I think I made you up inside my head.

“Relationships are both wonderful and tricky. The wonderful traits of a person are all sparkly and shiny, and we are attracted to that. But the real work is learning to find good in the gnarly aspects. It is a real art. Believing in the other person’s goodness and integrity enough to be content with working with the challenging parts. The sparkly parts are easy to love. Our job is to make the love bigger than an argument or an intense disagreement. You see, this is being authentic, vulnerable and true. And much more than a fairytale type romance. The real and honest and courageous decision is to love the warts and all. That is the true miracle.”

--Rachel Sat Siri Dougherty

“I wish we could spend July by the sea, browning ourselves and feeling water-weighted hair flow behind us from a dive. I wish our gravest concerns were the summer gnats. I wish we were hungry for hot dogs and dopes, and it would be nice to smell the starch of summer linens and the faint odor of talc in blistering summer bath houses… We could lie in long citoneuse beams of the five o’clock sun on the plage at Juan-les-Pins and hear the sound of the drum and piano being scooped out to sea by the waves.”

--Zelda Fitzgerald

“Happiness often slips in through a door you didn’t know you left open.”

--John Barrymore

“I have never found anybody who could stand to accept the daily demonstrative love I feel in me, and give back as good as I give.”

--Sylvia Plath

“I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane. (I think I made you up inside my head.)”

--Sylvia Plath

“You don’t need to make your tastes a self-conscious statement about who you are. Just unapologetically like the things you like.”

--Adulting: Step 179: Stop enjoying things ironically. Just enjoy them.

“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”

--Margaret Atwood

"The sun was warm but the wind was chill. 

You know how it is with an April day."

--Robert Frost

“You can’t ever be really free if you admire somebody too much.”

--Tove Jansson

“Some people are uncomfortable with silences. Not me. I’ve never cared much for call and response. Sometimes I will think of something to say and then I ask myself; is it worth it? And it just isn’t.”

--Miranda July

“A daydreamer is prepared for most things.”

--Joyce Carol Oates

“Vulnerability is one of the last things we share with people, yet one of the first things they try to recognize.”

--Dallas Clayton 

“It’s great when you finally realise that being miserable doesn’t protect you from bad stuff happening.”

--Alain de Botton

“One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.”

--Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“A girl should be two things: who and what she wants.”

--Coco Chanel

“God is within her, she will not fall;

God will help her at break of day.”

--Psalm 46:5

“The world is simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.”

--Henry Miller

“The essence of pleasure is spontaneity.”

--Germaine Greer

“Every stylish girl knows that when the sun goes down, the heel goes up.”

--Nina Garcia

“There is in the soul a desire for not thinking. For being still. Coupled with this a desire to be strict, yes, and rigorous. But the soul is also a smooth son of a bitch, not always trustworthy. And I forgot that.”

--Raymond Carver, 'All of Us: The Collected Poems'

“Some changes look negative on the surface but you will soon realize that space is being created in your life for something new to emerge.”

--Eckhart Tolle

“It is one of the defects of my character that I cannot altogether dislike anyone who makes me laugh.”

--W. Somerset Maugham, 'The Moon and Sixpence'

I have grown to love secrecy.

"This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meaness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they are a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight."

--Rumi

"When I have a camera in my hand, I know no fear."

--Alfred Eisenstaedt

"I’m really insecure in a lot of ways and I suppose my confidence comes out in my clothes."

--Alexander McQueen

“What you wear is how you present yourself to the world, especially today, when human contacts are so quick. Fashion is instant language.”

--Miuccia Prada

“Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.”

--Gore Vidal

"You cannot really be too concerned with what people think of you. You’re on you’re own adventure of growth and discovery. So it’s not always good to be who people think you are, especially if you subscribe to it as well … which is easily done, because then you don’t have to figure out who you are, you just ask somebody else."

--Tom Waits

"You’ll have bad times, but it’ll always wake you up to the good stuff you weren’t paying attention to."

--Sean, 'Good Will Hunting'

“There are silences harder to take back than words.”

--James Richardson

“You’re going to discover that conversations are best at 4am. The heavier the eyelids, the sincerer the words. Those are the talks you’ll remember. It’s ok not to know the answer and silence is not awkward. It’s shared, so share it more often than not.”

--Jeff Stuckel

“You explain quite a lot by saying little…and even more with nothing at all.”

--Georgia Whots, “Her Last Letter to Ghosts”, 1923

“I love myself when I am laughing… and then again when I am looking mean and impressive.”

--Zora Neale Hurston

“Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.”

--F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I marvel at how even the wrong choices can keep us on the right path. How the worst mistake can wind up being the best thing that ever happened to us.”

--Katie Klein, 'Cross My Heart'

“If you meet someone whose soul is not aligned with yours, send them love & move along.”

--Wayne W. Dyer

“Some people are old at 18 and some are young at 90. Time is a concept that humans created.”

--Yoko Ono, 1977

“Alice: How long is forever?

White Rabbit: Sometimes, just one second.”

--Lewis Carrol

“Everything you own should have value, either because it’s functional or beautiful or you just love it.”

--Peter Walsh

“Heart-shattered lives ready for love, don’t for a moment escape God’s notice…”

--Psalm 51

“Bizarre travel plans are dancing lessons from God.”

--Kurt Vonnegut

“I’ll try to be around and about. But if I’m not, then you know that I’m behind your eyelids, and I’ll meet you there.”

--Terence McKenna

“I’d imagine the whole world was one big machine. Machines never come with any extra parts, you know. They always come with the exact amount they need. So I figured, if the entire world was one big machine, I couldn’t be an extra part. I had to be here for some reason.”

--Hugo Cabret, 'Hugo'

“From war and dust; love.

From love and thought; opinion.

From opinion; war and dust.”

--Georgia Whots, 'All Wars, Loss & Gain

“Here is a new spiritual practice for you: don’t take your thoughts so seriously.”

--Eckhart Tolle

“When I like people immensely I never tell their names to any one. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy.”

--Oscar Wilde

“Learn to say ‘no’ to the good so you can say ‘yes’ to the best”.

--John C. Maxwell

Beautiful people do not just happen.

“I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart.”

--Vincent Van Gogh

“For me, a woman who is absorbed in her work, who does not care about gaining one’s favor, strong yet subtle at the same time, is essentially more seductive. The more she hides and abandons her femininity, the more it emerges from the very heart of her existence.”

--Yohji Yamamoto

“When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”

--Haruki Murakami

“But whereas a girl of nineteen draws her confidence from a surfeit of attention, a woman of twenty-nine is nourished on subtler stuff. Desirous, she chooses her apéritifs wisely, or, content, she enjoys the caviare of potential power. Happily she does not seem, in either case, to anticipate the subsequent years when her insight will often be blurred by panic, by the fear of stopping or the fear of going on. But on the landings of nineteen or twenty-nine she is pretty sure that there are no bears in the hall.”

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

“‎Close your eyes & imagine the best version of you possible. That’s who you really are, let go of any part of you that doesn’t believe it.”

--C. Assaad

"The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with a compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen."

--Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

“You have to be different, great or first.”

--Loretta Lynn

"I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me."

--Humphrey Bogart

“I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”

--John Green, 'The Fault in Our Stars'

“My love lacked passion, I seemingly ran circles in sentences trying to say what I couldn’t. I had not a brittle bone of romanticism in me… But all the impossible trying, the countless errors, they were the reasons he knew I loved him.”

--Georgia Whots

“There is no such thing as work-life balance. There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences.”

--Jack Welch, former CEO of GE

“Unless you have a feeling for that secret knowledge that modest things can be more beautiful than anything expensive, you will never have style.”

--Andrée Putman, French interior designer

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

--William Henry Channing

Fearlessly be yourself.

“If there’s someone you absolutely miss, you might find yourself talking to them a lot in your mind, creating those fake conversations with them and you answer yourself in their voice in your head. Maybe it’s a girlfriend who dumped you or you know someone who died or that sort of thing, you adopt their personality or the memory of who they were as a means of staying close to them. People talk about spirit, but I have this idea that when we die, we’re gone. All that lives on is our memory and how we affected people, the way we changed people throughout our life. Whether you’ve had a good effect of a bad effect on people, that’s your afterlife—the people who live on after you.”

--Matt Berninger

“I need to rebel against myself. It’s the opposite of following your bliss. I need to do what I most fear.”

--Chuck Palahniuk

“There is only one you for all time. Fearlessly be yourself.”

--Anthony Rapp

“I still love the people I’ve loved, even if I cross the street to avoid them.”

--Uma Thurman

“You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from.”

--Joan Didion

“A prayer, for the wild at heart kept in cages.”

--Unknown

“Lonely is a freedom that breathes easy and weightless and lonely is healing if you make it.”

--A tidbit from how to be alone

"Choose your corner, pick away at it carefully, intensely and to the best of your ability and that way you might change the world."

--Ray Eames

"Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working."

--Pablo Picasso

“I don’t get nearly enough credit in life for the things I manage not to say.”

--Meg Rosoff, 'How I Live Now'

“Some people bring out the worst in you, others bring out the best, and then there are those remarkably rare, addictive ones who just bring out the most. Of everything. They make you feel so alive that you’d follow them straight into hell, just to keep getting your fix.”

--Karen Marie Moning

“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

--Oscar Wilde

“Things are sweeter when they’re lost. I know - because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly… and when I got it it turned to dust in my hands.”

--F. Scott Fitzgerald, 'The Beautiful and Damned'

“I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.”

--Rainer Maria Rilke

“A sure way to lose happiness, I found, is to want it at the expense of everything else.”

--Bette Davis

“Happy. Just in my swim shorts, barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, singing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, running; that’s the way to live.”

--Jack Kerouac, 'The Dharma Bums'

“This morning, with her, having coffee.”

--Johnny Cash, when asked for his definition of paradise.

"Life is like a game of bridge -- only a dummy puts all her cards on the table."

--Florence Broadhurst

“Style for me is a casual way of putting something on. It’s not thought out but needs to suit your way of life. Now I like wearing the same sweater over and over again, then taking it off when it’s smelly.”

--Charlotte Gainsbourg

Everything in its perfect time. Everything is unfolding.

“Fear is the cheapest room in the house

I would like to see you living

in better conditions.”

--Hafiz

“Why did he write to her,

“I can’t live without you”?

And why did she write to him,

“I can’t live without you”?

For he went west, she went east,

And they both lived.”

--Carl Sandburg

“The simple lack of her is more to me than others’ presence.”

--Edward Thomas

“When I sing ‘Someone Like You,’ I know that every single person in the room will be able to relate to it. That’s where that emotional connection comes from. I have sympathy for myself, I have sympathy for them, they have sympathy for me, and I know that we are all there knowing exactly how each other feels. It’s like a big pact. You can just feel it. You can slice it.”

--Adele in the March Issue of Vogue

“She writes like she’s starving and reads like she’s feasting.”

--R.D. Larson

“The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life — and one is as good as the other.”

--Ernest Hemingway

“Creativity is just connecting things.”

--Steve Jobs

“Getting dressed is really the only area in my life that I can say I am fearless; I’m terrified of so many things, yet somehow am not afraid to wear anything.”

--Nick Wooster

“The goal for all women should be to make her own living and to support herself, to be self-sufficient. That is the philosophy of her clothes. They are working for modern women, women who do not need to assure their happiness by looking sexy to men, by emphasising their figures, but who attract them with their minds.”

--Rei Kawakubo (in an interview with Nicolas Coleridge in 1988)

“I’ve started my new meaningful life today and I bought a whole new meaningful wardrobe to go with it.”

--Phyllis Nefler, 'Troop Beverly Hills'

“Old friends pass away, new friends appear. It is just like the days. An old day passes, a new day arrives. The important thing is to make it meaningful: a meaningful friend - or a meaningful day.”

--Dalai Lama

“Sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whisky, and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested.”

--Hunter S. Thompson

“Age appears to be best in four things; old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.”

--Francis Bacon on what may not always be, but very often is, the truth.

“Food, fire, walks, dreams, cold, sleep, love, slowness, time, quiet, books, seasons – all these things, which are not really things, but moments of life – take on a different quality at night-time, where the moon reflects the light of the sun, and we have time to reflect what life is to us, knowing that it passes, and that every bit of it, in its change and its difference, is the here and now of what we have. Life is too short to be all daylight. Night is not less; it’s more.”

--Jeanette Winterson, Why I adore the night

“Remember to look up at the stars, and not down to your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don’t just give up.”

--Stephen Hawking

“I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”

--Henry David Thoreau

“Loners, if you catch them, are well worth the trouble. Not dulled by excess human contact, nor blasé or focused on your crotch while jabbering about themselves, loners are curious, vigilant, full of surprises. They do not cling. Separate wherever they go, awake or asleep, they shimmer with the iridescence of hidden things seldom seen.”

--Anneli Rufus, 'Party of One: The Loners’ Manifesto'

“Loneliness is black coffee and late-night television; solitude is herb tea and soft music. Solitude, quality solitude, is an assertion of self-worth, because only in the stillness can we hear the truth of our own unique voices.”

--Pearl Cleage

“I change my thoughts, I change my world.”

--Norman Vincent Peale

“Be empty of worrying.

Think of who created thought! Why do you stay in prison

When the door is so wide open?”

--Rumi

“Nothing good gets away.”

--John Steinbeck

“Some things you’re not letting happen right now because the timing isn’t perfect for you. Some you’re not letting happen because you are very aware of where you are. But all things, as they are happening, are happening in perfect order. And if you will relax and begin saying, “Everything in its perfect time. Everything is unfolding. And I’m enjoying where I am now, in relationship to where I’m going. Content where I am, and eager for more,” that is the perfect vibrational stance.”

--Abraham Hicks

“Your 20’s are your ‘selfish’ years. It’s a decade to immerse yourself in every single thing possible. Be selfish with your time, and all the aspects of you. Tinker with shit, travel, explore, love a lot, love a little, and never touch the ground.”

--Kyoko Escamilla

“Don’t ask for guarantees. And don’t look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were heading for shore.”

--Ray Bradbury

“You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their mistake, not my failing.”

--Richard P. Feynman

“It’s a sad day when you find out that it’s not accident or time or fortune, but just yourself that kept things from you.”

--Lillian Hellman

"it has been a beautiful

fight

still is."

--Charles Bukowski

some things i wanted to say to you

if the horse that you ride
is blind it’s good
that it also be slow,
and please stroke it
a hundred more times than you would
the powerful dazzling one.
to be generous is one thing,
but there’s a clerk in some of us,
quick to say yes.
worry about the command
in the suggestion.
worry about smiles, and those men
whose business is business.
there are joys and enigmas
of an evening alone
to appreciate.
there are always the simple events
of your life
that you might try to convert
into legend.
did you know
a good dog in your house
can make you more thoughtful,
even more moral?
and sex without conversation,
sex that’s erotic or sleepy…
oh don’t let anybody tell you
there’s a wrong way to have it.
tell your lovers the world
robs us in so many ways
that a caress is your way
of taking something back.
tell the dogs and the horses
you love them more than cars.
speak to everything
would be my advice.
--Stephen Dunn

A Note

Life is the only way
to get covered in leaves,
catch your breath on the sand,
rise on wings;
to be a dog,
or stroke its warm fur;
to tell pain
from everything it’s not;
to squeeze inside events,
dawdle in views,
to seek the least of all possible mistakes.
An extraordinary chance
to remember for a moment
a conversation held
with the lamp switched off;
and if only once
to stumble upon a stone,
end up soaked in one downpour or another,
mislay your keys in the grass;
and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes;
and to keep on not knowing
something important.

--Wislawa Szymborska