I am prepared for amazing things to happen.

"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.

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.

“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

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.

--Ashli Wood

torches together.

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.

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

“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