Learn to float.

“Because I know in my life, the movies I watch and the music I listen to and the books I read - those are important to me. It’s very important to me, and I don’t know what I would do without those things. And so to be a part of that exchange is about as meaningful to me as anything I can think of.”

--Joseph Gordon Levitt

''It's good to have money and the things that money can buy, but it's good, too, to check up once in a while and make sure that you haven't lost the things that money can't buy.''

--George Horace Lorimer

"Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better."

--Albert Camus

I feel like when she moves, the time doesn’t.

There is no such thing as bad weather only bad attitudes.

"A man should look as if he had bought his clothes with intelligence, put them on with care, and then forgotten all about them."

--Hardy Amies

"You are the music, while the music lasts."

--T.S. Eliot

"We laughed and laughed, together and separately, out loud and silently, we were determined to ignore whatever needed to be ignored, to build a new world from nothing if nothing in our world could be salvaged, it was one of the best days of my life, a day during which I lived my life and didn’t think about my life at all."

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

“I certainly have not the talent which some people possess of conversing easily with those I have never seen before. I cannot catch their tone of conversation, or appear interested in their concerns, as I often see done.”

--Jane Austen

“It always fascinates me how people go from loving you madly, to nothing at all… nothing. It hurts so much. When I feel someone is going to leave me I have a tendency to break up first before I get to hear the whole thing. Here it is, one more one less, another wasted love story. I really loved this one.”

--Marion, '2 Days in Paris'

“We were just talking about those American Apparel ads. They’re fucking gross, man. Look, I love beautiful girls too. I think everyone should be free to have their knee socks and their sweaty shorts, but I’m over it. I’m over this weird, exhausted girl. I’m over the girl that’s tired and freezing and hungry. I like bossy girls, I always have. I like people filled with life. I’m over this weird media thing with all this, like, hollow-eyed, empty, party crap.”

--Amy Poehler

"Memories mean more to me than dresses."

--Anne Frank

"This is true happiness: to have no ambition and to work like a horse as if you had every ambition. To live far from men, not to need them and yet to love them. To have the stars above, the land to your left and the sea to your right and to realize of a sudden that in your heart, life has accomplished its final miracle: it has become a fairy tale."

--Nikos Kazantzakis

"I am rooted, but I flow."

--Virginia Woolf

"Thoughts are slow and deep and golden in the morning."

--John Steinbeck

"Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside."

--Mark Twain

Learn to float. Both in water and in life.

“Why should it be easy..? Why should love be easy? I’m the work of your life & you’re the work of mine.”

--'The Last Station'

All photographs are self portraits.

"People think they know the mystery of living in your skin. They don't. There's no one who knows except the person who carts it around her own self."

--Colum McCann

They had dug their feet down into happiness and weren’t prepared to let go.

“I can’t think of anything lonelier than spending the rest of my life with someone I can’t talk to, or worse, someone I can’t be silent with.”

--Mary Ann Shaffer

“Anxiety is practising failure in advance. Anxiety is needless and imaginary. It’s fear about fear, fear that means nothing.”

--Seth Godin

“My mother says that pain is hidden in everyone you see. She says try to imagine it like big bunches of flowers that everyone is carrying around with them. Think of your pain like a big bunch of red roses, a beautiful thorn necklace. Everyone has one.”

--Francesca Lia Block

“You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place, I told him, like you’ll not only miss the people you love but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you’ll never be this way ever again.”

--Azar Nafisi

“You’re going to meet the most extraordinary men, the sexiest, brightest, funniest men, and you’re going to fall in love with so many of them, and you won’t know until the end of your life who your greatest friends were or your greatest love was.”

--'Milk'

“…acquired tastes can be rewarding. Acquired taste jump-starts new satisfactions where I do not initially find them. Through acquired taste, I grow in my capacity to enjoy what the world has to offer.”

--NYtimes.com

“I love you also means I love you more than anyone loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that no one loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that I love no one else, and never have loved anyone else, and never will love anyone else.”

--Jonathan Safran Foer

"I want someone who will be monogamous, and nice to his mother. And I want someone who likes musicals, but knows to just shut his mouth when I’m watching Lost. And I want someone, who thinks being really into cars is lame, and strip clubs are gross. I want someone who will actually empty the dishwasher instead of just taking out forks as needed, like I do. I want someone with clean hands and feet, and beefy forearms like a damn Disney prince. And I want him to genuinely like me, even when I’m old… that’s what I want."

--Liz Lemon, '30 Rock'

"All photographs are self portraits."

--Minor White

“What I hope most of all is that you understand what I mean when I tell you that though I do not know you and even though I may never meet you, laugh with you, cry with you, or kiss you, I love you. With all my heart, I love you.”

--'V for Vendetta'

“Instead of focusing on how much you can accomplish, focus on how much you can absolutely love what you’re doing.”

--Leo Babauta

“Sometimes she has imagined what it would be like to fly, to live in the river, to run like a horse. She has dreamed of that freedom, that power, and fears the wildness in herself that wants to live as beasts live, moved purely by need and desire. She has felt torn between the heat of her limbs and the thoughts in her mind telling her to be careful and good and always calm.”

--Francesca Lia Block

“We’re making it up. The world, the universe, life, reality. Especially reality.”

--Tom Robbins

“If people sat outside and looked at the stars each night, I’ll bet they’d live a lot differently.”

--Bill Watterson

“What if she was meant to be, or could have been, someone important in my life? I think that’s what scares me: the randomness of everything. That the people who could be important to you might just pass you by. Or you pass them by. How do you know. I felt that by walking away I was abandoning them, that I spent my entire life, day after day, abandoning people.”

--Peter Cameron

“Don’t try to be different. Just be good. To be good is different enough.”

--Arthur Freed

Beauty is not something you can count on.

“Sunglasses are like eyeshadow, they make everything look younger and prettier.”

--Karl Lagerfeld

“What’s the matter with you? What is it? What is it you’re doing here? I don’t ask you to look for the words for it. Words are secondary. I want you to find the feel of it. I want you to find the fire of it. I want you to touch the source of your life, to feel the joy and the love that can come from living from the source of your being. Throw yourself completely into the aliveness of your life. It’s pretty risky. You could lose yourself. There’s nothing to hold onto.”

--Yun-men

“Sometimes, I have the feeling,” she says, with a charming pout, “that when you are 20 years old and people say, ‘Oh, she’s beautiful,’ it sticks to you. Am I beautiful? It depends on the day, it depends on my life. Beauty is not something you can count on. Usually, when people say you are beautiful, it is when there is a harmony between the inside and the outside. When you are happy and in love and when you have children, then maybe you are beautiful.”

--Emmanuelle Beart

“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more dangerous to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”

--Chris McCandless

“Every single thing

you’ve secretly waited for,

I have inside me.”

--Tyler Knott Gregson

“You are the true love

I have waited my whole life

to wrap myself in.”

--Tyler Knott Gregson

“My face is waiting

to smile back with yours in so

many photographs.”

--Tyler Knott Gregson

Material possessions won't make you happy or maybe they will.

"There is no right and wrong. There is only fun and boring."

--Hackers

"I think your love is beautiful. I think you should go for it with everything you are, because love comes and it will go so quickly if you forget to grasp it with both hands. Love unconditionally. Every other way will fall apart."

--Jane Bird

"White is ultimately my favourite color, but it must be chic, fun, and sophisticated..."

--Lee Kleinhelter

"Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense."

--Emerson

"Why'd you read then?"

"Partly for pleasure, because it's a habit and I'm just as uncomfortable if I don't read as if I don't smoke, and partly to know myself. When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has meaning for me, and it becomes part of me."

--W. Somerset Maugham

“Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they’ll make your soul impervious to the world’s soft decay.”

--Janet Fitch

“If everybody feels fear when approaching something totally new in life, yet so many are out there “doing it” despite the fear, then we must conclude that fear is not the problem.”

--Susan Jeffers

“There’s room for the Gap, but the joy of dressing is an art.”

--John Galliano

“I am only one; but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something. I will not refuse to do the something I can do.”

--Helen Keller

“I tell you these stories because these things happen to everyone. It’s not about being starched or polished or cute or polite. It’s about having ears that stick out, about breaking yet another glass. It’s about seeing something for the first time and making a million mistakes and not ever getting completely discouraged.”

--Maira Kalman

"Seven deadly sins: wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, science without humanity, knowledge without character, politics without principle, commerce without morality, and worship without sacrifice.”

--Mahatma Gandhi

“I’m here. I love you. I don’t care if you need to stay up crying all night long, I will stay with you. There’s nothing you can ever do to lose my love. I will protect you until you die, and after your death I will still protect you. I am stronger than depression and I am braver than loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me.”

--Elizabeth Gilbert

“I’m so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything”

--Jonathan Safran Foer

“Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we’re quoting.”

--John Green

"Peace - that was the other name for home."

--Kathleen Norris

'Let's Build the Last Song and Sneak Away While Everyone is Listening' by Mike Young

Things that scare me include car dealerships at night and the fact that snow cannot live inside my mouth. Boom. That’s it. Once on Belchertown Rd. I saw a ten foot soldier with a deer rifle and a torn jerkin walk out of 1789 and into the woods. He left because he knows I will protect you. You don’t need to keep a grill skewer in the soap dish. The world is something I will gather for you and brush off like I’m cleaning a dryer filter. Let’s plant apple trees in the radio. Keep one suitcase full of bees. Listen, I like you so much that I want to steal your jokes. Though you are a hand and I am a boat, we smell like dancing. We make a new health. Dancing invented us. Dancing is just putting yourself on inside out. When you are near me, I feel as if I have caught the only bus of the day somewhere in New Mexico and you are the spy plane above us and the gingerbread factory that the driver won’t stop talking about. Except no, wait, that’s you, sitting in the aisle with your boots off. You bite my shoulder. You have a smoothie mustache. It is because your name does so much to me that I call you many things. You ask me why I’m not asleep yet. I forgot how to get there. For some reason I just hold you and float.

Absence Makes the Heart

"Cherish your solitude. Take trains by yourself to places you have never been to. Sleep 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 whenever you don't want to do something. Say yes to your instincts 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. Believe in kissing."

--Eve Ensler

Someday my prince will come to his senses.

“Expecting the worst was the best I could do.”

--Adam Clay

“Someday I will look back on this time and think that was the spring when I started looking people in the eye.”

--Kristina S. B.

I sometimes think that people’s hearts are like deep wells. Nobody knows what’s at the bottom. All you can do is imagine by what comes floating to the surface every once in a while.

Fragments of ideas float around my brain as I tirelessly try to fit them together. With so many words in my head, I am always afraid of writing them down improperly. Or forgetting them in the first place. I cannot seem to write fast enough because somehow a thought always gets lost.

"It would have been nice to send a picture of how you feel beside a picture of how I wish you could feel."

--Bob Hicok, 'The Personal Touch'

It would be peaceful to be a sail

except during the storm.

During the storm, I would like to be

the storm. If you’re the storm,

there’s nothing frightening

about the storm except when it stops,

then you’re dead and the maps

are drowned. Within my heart

is another heart, within that heart,

a man at war writes home.

--Bob Hicok, 'Absence Makes the Heart. That's it: Absence Makes the Heart'

Get a job. Walk to work. Wear a suit and brown glossy shoes. Paint your nails. Wear black. Never wear black. Lipstains on your paper cups, heavy mugs. Scribble poetry in business meetings. Whistle in the elevator. Smile on the subway (it'll scare them away). Cut your hair. Pin it in curls. Take cold showers. Never shower. Wear five dollar perfume. Stop reading magazines. Lie about politics. Change your name. Buy watercolors. Primary colors. Work in black and white. Take pictures. Stop seeing. Listen to buried records. Listen to silence. Pack your bags. Donate everything. Step into new shoes. Update your passport. Leave this city. Leave this state. Leave this country. Never look back. Learn a new language. Fall in love. Break your heart. Break a bone. Watch death. Touch old things. Lose a friend. Lose yourself. Lose 10 pounds. Lose a parent. Change. Forget. Never forget. Wear black. Never wear black. Lipstick. Night air. Tangerines and overripe plums. Touch your toes. Touch your lips. Touch your heart and break it in half. Pack your bags.
--paintedfictions

We all fall down.

"Keep on going, and the chances are that you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it. I never heard of anyone ever stumbling on something sitting down."

--Charles F. Kettering

“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

"Everyone knows what their roots are, but you’ve got to explore everywhere. You’ve got to explore the sky too."

--Mick Jagger

"Let’s leave the obviously pretty women to men with no imagination."

--Proust

"Time has a wonderful way of showing us what really matters."

--Marageret Peters

In a city with too many people, I hope to run into you and act surprised.

“Ugliness is in a way superior to beauty because it lasts.”

--Serge Gainsbourgh

“You’re going to meet the most extraordinary men, the sexiest, brightest, funniest men, and you’re going to fall in love with so many of them, and you won’t know until the end of your life who your greatest friends were or your greatest love was.”

--'Milk'

“…acquired tastes can be rewarding. Acquired taste jump-starts new satisfactions where I do not initially find them. Through acquired taste, I grow in my capacity to enjoy what the world has to offer.”

--NYTimes.com, 'The acquisition of taste'

“If people sat outside and looked at the stars each night, I’ll bet they’d live a lot differently.”

--Bill Watterson

“There is only one conclusion to every story… We all fall down.”

--'Domino'

“What if she was meant to be, or could have been, someone important in my life? I think that’s what scares me: the randomness of everything. That the people who could be important to you might just pass you by. Or you pass them by. How do you know. I felt that by walking away I was abandoning them, that I spent my entire life, day after day, abandoning people.”

--Peter Cameron

“Don’t try to be different. Just be good. To be good is different enough.”

--Arthur Freed

"I saw me branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."

--Sylvia Plath, 'The Bell Jar'