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'

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

Reading is bliss.

All quotes by author Nora Ephron

“Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.”

“Maybe young women don’t wonder whether they can have it all any longer, but in case if you are wondering, of course you can have it all. What are you going to do? Everything, is my guess. It will be a little messy, but embrace the mess. It will be complicated, but rejoice in the complications. It will not be anything like what you think it will be like, but surprises are good for you. And don’t be frightened: you can always change your mind. I know: I’ve had four careers and three husbands.”

"Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim."

“I don’t think any day is worth living without thinking about what you’re going to eat next at all times.”

“And then the dreams break into a million tiny pieces. The dream dies. Which leaves you with a choice: you can settle for reality, or you can go off, like a fool, and dream another dream.” 

--'Heartburn'

What wonderful thing didn't start out scary?

All quotes by author Isaac Marion from the book 'Warm Bodies'

“In my mind I am eloquent; I can climb intricate scaffolds of words to reach the highest cathedral ceilings and paint my thoughts. But when I open my mouth, everything collapses.” 

“You should always be taking pictures, if not with a camera then with your mind. Memories you capture on purpose are always more vivid than the ones you pick up by accident.” 

“There is no ideal world for you to wait around for. The world is always just what it is now, and it's up to you how you respond to it.” 

“What wonderful thing didn't start out scary?” 

“It frustrates and fascinates me that we'll never know for sure, that despite the best efforts of historians and scientists and poets, there are some things we'll just never know. What the first song sounded like. How it felt to see the first photograph. Who kissed the first kiss, and if it was any good.”

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'

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'

One train wreck at a time.

All quotes by author Jonathan Tropper

“Everyone always wants to know how you can tell when it's true love, and the answer is this: when the pain doesn't fade and the scars don't heal, and it's too damned late. The tears threaten to return, so I willfully banish all thoughts from my head and take a few more deep breaths. I'm suddenly dizzy from the panic attack I've just suffered, and I close my eyes, resting my head against the warm leather of my steering wheel. Loneliness doesn't exist on any single plane of consciousness. It's generally a low throb, barely audible, like the hum of a Mercedes engine in park, but every so often the demands of the highway call for a burst of acceleration, and the hum becomes a thunderous, elemental roar, and once again you're reminded of what this baby's carrying under the hood.” 

--'The Book of Joe'

"I find that most people worth knowing are fucked up in some way or another.” 

--'The Book of Joe'

“You have to look at what you have right in front of you, at what it could be, and stop measuring it against what you've lost. I know this to be wise and true, just as I know that pretty much no one can do it.” 

--'This Is Where I Leave You'

“We all start out so damn sure, thinking we've got the world on a string. If we ever stopped to think about the infinite number of ways we could be undone, we'd never leave our bedrooms.” 

--'This Is Where I Leave You'

“It would be a terrible mistake to go through life thinking that people are the sum total of what you see.” 

--'This Is Where I Leave You'

“And even if you didn't fall in love in the eighties, in your mind it will feel like the eighties, all innocent and airbrushed, with bright colors and shoulder pads and Pat Benetar or the Cure on the soundtrack.” 

--'This Is Where I Leave You'

“It's hard to imagine her ever having felt lost, but it's impossible to know the people your parents were before they were your parents.” 

--'This Is Where I Leave You'

“I've never been shot, but this is probably what it feels like, that second of nothingness right before the pain catches up to the bullet.” 

--'This Is Where I Leave You'

“She was smart and funny and vulnerable and just so goddamned beautiful, the kind of beautiful that was worth being shot down over.” 

--'How to Talk to a Widower'

“I wake up like this, this sense that I've somehow been transported to an alternate universe where my life took a left instead of a right because of some seemingly insignificant yet cosmically crucial choice I've made, about a girl or a kiss or a date or a job or which Starbucks I went into...something.” 

--'Everything Changes'

“One train wreck at a time, I always say."

“I totally remember what it felt like to be so full…Full of promise, full of dreams, full of shit. Mostly just full of yourself. So full you’re bursting. And then you get out into the world, and people empty you out, little by little, like air from a balloon…You try like hell to fill yourself up with fresh air, from you and from other people. But back then…it was so damn effortless to feel full, you know? All you had to do was breathe."

“Life, for the most part, inevitably becomes routine, the random confluence of timing and fortune that configures its components all but forgotten. But every so often, I catch a glimpse of my life out of the corner of my eye, and am rendered breathless by it.”

Everything takes time.

All quotes by author David Foster Wallace

“Everything I’ve ever let go of had claw marks on it.”

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.” 

--'This Is Water'

“Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.” 

--'Infinite Jest'

“I like the fans’ sound at night. Do you? It’s like somebody big far away goes like: it’sOKit’sOKit’sOKit’sOK, over and over. From very far away.” 

--'Infinite Jest'

“She wanted only tall smooth bottles whose labels spoke of Proof.” 

--'Infinite Jest'

“You have decided being scared is caused mostly by thinking."

“We're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we've never even met?” 

“Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.” 

--'Brief Interviews With Hideous Men'

“I'd like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time, instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them.”

“Look. Listen. Use ears I'd be proud to call our own. Listen to the silence behind the engine's noise. Jesus, Sweets, listen. Hear it? It's a love song. For whom? You are loved.” 

--'Girl With Curious Hair'

“Tell them there are no holes for your fingers in the masks of men. Tell them how could you ever even hope to love what you can't grab onto.” 

--'Girl With Curious Hair'

“What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves, they've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.”

“I have this -- here’s this thing where it’s going to sound sappy to you. I have this unbelievably like five-year-old’s belief that art is just absolutely magic. And that good art can do things that nothing else in the solar system can do. And that the good stuff will survive, and get read, and that in the great winnowing process, the shit will sink and the good stuff will rise.”

You have nothing to prove to anybody.

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

--Mary Oliver

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

--'One Hour Photo'

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

--Nick Hornsby

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

--Zelda Fitzgerald

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

--F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

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

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

--Chuck Palahniuk, 'Lullaby'

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

--Margaret Mead

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

--Annie Dillard

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

--Unknown

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

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

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

--Carolyne Roehm

“Time wounds all heels.”

--Jane Ace

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

--Orson Welles

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

--David McCullough

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

--Tyler Durden, 'Fight Club'

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

--Maya Angelou

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

--Kazuo Ishiguro

"Write drunk; edit sober."

--Ernest Hemingway

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

--Ernest Hemingway, 'The Sun Also Rises'

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

--Marcel Proust

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

--E.E. Cummings

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

--Bob Dylan

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

--Antoine de Saint-Exupery

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

--Truman Capote

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

--Rumi

Give up to grace.

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

--Oprah Winfrey

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

--Allen Ginsberg

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

--Stevie Nicks

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

--Rumi

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

--Ernest Hemingway

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

--Spinoza

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

--Voltaire

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

--Iris Murdoch

“And the rest is rust and stardust.”

--Vladimir Nabokov, 'Lolita'

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

--Bob Dylan

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

--Robert Plant

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

--Jim Morrison

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

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

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

--Aldous Huxley

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

--Marcelene Cox

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

--E. Paluszak

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

--Anthony Bourdain

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

--Alan Alda

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

--Osho

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

--Papiha Ghosh

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

--Thich Nhat Hanh

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

--Rumi

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

--Tallulah Bankhead

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

--Jaggi Vasudev

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

--Willa Cather

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

--Amelia Earhart

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

--Henry David Thoreau

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

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

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

--Miranda July, 'It Chooses You'

I disappear a lot.

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

--The White Rabbit, 'Alice In Wonderland'

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

--Kathryn Stockett, 'The Help'

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

--Henry David Thoreau

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

--Osho

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

--Morrie Schwartz

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

--Thom Yorke

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

--Charles Bukowski

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

--Maya Angelou

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

--F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

--Hara Estroff Morano

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

--Ashton Darian

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

--Virginia Woolf

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

--Barack Obama

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

--Sofia Coppola

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

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

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

--Sylvia Plath

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

--Charles Bukowski

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

--Bob Dylan

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

--Douglas Coupland

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

--Yo La Tengo!, 'Autumn Sweater'

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

--Jim Morrison

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

--Steven Morrissey

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

--Claude Monet

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

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

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

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

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

--Theodore I. Rubin

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

--Dean Spade, ‘For Lovers and Fighters’

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

--Harry Truman

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

--Oscar Wilde

Love and be loved if at all possible.

All quotes by author David Nicholls

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

--'One Day'

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

--'One Day'

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

--'One Day'

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

--'One Day'

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

--'One Day'

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

--'One Day'

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

--'One Day'

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

--'One Day'

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

--'One Day'

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

--'One Day'

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

--'Starter for Ten'

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

--'Starter for Ten''

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

--'A Question of Attraction: A Novel'

You belong.

"You should above all things be glad and young

For if you're young, whatever life you wear

it will become you; and if you are glad

whatever's living will yourself become."

--EE Cummings

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

--Jerry Garcia

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

--Audrey Hepburn

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

--F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

--Andy Warhol

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

--Bob Dylan on Creativity

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

--Shyma Perera, 'Bitter Sweet Symphony'

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

--Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell To Arms

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

--Zadie Smith

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

--Zelda Fitzgerald

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

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

--Josephine Humphreys, 'Rich In Love'

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

--Alan Watts

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

--Charles Bukowski

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

--Johnny Depp

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

--Ashli Wood

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

--Abu adh-Dhiya

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

--Robert Louis Stevenson

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

--Ella Fitzgerald

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

--Kate Moller

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

--Rumi

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

--Florence Welch, Nylon magazine

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

--Oprah Winfrey

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

--Jack Kerouac

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

--Franz Kafka

Be in love with your life.

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

--Oliver Goldsmith

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

--Kimya Dawson

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

--Haruki Murakami

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

--Audrey Niffenegger

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

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

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

--Audrey Hepburn

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

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

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

--Elizabeth Gilbert, 'Eat Pray Love'

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

--L.M. Montgomery

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

--Max Lucado

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

--William Shakespeare

“On the other side

I can see us waiting for

all we know we’ll be.”

--Tyler Knott Gregson

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

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

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

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

--Charles Dickens, 'Great Expectations'

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

--I Wrote This For You

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

--Jack Kerouac

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

--Jhumpa Lahiri

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

--Diana Ross

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

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

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

--Salman Rushdie

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

of non-definitive acts,

something other than the desperation.

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

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

and seduced you

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

You want a better story. Who wouldn't?

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

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

--Oprah Winfrey

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

--Dries Van Noten

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

--Fernando Pessoa

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

--Neil Gaiman, 'Coraline'

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

All quotes by author Donald Miller

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.

All quotes by author Haruki Murakami

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

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

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

--'Norwegian Wood'

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

--'Norwegian Wood'

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

--'Sputnik Sweetheart'

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

--'Sputnik Sweetheart'

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

--'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle'

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

--'Sputnik Sweetheart'

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

--'Kafka on the Shore'

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

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

--'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle'

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

W: Wow, and did your search pay off?

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

--'Norwegian Wood'

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

--'Norwegian Wood'

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

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

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

--'Norwegian Wood'