love is well done.

“Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.”

--Jack Kerouac, 'The Dharma Bums'

“Millions of people have decided not to be sensitive. They have grown thick skins around themselves just to avoid being hurt by anybody. But it is at great cost. Nobody can hurt them, but nobody can make them happy either.”

--Osho

“Remember one thing always — that there is no cause to be anxious in life, and all causes are just excuses. If you decide not to be anxious, then nothing will make you anxious; there is nothing worth it. Life is such a fleeting phenomenon that is going to disappear one day. Why be bothered too much about it? We are only here for so few days. Just play the game and remain aloof. If one can remain a witness, aloof, distant from things, then anxiety is not possible. Anxiety comes into existence only when we become identified with small things. And they all pass.”

--Osho

“There is no one torturing you except yourself. There is nobody except yourself; your whole life is your work—your creation. Once you grasp this, things start changing…transforming. You can play at changing your hell into heaven, or, if you are in love with misery, create as much as you wish.”

--Osho

“If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.”

--Thomas Merton

“As time goes on, you’ll understand. What lasts, lasts; what doesn’t, doesn’t. Time solves most things. And what time can’t solve, you have to solve yourself.”

--Haruki Murakami, 'Dance, Dance, Dance'

“Chic is knowing how to buy something that will last.”

--Ellen Wallace

“When a woman says, ‘I have nothing to wear!’, what she really means is, ‘There’s nothing here for who I’m supposed to be today.”

--Caitlin Moran, ‘How to be a Woman’

“I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me.”

--Anais Nin

“The less you reveal, the more people can wonder.”

--Emma Watson

“You may think I’m small, but I have a universe in my head.”

--Yoko Ono

"Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary."

--Cecil Beaton

“The truth is undeniably the love of my life, following me in my own tread, helping to keep me up when I falter, and making sure to keep me placed well when my modesty comes up short. & though the truth walks with me aggressively; it is not of my own will or desire. Regardless of how far behind it is, in most cases how ahead, the truth always confronts me. I am always a part of its story, and no matter how many lies I tell, how well I can conceive them or preach them… the truth is always the epilogue of mine.”

--Rakishi, 1956. On Losing My Own Ghosts.

“The artist is by necessity a collector.”

--Paul Rand

“Well, it seems to me that the best relationships - the ones that last - are frequently the ones that are rooted in friendship. You know, one day you look at the person and you see something more than you did the night before. Like a switch has been flicked somewhere. And the person who was just a friend is suddenly the only person you can ever imagine yourself with.”

--Dana Scully, 'The X Files'

"Those who love you are not fooled by mistakes you have made or dark images you hold about yourself. They remember your beauty when you feel ugly; your wholeness when you are broken; your innocence when you feel guilty; and your purpose when you are confused."

--Alan Cohen

“I was beginning to believe that a very few times in your life, if you were lucky, you might meet someone who was exactly right for you. Not because he was perfect, or because you were, but because your combined flaws were arranged in a way that allowed two separate beings to hinge together.”

--Lisa Kleypas, 'Blue-Eyed Devil'

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

--F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Eventually you will come to understand that love heals everything, and love is all there is.”

--Gary Zukav

“My heart is drumming in my chest so hard it aches, but it’s the good kind of ache, like the feeling you get on the first real day of autumn, when the air is crisp and the leaves are all flaring at the edges and the wind smells just vaguely of smoke - like the end and the beginning of something all at once.”

--Lauren Oliver

“Friends were like clothes: Fine while they lasted but eventually they wore thin or you grew out of them.”

--David Nicholls, 'One Day'

“And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected.”

--John Steinbeck, 'East of Eden'

“Give your daughters difficult names. Give your daughters names that command the full use of tongue. My name makes you want to tell me the truth. My name doesn’t allow me to trust anyone that cannot pronounce it right.”

--Warsan Shire

“Our culture has accepted two huge lies. The first is that if you disagree with someone’s lifestyle, you must fear or hate them. The second is that to love someone means you agree with everything they believe or do. Both are nonsense. You don’t have to compromise convictions to be compassionate.”

--Rick Warren

“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.”

--Henry David Thoreau

“Don’t wish me happiness. I don’t expect to be happy all the time… It’s gotten beyond that somehow. Wish me courage and strength and a sense of humor. I will need them all.”

--Anne Morrow Lindbergh

“I’m grateful for anything that reminds me of what’s possible in this life. Books can do that. Films can do that. Music can do that. School can do that. It’s so easy to allow one day to simply follow into the next, but every once in a while we encounter something that shows us that anything is possible, that dramatic change is possible, that something new can be made, that laughter can be shared.”

--Jonathan Safran Foer

“I begin to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life. He taught me that if you are interested in something, no matter what it is, go at it full speed ahead. Embrace it with both arms, hug it, love it and above all become passionate about it. Lukewarm is no good. Hot is no good, either. White hot and passionate is the only thing to be.”

--Roald Dahl, 'My Uncle Oswald'

“It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done.”

--Vincent van Gogh

I want a Tuesday kind of love.

“A Tuesday kind of love is this: commuting to work knowing that someone cares about what you’re going to have for lunch; understanding that you do not have to be your dynamic, charming, weekend self this time; this time you can butcher sentences and make bad jokes and trip over thin air and it won’t change anything. A Tuesday kind of love is when weekends and weekdays are one and the same, expanses of time where unpredictable, irreplaceable closeness exists, swells, bursts. Tuesday is directionless conversation about things that happened five hours or five years ago; it’s knowing where he keeps his receipts and when he has a doctor appointment; it’s ordering Chinese food or taking his parents out for dinner because they’re in town or forgetting to eat because you’re full of each other’s words and there’s just no room for anything else. 

I don’t want to dream through our lives together, don’t want to sleep in, don’t want to put on my sunglasses and pretend that life’s a vacation. The fantasy is that I want to exist in reality; the fantasy is to be there for someone on a Sunday morning but also on a Tuesday night, when the haze and laze of the weekend has worn thin and seems far away as ever. I want a Tuesday kind of love.”

--via

tackle the motherfucking shit out of love.

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

--Julian Barnes, 'Flaubert’s Parrot'

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

--Pete Townshend

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

--Frank Ocean

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

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

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

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

--Syd Barrett

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

--Sophie Kinsella

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

--Stella McCartney

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

--Rachel Roy

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

--Edie Sedgwick

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

--Joseph Campbell

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

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

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

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

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

--Michelle Williams

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

--Michelle Williams

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

--Jewel Kilcher

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

--Cecil B. DeMille

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

--Sonya Sones, 'Stop Pretending'

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

--Tim Kreider

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

--Charles de Lint, 'The Blue Girl'

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

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

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

--Paulo Coelho

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

--Unknown

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

--'One Tree Hill'

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

--Ira Glass

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

--Peace Pilgrim

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

--Cheryl Strayed, 'Tiny Beautiful Things'

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

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

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

--Paulo Coelho

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

--Jonathan Tropper, 'Everything Changes'

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

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

New York

November 10, 1958

Dear Thom:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love,

Fa

Love her, love her, love her!

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

--Ann Aguirre, 'Blue Diablo'

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

--Susane Colasanti, 'So Much Closer'

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

--Haruki Murakami

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

--F. Scott Fitzgerald, 'Magnetism'

“You will always be my always.”

--David Levithan

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

--Charles Dickens, 'Great Expectations'

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

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

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

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

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

--Charles Bukowski

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

--Anais Nin

flowers turn their heads to smell you.

All quotes by Shane Koyczan

“I've been told 

that people in the army 

do more by 7:00 am 

than I do 

in an entire day 

But if I wake 

at 6:59 am 

and turn to you 

to trace the outline of your lips 

with mine 

I will have done enough 

and killed no one 

in the process.”

“And you are worth the time it takes to take the time to get to know you. We've managed to muttle through the awkward stage of I like you and you like me, but when we both finally said 'yes' life became a multiple choice test, not knowing anything we became each others best guess. And, holding your hand is less like exploration and more like discovery. Lady, I don't have to study you to be sure. You're the choice I made before I knew what the other choices were.”

“I don't want to turn any of this into poetry / but / you're so beautiful / flowers turn their heads to smell you.” 

--'Visiting Hours'

“Don't let your luggage define your travels, each life unravels differently.”

“Someone once told me that the finer points of devotion are about the size of a pinhole, and there are millions of them. And if you could connect each dot, then you’ve got a diagram of what you think you thought you knew, and if you’re willing to admit that you know nothing…you have the blueprint for a breakthrough.”

“Don't tell me you're not beautiful. You're the kind of beautiful the blind would see if we could figure out some way to give them three seconds of sight.”

“We so seldom understand each other. But if understanding is neither here nor there, and the universe is infinite, then understand that no matter where we go we will always be smack dab in the middle of nowhere. All we can do is share some piece of ourselves, and hope that it’s remembered. Hope that we meant something to someone.”

Little blades, she was helpless.

“Regardless of any decision made,

i find myself questioning them in hope 

i will see an alternate life.”

--Georgia Whots on Regret, excerpt from 'Last Letters to Ghosts', 1938

“You last only moments and experience too few things.”

--Rakishi, 'Trading Wealth with Wisdom', 1934

“I have always been a wretched speaker. My vocabulary dwells deep in my mind and needs paper to wriggle out into the physical zone. Spontaneous eloquence seems to me a miracle. I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasures.”

--Vladimir Nabokov

“Novels shouldn’t aspire to answer questions, and I wouldn’t presume to offer advice about love or marriage in any case. What’s fascinating to me about marriage as a subject for fiction—a subject that fiction has taken on with gusto since the 19th century—is how unknowable other people’s relationships are. Even the marriages of your parents, your siblings, your closest friends always remain something of a mystery. Only in fiction can you pretend to know people completely.”

--Nell Freudenberger as told to RL Magazine

“I want to be in a relationship where you telling me you love me is just a ceremonious validation of what you already show me.” 

--Steve Maraboli, 'Life, the Truth, and Being Free'

“As I look back on my life, I realize that every time I thought I was being rejected from something good, I was actually being re-directed to something better.”

--Steve Maraboli

“…Imagining it was a mountain, a distant mountain, my goal. As long as I kept walking towards the mountain, I would be alright. And when I truly was not sure what to do I could stop and think about whether it was taking me towards or away from the mountain.”

— Neil Gaiman commencement address

“I don’t suppose I really know you very well - but I know you smell like the delicious damp grass that grows near old walls and that your hands are beautiful opening out of your sleeves and that the back of your head is a mossy sheltered cave when there is trouble in the wind and that my cheek just fits the depression in your shoulder.”

--Zelda Fitzgerald

"All happiness depends on a leisurely breakfast."

--John Gunther

"There is only one success - to be able to spend your life in your own way."

--Christopher Morley

“I don’t think I was homesick. If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.”

--Willa Cather's 'My Antonia'

The shoulder blades

sticking out as if they

wanted to grow wings through

that skin. Little blades,

she was helpless.

--Charles Bukowski

“I came to tell you that you’re beautiful, I think you’re lovely, I think that you’re made for more than you settled for.”

--Levi the Poet

"The personality of a house is indefinable, but there never lived a lady of great cultivation and charm whose home, whether a palace, a farm-cottage or a tiny apartment, did not reflect the charm of its owner."

--Emily Post

“One day, a long time from now, you’ll cease to care any more whom you please or what anybody has to say about you. That’s when you’ll finally produce the work you’re capable of.”

--J.D. Salinger

"The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you're walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That's the moment you may be starting to get it right."

--Neil Gaiman

“Actually that’s my secret — I can’t even talk about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful you are.”

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

“Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.” 

--F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires.” 

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

“I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside. ” 

--F. Scott Fitzgerald