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'

There is nothing wrong with loving the crap out of everything.

“If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it.”

--Unknown

“Whatever’s there to feel, feel it – the riddance, the relief, the fright and freedom, the fear of forgetting, the dull ache of your own mortality. Get with someone you can trust with tears, with anger, and wonderment and utter silence. Get that part done – the sooner the better. The only way around these things is through them.”

--Thomas Lynch, 'The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade'

“Italy is a dream that keeps returning for the rest of your life.”

--Anna Akhmatova

“My shadow serves as the friend I crave."

--Anna Akhmatova

“Instead of saying “I don’t have time” try saying “it’s not a priority,” and see how that feels. Often, that’s a perfectly adequate explanation. I have time to iron my sheets, I just don’t want to. But other things are harder. Try it: “I’m not going to edit your résumé, sweetie, because it’s not a priority.” “I don’t go to the doctor because my health is not a priority.” If these phrases don’t sit well, that’s the point. Changing our language reminds us that time is a choice. If we don’t like how we’re spending an hour, we can choose differently.”

--Unknown

“You either like me or you don’t. It took me twenty-something years to learn how to love myself, I don’t have that kinda time to convince somebody else.”

--Daniel Franzese

“There is nothing wrong with loving the crap out of everything. Negative people find their walls. So never apologize for your enthusiasm. Never. Ever. Never.”

--Ryan Adams

“Don’t wait until everything is just right. It will never be perfect. There will always be challenges, obstacles and less than perfect conditions. So what. Get started now. With each step you take, you will grow stronger and stronger, more and more skilled, more and more self-confident and more and more successful.”

--Mark Victor Hansen

“You know what’s the trouble with you? You’re an expatriate. One of the worst type… You get precious… You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed with sex. You spend all your time talking, not working.”

--Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises

“I want to know you. You seem like someone worth knowing. Every day I feel like I’m surrounded by people with hard edges and sour faces but I get the sense that you’re different. Too often people seem to think that they have the answers to everything. Their faces are trapped in permascowls and they can’t be bothered with anything besides their own narcissism. You aren’t like that. You still ask questions. You’re still looking for the answers.”

--Ryan O’Connell, 'I Want To Know You'

The answer is dreams.

“The answer is dreams. Dreaming on and on. Entering the world of dreams and never coming out. Living in dreams for the rest of time.”

--Haruki Murakami

“You rest, you rust.”

--Oscar de la Renta

“I love big bags because all my eyeglasses are so big, and it’s very hard to get any bag that fits them. And I always have to carry a lot of stuff. I’m always dragging. When you’re a bag lady, you’re a bag lady.”

--Iris Apfel

“I like the idea of wearing a glamourous coat with comfortable shoes; evening dresses with flats. I like it when there are two messages in one silhouette. I like it when it’s not first-degree sexy; when it’s not first-degree severe. I like it when everything is mixed.”

--Guillaume Henry, Creative Director of Carven

“And make no mistake about it, you are dumb. You’re a group of incredibly well-educated dumb people. I was there. We all were there. You’re barely functional. There are some screw-ups headed your way. I wish I could tell you that there was a trick to avoiding the screw-ups, but the screw-ups, they’re a-coming for ya. It’s a combination of life being unpredictable, and you being super dumb.”

--Remarks by Aaron Sorkin ‘83 at Syracuse University’s 158th Commencement and the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry’s 115th Commencement

“You know when sometimes you meet someone so beautiful and then you actually talk to them and five minutes later they’re as dull as a brick? Then there’s other people, when you meet them you think, “Not bad. They’re okay.” And then you get to know them and…and their face just sort of becomes them. Like their personality’s written all over it. And they just turn into something so beautiful.”

--Amelia Pond

“What you are is a complicated girl with simple needs. You need your books and time to read, and you need a few friends and you need someone-not to take care of you, but to care for you. If you have all those things, you’ll always be alright.”

--Brian Morton, 'Breakable You'

“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

"Do magic. Enter her heart without touching her."

--Unknown

I never tried to be anything other than a dreamer.

"The greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change her future by merely changing her attitude."

--Oprah Winfrey

“O! It’s nice to get up in the morning. But it’s nicer to stay in bed.”

--Harry Lauder

“I have had a holiday, and I'd like to take it up professionally."

--Kylie Minogue

"Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting."

--Cormac McCarthy

“Fashion isn’t just frocks. It’s how we do our houses, our gardens - it’s what we eat and drink.”

--Grace Coddington

“If you are all wrapped up in yourself, you are overdressed.”

--Kate Halverson

“I believe part of the process of figuring yourself out is a way of connecting the dots between the fabulous and influential people around us all, like some sort of hidden constellation—you only have to know where to look.”

--Ashley Olsen

“Long hair minimizes the need for barbers; socks can be done without; one leather jacket solves the coat problem for many years; suspenders are superfluous.”

--Albert Einstein

“All I’ve ever done is dream. That, and only that, has been the meaning of my existence. The only thing I’ve ever really cared about is my inner life. My greatest griefs faded to nothing the moment I opened the window onto my inner self and lost myself in watching. I never tried to be anything other than a dreamer. I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be. Anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed to be full of poetry. The only thing I ever loved was pure nothingness…”

--Fernando Pessoa

“I got my feet on the ground and I don’t go to sleep to dream.”

--Fiona Apple

“You will recognize your own path when you come upon it because you will suddenly have all the energy and imagination you will ever need.”

--Sara Teasdale

“I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.”

--Albert Camus

“I am still so naive; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?”

--Sylvia Plath

“How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.”

--Anais Nin

“That’s who you really like. The people you can think out loud in front of.”

--John Green

"Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we're quoting."

--John Green

“I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognized wiser than oneself.”

--Marlene Dietrich

“I wouldn't mind living my life capturing the moments of others.”

--Unknown

“If he wrote it he could get rid of it. He had gotten rid of many things by writing about them.”

--Ernest Hemingway, 'Fathers and Sons'

“It pains me to realize I’ll never get to actually live in these well written worlds, but at least I can stay for a little while.”

--Unknown

“I guess that’s the beauty of books. When they finish they don’t really finish.”

--Markus Zusak

“Stories you read when you’re the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you’ll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit.”

--Neil Gaiman

“Anyone who knows me, should learn to know me again;

For I am like the Moon,

you will see me with new face everyday.”

--Rumi

“I want to sing like the birds sing, not worrying about who hears or what they think.”

--Rumi

“Appreciate how rare and full of potential your situation is in this world, then take joy in it, and use it to your best advantage.”

--Dalai Lama

“As long as one keeps searching, the answers come.”

--Joan Baez

“Very little is needed to make a happy life. It is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.”

--Marcus Aurelius

“It is not about how others are or how society is. The most important thing is to ask yourself, “What should I do?” and “What can I do?” One who stands up with moral courage and conviction can change society and create waves of transformation around the world.”

--Daisaku Ikeda

“So I dressed with remaining ceramics, furniture and objects; so I placed a message in each, a small story, at times ironic and obviously wordless, but audible to those who believe in poetry.”

--Piero Fornasetti

There isn't enough of anything as long as we live.

All quotes by author Raymond Carver

“Cool summer nights. Windows open. Lamps burning.

Fruit in the bowl. And your head on my shoulder.

These the happiest moments in the day.

Next to the early morning hours, of course.

And the time just before lunch. And the afternoon,

and early evening hours. But I do love these

summer nights. Even more, I think, than those other

times. The work finished for the day.

And no one who can reach us now. Or ever.”

"It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love."

"That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones."

"And did you get what

you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth."

"Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read."

"Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from."

"There isn't enough of anything

as long as we live. But at intervals

a sweetness appears and, given a chance

prevails."

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