Take it from me - choke those little bad days. Choke ‘em down to nothing.

“Everyone who terrifies you is sixty-five percent water. And everyone you love is made of stardust, and I know sometimes you cannot even breathe deeply, and the night sky is no home, and you have cried yourself to sleep enough times that you are down to your last two percent, but nothing is infinite, not even loss. You are made of the sea and the stars, and one day you are going to find yourself again.”

--Finn Butler

“There’s nothing more intimate in life than simply being understood… And understanding someone else.”

--Brad Meltzer, 'The Inner Circle'

“March 4th, the only day that is also a sentence”

--John Green

“Someone said, ‘You never regret a baby or a swim,’ and I always think that about a walk, as well.”

--Nigella Lawson

“Don’t plant your bad days. They grow into weeks. The weeks grow into months. Before you know it, you got yourself a bad year. Take it from me - choke those little bad days. Choke ‘em down to nothing.”

--Tom Waits

“In the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you.”

--Buddhist Saying

“The chicest thing is when you don’t exist on Google.”

--Phoebe Philo

“When I first met you, I felt a kind of contradiction in you. You’re seeking something, but at the same time, you are running away for all you’re worth.”

--Haruki Murakami

“Get all dressed up, do [your] makeup, and stay at home.”

--Andre Leon Talley, on the most decadent thing a person could do

“You must love in such a way that the person you love feels free.”

--Thich Nhat Hanh

“Only the strong go crazy. The weak just go along.”

--Assata Shakur

“The moment you fall in love feels like it has centuries behind it, generations - all of them rearranging themselves so this precise, remarkable intersection could happen. In your heart, in your bones, no matter how silly you know it is, you feel that everything has been leading to this, all the secret arrows were pointing here, the universe and time itself crafted this long ago, and you are just now realizing it, you are just now arriving at the place you were always meant to be.”

--David Levithan, 'Every Day'

“I notice you, I want to say. Even when no one else does, I do. I will.”

--David Levithan, 'Every Day'

“You’ll need coffee shops and sunsets and road trips. Airplanes and passports and new songs and old songs, but people more than anything else. You will need other people and you will need to be that other person to someone else, a living breathing screaming invitation to believe better things.”

--Jamie Tworkowski

“This is the real secret of life—to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.”

--Alan Watts

“You should bring something into the world that wasn’t in the world before. It doesn’t matter what that is. It doesn’t matter if it’s a table or a film or gardening — everyone should create. You should do something, then sit back and say, “I did that.”

--Ricky Gervais

“Don’t chase money, or fame, or power. Enjoy cultivating friendships, earn respect by showing respect, and be happy. A business is only as strong as its people, and it is in relationships that life finds true value.”

--Ethan Newton

Stop being who you were and become who you are.

"Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not."

--James Joyce

"Who ran to help me when I fell,
And would some pretty story tell,
Or kiss the place to make it well?
My mother."
--Ann Taylor

“Home is the result of intersecting lives. It is the secondary color created by individuals in relationships… Yes, home is the landscape of people, places, and things upon which we live out life—but it is mostly about people. That is why home can be a suburban neighborhood, or a struggling farm, or a ship at sea, or a war-torn nation. After all, home is where hearts are.”

--Austin Sailsbury in Kinfolk Magazine, Volume V: In Search of Home

“Your body is the house you grew up in, how dare you try to burn it to the ground.”

--Sierra Demulder

“Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It’s like the tide going out, revealing whatever’s been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future.”

--Margaret Atwood, 'Cat’s Eye'

“Going barefoot is the gentlest way of walking and can symbolize a way of living — being authentic, vulnerable, sensitive to our surroundings. It’s the feeling of enjoying warm sand beneath our toes, or carefully making our way over sharp rocks in the darkness. It’s a way of living that has the lightest impact, removing the barrier between us and nature.”

--Adele Coombs, 'Barefoot Dreaming'

“This is why it hurts the way it hurts. You have too many words in your head. There are too many ways to describe the way you feel. You will never have the luxury of a dull ache. You must suffer through the intricacy of feeling too much.”

--Iain Thomas

“I am very particular about what I like and the way things fit. I think that is the difference between people who are stylish and who aren’t - being very particular.”

--Binki Shapiro for StyleLikeU

“If you had a person in your life treating you the way you treat yourself, you would have gotten rid of them a long time ago.”

--Cheri Huber, 'There Is Nothing Wrong With You'

“That is why it is so important to let certain things go. To release them. To cut loose. People need to understand that no one is playing with marked cards; sometimes we win and sometimes we lose. 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. Complete the circle. Not out of pride, inability or arrogance, but simply because whatever it is no longer fits in your life. Close the door, change the record, clean the house, get rid of the dust. Stop being who you were and become who you are.”

--Paulo Coehlo

Little blades, she was helpless.

“Regardless of any decision made,

i find myself questioning them in hope 

i will see an alternate life.”

--Georgia Whots on Regret, excerpt from 'Last Letters to Ghosts', 1938

“You last only moments and experience too few things.”

--Rakishi, 'Trading Wealth with Wisdom', 1934

“I have always been a wretched speaker. My vocabulary dwells deep in my mind and needs paper to wriggle out into the physical zone. Spontaneous eloquence seems to me a miracle. I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasures.”

--Vladimir Nabokov

“Novels shouldn’t aspire to answer questions, and I wouldn’t presume to offer advice about love or marriage in any case. What’s fascinating to me about marriage as a subject for fiction—a subject that fiction has taken on with gusto since the 19th century—is how unknowable other people’s relationships are. Even the marriages of your parents, your siblings, your closest friends always remain something of a mystery. Only in fiction can you pretend to know people completely.”

--Nell Freudenberger as told to RL Magazine

“I want to be in a relationship where you telling me you love me is just a ceremonious validation of what you already show me.” 

--Steve Maraboli, 'Life, the Truth, and Being Free'

“As I look back on my life, I realize that every time I thought I was being rejected from something good, I was actually being re-directed to something better.”

--Steve Maraboli

“…Imagining it was a mountain, a distant mountain, my goal. As long as I kept walking towards the mountain, I would be alright. And when I truly was not sure what to do I could stop and think about whether it was taking me towards or away from the mountain.”

— Neil Gaiman commencement address

“I don’t suppose I really know you very well - but I know you smell like the delicious damp grass that grows near old walls and that your hands are beautiful opening out of your sleeves and that the back of your head is a mossy sheltered cave when there is trouble in the wind and that my cheek just fits the depression in your shoulder.”

--Zelda Fitzgerald

"All happiness depends on a leisurely breakfast."

--John Gunther

"There is only one success - to be able to spend your life in your own way."

--Christopher Morley

“I don’t think I was homesick. If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.”

--Willa Cather's 'My Antonia'

The shoulder blades

sticking out as if they

wanted to grow wings through

that skin. Little blades,

she was helpless.

--Charles Bukowski

“I came to tell you that you’re beautiful, I think you’re lovely, I think that you’re made for more than you settled for.”

--Levi the Poet

"The personality of a house is indefinable, but there never lived a lady of great cultivation and charm whose home, whether a palace, a farm-cottage or a tiny apartment, did not reflect the charm of its owner."

--Emily Post

“One day, a long time from now, you’ll cease to care any more whom you please or what anybody has to say about you. That’s when you’ll finally produce the work you’re capable of.”

--J.D. Salinger

"The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you're walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That's the moment you may be starting to get it right."

--Neil Gaiman

“Actually that’s my secret — I can’t even talk about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful you are.”

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

“Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.” 

--F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires.” 

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

“I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside. ” 

--F. Scott Fitzgerald

You can have anything that you want.

"What is the goal? A house that is like the life that goes with it, a house that gives us beauty as we understand it--and beauty of a nobler kind that we may grow to understand."

--Elsie de Wolfe

“The trouble with living alone is that it’s always your turn to do the dishes.”

--Unknown

“Hospitality is making your guests feel at home, even if you wish they were.”

--Unknown

“A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life: he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair, the rest of his days.”

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The fellow that owns his own home is always just coming out of a hardware store.”

--Kin Hubbard

“You know what I tell people who ask me what’s a fashion faux pas? It’s when you look in the mirror and see a stranger looking back.”

--Iris Apfel

“One of my favorite clothing patterns is camouflage. Because when you’re in the woods it makes you blend in. But when you’re not it does just the opposite. It’s like, ‘Hey, there’s an asshole.’”

--Demetri Martin

“I never go outside unless I look like Joan Crawford the movie star. If you want to see the girl next door, go next door.”

--Joan Crawford

“You try, you fail. You try again, you fail again. But the only true failure is when you stop trying.”

--Leota, 'The Haunted Mansion'

“I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else’s whim or to someone else’s ignorance.”

--Bell Hooks

“Do yourself a favor. Before it’s too late, without thinking too much about it first, pack a pillow and a blanket and see as much of the world as you can. You will not regret it. One day it will be too late.”

--Jhumpa Lahiri, 'The Namesake'

“Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.”

--Rumi

“To make the right choices in life, you have to get in touch with your soul. To do this, you need to experience solitude, which most people are afraid of, because in the silence you hear the truth and know the solutions.”

--Deepak Chopra

“Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible. As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know.”

--Carl Jung

“Oftentimes I’ll just overflow, and then I’ll need to spend a week alone and not talk to anybody or call anybody.”

--Justin Vernon

“Not only have I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, I remain unconvinced that the distinction matters."

--Joan Didion

"You need to let the little things that would ordinarily bore you suddenly thrill you."

--Andy Warhol

"It's the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting."

--Paulo Coelho

“For most of life, nothing wonderful happens. If you don’t enjoy getting up and working and finishing your work and sitting down to a meal with family or friends, then the chances are that you’re not going to be very happy. If someone bases his happiness or unhappiness on major events like a great new job, huge amounts of money, a flawlessly happy marriage or a trip to Paris, that person isn’t going to be happy much of the time. If, on the other hand, happiness depends on a good breakfast, flowers in the yard, a drink or a nap, then we are more likely to live with quite a bit of happiness.”

--Andy Rooney

"Work for a cause, not for applause. Live life to express, not to impress. Don't strive to make your presence noticed, just make your absence felt."

--Unknown

“I think you can have anything that you want. Find someone who has a life that you want and figure out how they got it. Read books. Figure out what you’re passionate about. Pick your role models wisely. Find out what they did and do it.”

--Lana Del Rey

“It is obvious that we can no more explain a passion to a person who has never experienced it than we can explain light to the blind.”

--T.S. Elliot

“To say “I love you” one must know first how to say the “I”.”

--Ayn Rand, 'The Fountainhead'

We're all just walking each other home.

All quotes by Ram Dass

“Either you do it like it’s a big weight on you or you do it as part of the dance.”

“I would like my life to be a statement of love and compassion — and where it isn’t, that’s where my work lies.”

“We're all just walking each other home.”

“The quieter you become, the more you can hear.”

“We're fascinated by the words--but where we meet is in the silence behind them.”

“As long as you have certain desires about how it ought to be you can't see how it is.”

“The most exquisite paradox… as soon as you give it all up, you can have it all. As long as you want power, you can't have it. The minute you don't want power, you'll have more than you ever dreamed possible.”

“The heart surrenders everything to the moment. The mind judges and holds back.”

“In most of our human relationships, we spend much of our time reassuring one another that our costumes of identity are on straight.”

“Your problem is you are too busy holding on to your unworthiness.”

“I'm not interested in being a "lover." I'm interested in only being love.”

“The next message you need is always right where you are.”

“A feeling of aversion or attachment toward something is your clue that there's work to be done.”

You’re already home where you feel love

“Mama once told me you, you’re already home where you feel love”

--The Head and the Heart, Lost In My Mind

“I began to draw an invisible boundary between myself and other people. No matter who I was dealing with. I maintained a set distance, carefully monitoring the person’s attitude so that they wouldn’t get any closer. I didn’t easily swallow what other people told me. My only passions were books and music.”

--Haruki Murakami, 'Sputnik Sweetheart'

“Socializing is as exhausting as giving blood. People assume we loners are misanthropes, just sitting thinking, ‘Oh, people are such a bunch of assholes,’ but it’s really not like that. We just have a smaller tolerance for what it takes to be with others. It means having to perform. I get so tired of communicating.”

--Anneli Rufus

“I think if you are really into words and poetry and situations of life, there is always a little kiss of sadness on everything you do… It’s just the kind of person who I am. I always look carefully beneath the outward appearance of things. I want to know what’s really going on in somebody’s heart.”

--Stevie Nicks

“‎Fashion is the armour to survive the reality of everyday life.”

--Bill Cunningham

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

--Marcelene Cox

“By 19, I had found my look. Oversize t-shirts, bike shorts, and wrestling shoes. To prevent the silhouette from being too baggy, I would cinch it at the waist with my fanny pack. I was pretty sure I would wear this look forever. The shirts allowed me express myself with cool sayings like ‘there’s no crying in baseball’ and ‘universität heidelberg,’ the bike shorts showed off my muscular legs, and the fanny pack held all my trolley tokens. I was nailing it on a daily basis. Find something like this for yourself as soon as possible.”

--Tina Fey, 'Bossypants'

“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”

--Albert Camus

“Someday, somewhere - anywhere, unfailingly, you’ll find yourself, and that, and only that, can be the happiest or bitterest hour of your life.”

--Pablo Neruda

“Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it’s much the same”

--Margaret Atwood, 'The Blind Assassin'

“There’s only one me

I have ever liked being;

the me that you see.”

--Tyler Knott Gregson

“How privileged you are, to be passionately

Clinging to what you love;

The forfeit of hope has not destroyed you.”

--Louise Gluck, 'October'

“I felt all inner development was ceasing, that all becoming and growing were being choked, because a single idea was filling my entire soul.”

--Ellen West

“I feel like we’re all wounded and we can carry wounds throughout our lives. It can be small incidents that happen, or the soul you’re born into. I’ve always thought I carried this heartbreak since the day I was born.”

--Lykke Li

“I am a dreamer. I know so little of real life that I just can’t help re-living such moments as these in my dreams, for such moments are something I have very rarely experienced. I am going to dream about you the whole night, the whole week, the whole year.”

--Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.”

--Rainer Maria Rilke

“I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.”

--James Baldwin

“Let nature do the freezing and frightening and isolating in this world. Let men work and love and fight it off.”

--Jack Kerouac

“I’m not a girl, nor will I ever be. But if I were a girl, I’d like to be Sofia. She’s very feminine. And she’s very quiet. But then, her movie’s done. She loves fashion and music and art and film, and she is able to combine them in a way that all seems to be quite natural. There’s nothing forced about it; she doesn’t have that gritty hunger to prove what she knows. There are certain people who have confidence and absolutely adore themselves and, five minutes around them, I just want to not be around them anymore. Sofia is confident in such a lovely way. It’s not aggressive or arrogant, and that’s a gift. I’m sure she works quite hard, but it all seems effortless.”

--Marc Jacobs on Sofia Coppola

The smallest things take up the most room in your heart.

"Doubt everything. Find your own light."

--Siddhārtha Gautama

"One never learns how the witch became wicked."

--Gregory Maguire

"There's a million guys out there at a million bars having a million drinks about you tonight."

--Steven Tyler

You can have it if you want but someday I’ll make a better one.

--Lykke Li, I Know Places

“Shower, keep clean, enjoy colors and animals. People, if possible.”

--Sylvia Plath

“I automatically assume people won’t like me, so I don’t talk to them unless they approach me first. I can’t become a part of a crowd because I can’t get past that feeling that I don’t belong.”

--Stephanie Kuehnert

“I’ve been savin’ this money for a dee-vorce if ever I get a husband!”

--Annie, 'It’s a Wonderful Life'

“Dear God,” she prayed, “let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. Let me be gay; let me be sad. Let me be cold; let me be warm. Let me be hungry… have too much too eat. Let me be ragged or well dressed. Let me be sincere — be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar. Let me be honorable and let me sin. Only let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost.”

--'A Tree Grows In Brooklyn'

“You are a good person, though. I can tell that much from looking at you. I can tell these things after seven years of watching people come up and go here: there are people who can open their hearts and people who can’t. You’re one of the ones who can. Or, more precisely, you can if you want to.” “What happens when people open their hearts?” Cigarette dangling from her lips, Reiko clasped her hands together on the table. She was enjoying this, “They get better,” she said.”

--Haruki Murakami, 'Norwegian Wood'

“Anyway, I want a cat,” she said, “I want a cat. I want a cat now. If I can’t have long hair or any fun, I can have a cat.”

--Hemingway

“Why didn’t I learn to treat everything like it was the last time? My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future.”

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

“One of my big concerns these past few years is that I’ve been losing the ability to feel things with the same intensity - the way I felt when I was younger. It’s scary - to feel your emotions floating away and just not caring.”

--Douglas Coupland

“'Sometimes,’ said Pooh, ‘the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.'”

--A.A. Milne

“We are the water

sitting so still and waiting

to be splashed into.”

--Tyler Knott Gregson

“I don’t change my handbag every season. I believe in the Yves Saint Laurent woman who either has her hands in the pockets of her pantsuit or is holding her lover’s hand. She doesn’t need a bag.”

--Carine Roitfeld

“Sweatpants are a sign of defeat. You lost control of your life so you bought some sweatpants.”

--Karl Lagerfeld

“I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.”

--Franz Kafka

“Certainly we talk to ourselves; there is no thinking being who has not experienced that. One could even say that the word is never a more magnificent mystery than when, within a man, it travels from his thought to his conscience and returns from his conscience to his thought. This is the only sense of the words, so often used in this chapter, “he said,” “he exclaimed”; we say to ourselves, we speak to ourselves, we exclaim within ourselves, without breaking the external silence. There is great tumult within; everything within us speaks, except the tongue. The realities of the soul, though not visible and palpable, are nonetheless realities.”

--Victor Hugo, 'Les Misérables'

“I am eternally, devastatingly romantic, and I thought people would see it because “romantic” doesn’t mean “sugary”. It’s dark and tormented — the furor of passion, the despair of an idealism that you can’t attain.”

--Catherine Breillat

“I wonder if four-leaf clovers have any insecurities about their deformity that could be healed with the knowledge that people value them.”

--Haley G Hoover

“Normally I didn’t see a great deal. I didn’t hear a great deal either. I didn’t pay attention. Strictly speaking I wasn’t there. Strictly speaking I believe I’ve never been anywhere.”

--Samuel Beckett

“As I grow to understand life less and less, I learn to love it more and more.”

--Jules Renard

“Nothing I like to do pays well.”

--Charles Portis, 'True Grit'

“It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.”

--Agnes Repplier

“Loneliness is something I’ve never been bothered with because I’ve always had this terrible itch for solitude.”

--Charles Bukowski

“The power of finding beauty in the humblest things makes home happy and life lovely.”

--Louisa May Alcott

“She was like the moon—part of her was always hidden away.”

--Dia Reeves

“Nothing makes a woman more beautiful than the belief that she is beautiful.”

--Sophia Loren

“I wonder what it is in women,” she said. “Whenever they find a big strong guy with a wide adolescent streak running through him, they get a powerful urge to hold his head in their laps.”

--Robert Parker

Beauty is not something you can count on.

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

--Karl Lagerfeld

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

--Yun-men

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

--Emmanuelle Beart

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

--Chris McCandless

“Every single thing

you’ve secretly waited for,

I have inside me.”

--Tyler Knott Gregson

“You are the true love

I have waited my whole life

to wrap myself in.”

--Tyler Knott Gregson

“My face is waiting

to smile back with yours in so

many photographs.”

--Tyler Knott Gregson

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

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

--Hackers

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

--Jane Bird

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

--Lee Kleinhelter

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

--Emerson

"Why'd you read then?"

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

--W. Somerset Maugham

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

--Janet Fitch

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

--Susan Jeffers

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

--John Galliano

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

--Helen Keller

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

--Maira Kalman

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

--Mahatma Gandhi

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

--Elizabeth Gilbert

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

--Jonathan Safran Foer

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

--John Green

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

--Kathleen Norris

It's the simple life for me.

“I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn’t have a god, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. I didn’t make for an interesting person. I didn’t want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone.”

--Charles Bukowski

We can go all night

dancing to music we’ve never heard

and don’t much care for

drinking until it gets so very funny

every word, every step.

--Dallas Clayton

"I am simply looking for beauty, whatever that is - it's nothing that can be explained - only felt. If I find it in a single bowl, or wandering line of pots, good. I am grateful."

--Gwyn Hanssen Pigott, 'Potter'

Always treat your woman like a lady.

Never get too old to call her baby.

Never let your praying knees get lazy.

And love like crazy.

And then God created Saturn…and he liked it, so he put a ring on it…

"Gorgeous. Haunting. Let go. Decompress. Grandiose and gratifying. The waves will roll over you."

--Dianna Agron

Take me to the place where the sea meets the sky. It's the simple life for me.

i am not strange

i am an artist

"Now listen, life is lovely, but I Can’t Live It. I can’t even explain. I know how silly it sounds… but if you knew how it Felt. To be alive, yes, alive, but not be able to live it. Ay that’s the rub. I am like a stone that lives… locked outside of all that’s real… do you know of such things, can you hear? I wish, or think I wish, that I were dying of something for then I could be brave, but to be not dying, and yet… and yet to be behind a wall, watching everyone fit in where I can’t, to talk behind a gray foggy wall, to live but to not reach or to reach wrong… to do it all wrong… believe me, (can you?)"

Anne Sexton, 'A Self-Portrait in Letters'

"She would tell her about the music and the lights and how when you got going fast some looked like stars and others looked like fireflies that came so close to your nose you had to be careful not to breathe them in."

--Dennis G. Dillingham, Jr., 'The White Carousel Horse'

“She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow.”

--Sandra Cisneros

We have advantages. We have a cushion to fall back on. This is abundance. A luxury of place and time. Something rare and wonderful. It's almost historically unprecedented. We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to.

I prefer places where buildings are not taller than the tallest of trees

I was anti-everything and everyone. I didn't want people around me. This aversion was not some big crippling anxiety; merely a mature recognition of my own psychological vulnerability and my lack of suitability as a companion. Thoughts jostled for space in my crowded brain as I struggled to give them some order which might serve to motivate my listless life.

"What is beautiful for you may not be beautiful to someone else. Or whatever is beautiful here may not be beautiful there and what is sometimes beautiful today is not necessarily beautiful tomorrow. Perhaps this is the story of fashion and what makes fashion move forward, the fact that there is no decision whatsoever with what's wrong."

--Alber Elbaz, Artistic Director, Lanvin

"If clothes look beautiful on the hangers they won't necessarily look beautiful on the body. And that which may look good on the hanger, may look good on the body. Mr. Geoffrey Beene once told me that fashion is not what's on the back or the front of a coat but what's in between."

--Alber Elbaz, Artistic Director, Lanvin

"Ever tried

Ever failed

No matter

Try again

Fail again

Fail better"

--Samuel Beckett

“I don’t want to earn my living; I want to live.”

--Oscar Wilde

"Everybody has to leave, everybody has to leave their home and come back so they can love it again for all new reasons."

--Donald Miller, 'Through Painted Deserts'

"Dogs are minor angels, and I don't mean that facetiously. They love unconditionally, forgive immediately, are the truest of friends, willing to do anything that makes us happy, etcetera. If we attributed some of those qualities to a person we would say they are special. If they had ALL of them, we would call them angelic. But because it's "only" a dog, we dismiss them as sweet or funny but little more. However when you think about it, what are the things that we most like in another human being? Many times those qualities are seen in our dogs every single day-- we're just so used to them that we pay no attention."

--Jonathan Carroll

"When people talk about the good old days, I say to people, 'It's not the days that are old, it's you that's old.' I hate the good old days. What is important is that today is good."

--Karl Lagerfeld

Rise above the little things.

“Ever since happiness heard your name, it has been running through the streets trying to find you.”

--Hafiz

And is often the case with faith, I thought I was being asked a favor, when in fact I was being given one.

“There is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.”

--DH Lawrence

When you reach the little house, the place your journey started, you will recognize it, although it will seem much smaller than you remember. Walk up the path, and through the garden gate you never saw before but once. And then go home. Or make a home. Or rest.

There's no pleasure in having nothing to do. The fun is in having lots to do, and not doing it.

"I am neither better nor smarter, only luckier. And I should be ashamed of thinking I know everything because you can know the whole world and still feel lost in it. So many people are in pain – no matter how smart or accomplished – they cry, they yearn, they hurt. But instead of looking down on things, they look up, which is where I should be looking too. Because when the world quiets to the sound of your own breathing, we all want the same things: Comfort, love and a peaceful heart."

--Mitch Albom, 'Have A Little Faith'

"It is far more comforting to think God listened and said no, than to think that nobody’s out there."

--Mitch Albom, 'Have A Little Faith'

"If we tend to the things that are important in life, if we are right with those we love and behave in line with our faith, our lives will not be cursed with the aching throb of unfulfilled business. Our words will always be sincere, our embraces will be tight. We will never wallow in the agony of 'I could have, I should have.' We can sleep in a storm. And when it's time, our goodbyes will be complete."

--Mitch Albom, 'Have A Little Faith'

She was either crying or laughing. Her moods never gave warning. But we stuck with her; because that’s what friends do. We see past the bad to the good, to the purpose for loving them.

She decided to free herself, dance into the wind, create a new language. And birds fluttered around her, writing "yes" into the sky.

My thoughts tend to sound better in books I didn’t write, and in the songs I didn’t sing. Even then, sometimes there is no piece of literature, no song, no work of art that can really explain the way you feel. There is a double-edge comfort in knowing that no one really knows.

“Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep moving, trying to slip through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won’t be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there — to the edge of the world. There’s something you can’t do unless you get there.”

--Haruki Murakami

“We spend January 1 walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives…not looking for flaws, but for potential.”

--Ellen Goodman

“One resolution I have made, and try always to keep, is this: To rise above the little things.”

--John Burroughs

“We are all mortal until the first kiss and the second glass of wine.”

--Eduardo Galeano

“You can’t control when you lose your heart. The only thing you can do is trust, trust that the person who has your heart realizes it’s value.”

--'Grey's Anatomy'

“Make a wish and place it in your heart. Anything you want, everything you want. Do you have it? Good. Now believe it can come true. You never know where the next miracle is gonna come from, the next smile, the next wish come true. But if you believe that it’s right around the corner, and you open your heart and mind to the possibility of it, to the certainty of it. You just might get the thing you’re wishing for. The world is full of magic. You just have to believe in it. So make your wish. Do you have it? Good. Now believe in it. With all your heart.”

--'One Tree Hill'

“That’s the point,” he said. “Every kind of animal thinks its own kind of animal is wonderful. so people getting married think they’re wonderful and that they’re going to have a baby that’s wonderful, when actually they’re as ugly as a rhinoceroses. Just because we think we’re so wonderful doesn’t mean we really are. We could be terrible animals and just never admit it because it would hurt so much.”

Fairy tales are more than true.

All quotes by author G.K. Chesterton

“Fairy tales, are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated.”

"Fairy tales make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water."

"There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less."

"You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink."

"We should always endeavor to wonder at the permanent thing, not at the mere exception. We should be startled by the sun, and not by the eclipse. We should wonder less at the earthquake, and wonder more at the earth."

"There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there."

"There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematician that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one."

No two loves are identical.

"How different this moment feels, for so many reasons. I tell myself that no two loves are identical--but that I don't have to compare anymore."

--Emily Griffin, 'Love The One You're With'

"I couldn't help but wonder if that was what love was--believing that someone was going to come through, in the end, and that it would still count."

--Laura Dave, 'London Is the Best City in America'

If my heart was a house you'd be home

"Maybe finding one's true self is like building a house and then making it home."

--Anna Esaki-Smith, 'Meeting Luciano'

"When we're two balloons, and together our direction is up, chances are we've found the right person. Our soulmate is the one who makes life come to life."

--Richard Bach

Love is a form of prejudice. You love what you need, you love what makes you feel good, you love what is convenient. How can you say you love one person when there are ten thousand people in the world that you would love more if you ever met them? But you'll never meet them.

“When you’re in love, you don’t need words. A look, a touch, a sigh — you’ve said it all.”

--Juliet Mills

"Many people love in themselves what they hate in others."

--Benzel Sternan

Just do it.

"No one but a fool would measure their satisfaction by what the world thinks of it."

--Oliver Goldsmith

“It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.”

--Frederick Douglass

"I am thankful for a lawn that needs mowing, windows that need cleaning and gutters that need fixing because it means I have a home... I am thankful for the piles of laundry and ironing because it means my loved ones are nearby."

--Nancie J. Carmody

"You can have all the faith you want in spirits, the afterlife, and heaven and hell... but when it comes to this world, don't be an idiot. 'Cause you can tell me you put your faith in God to get through the day, but when it comes time to cross the street, I know you look both ways."

--'House'

"I get crazy in a bookstore. It makes my heart beat hard because I want to buy everything."

--Reese Witherspoon

I feel like a jigsaw puzzle missing a piece, and I'm not even sure what the picture should be.

"Yesterday you said tomorrow. Just do it."

--Nike

May your organs fail before your dreams do.

"Lately I've been struck with how I really love what you can't see in a photograph."

--Diane Arbus

“Maybe that’s what you got when you stood over your grief, facing it finally. A sense of it’s depths, its area, the distance across, and the way over around it, whichever you choose in the end.”

--Sarah Dessen, 'The Truth About Forever'

"It is possible, if you stand tippy-toe, to walk between the raindrops."

--Nikki Giovanni

"The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don't have that, we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach.”

--Maya Angelou

"Chance is the first step you take, luck is what comes afterward."

--Amy Tan, 'The Kitchen God's Wife'

"Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever."

--Amy Tan, 'The Joy Luck Club'

"All these years I kept my true nature hidden, running along like a small shadow so nobody could catch me."

--Amy Tan, 'The Joy Luck Club'

"But she never looked back with regret. There were so many ways for things to get better."

--Amy Tan, 'The Joy Luck Club'

"Too many good things all seem the same after a while."

--Amy Tan, 'The Joy Luck Club'

It seemed that the oven heated up all of her goodness and it came shining back in every scrumptious bite.

"I just don't like to see you waste your time on silly things," he said. "Well then," she said "Close your eyes."

“‘But if everything was always smooth and perfect,’ she continued, ‘you’d get too used to that, you know? You have to have a little bit of disorganization now and there. Otherwise, you’ll never really enjoy it when things go right.”

--Sarah Dessen, 'The Truth About Forever'

"Okay, I thought. Here you are. You Are Here. And you move forward because that's the way it works; thats the only place you can go. You keep going until it stops hurting, or until you find new things to hurt you worse, I guess. And that is the human condition, all of us lurching along in our own private miseries, because that's the way it is. Because, I guess, God didn't give us any choice. You grow up. You learn."

--Jennifer Weiner, 'Good in Bed'

"Opening yourself up, even if it means your heart and soul are crushed. That's what makes you stronger. That's what gives you the power to move on, put the past behind you. To get out there, and get your heart stomped on all over again."

--'The Bedford Diaries'

"There are very few monsters who warrant the fear we have of them."

--André Gide

"Try a thing you haven't done three times. Once, to get over the fear of doing it. Twice, to learn how to do it. And a third time to figure out whether you like it or not."

--Virgil Thomson

She felt like the original peach of summer.

There is never a sudden revelation, a complete and tidy explanation for why it happened, or why it ends, or why or who you are. You want one and I want one, but there isn't one. It comes in bits and pieces, and you stitch them together wherever they fit, and when you are done you hold yourself up, and still there are holes and you are a rag doll, invented, imperfect. And yet you are all that you have, so you must be enough. There is no other way.

"People who want to make a million borrow a million first."
--Sophie Kinsella

"I love new clothes. If everyone could just wear new clothes everyday, I reckon depression wouldn’t exist anymore."
--Sophie Kinsella

"Think for a minute, darling: in fairy tales it's always the children who have the fine adventures. The mothers have to stay at home and wait for the children to fly in the window."
--Audrey Niffenegger

People are unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered.
Love them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Be kind anyway.
If you are successful, you will win some false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway.
The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
Be good anyway.
Honesty and frankness will make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway.
In the final analysis, it is between you and God.
It was never between you and them anyway.
--Mother Teresa

“Like a twenty you find crunched up in a pocket or a lollipop in the depths of your purse when you’re on a diet and at the movies willing yourself away from the chocolate-covered peanuts. The thoughts blossomed and evolved into a new perspective. Suddenly, she was hopeful, she was glowing, she felt like the original peach of summer. Turned around, upside down, inside out and loving the fact that for the first time in days she didn’t want to cry when she thought about her future."
--Rebecca Bloom, 'Tanged Up In Daydreams'

"In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets."
--Rebecca Bloom, 'Tanged Up In Daydreams'

It's a mystery of human chemistry, and I don't understand it. Some people, as far as your senses are concerned, just feel like home.

Home at last!

"Art is the only way to run away without leaving home."
--Twyla Tharp

"Home is a shelter from storms - all sorts of storms."
--William J. Bennett

"If you can organize your kitchen, you can organize your life."
--Louis Parrish

And each heart is whispering, "Home, home at last!"

I'm nearly home.

“It is always sad when someone leaves home, unless they are simply going around the corner and will return in a few minutes with ice-cream sandwiches.”
--Lemony Snicket

"The island sky has its own unmistakable lights, an iridescent sheen that moves with the moods of the sea. It’s never the same, but it’s always the same, and whenever I see it I know I’m nearly home."
--Kevin Brooks, 'Lucas'

The most important thing in life is your family.

If you don't know your family's history, then you don't know anything. You are a leaf that doesn't know it is part of a tree.

My family is really boring. They have a coffee table book called 'Pictures We Took Just to Use Up the Rest of the Film.'

The most important thing in life is your family. There are days you love them, and others you don't, but in the end they're the people you always come home to. Sometimes it's the family you're born into and sometimes it's the one you make for yourself.

Home is where you can say anything you like 'cause nobody listens to you anyway.

I’m so homesick now for someone that I never knew. I’m so homesick now for someplace I will never be.

Home is where they catch you when you fall.

But as for today all I want is to be home.

"There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort."

--Jane Austen

Home is where your history begins. Home is where they catch you when you fall.

I think what you notice most when you haven't been home in a while is how much the trees have grown around your memories.

Before you decide what you want to be, know where you want to be.

I never realize how much I like being home until I've been somewhere totally different for awhile.

"Who needs a map when there's only one passable road to the future? When you're headed in the only direction that makes any sense to you at all? You don't need a map to find your home."

--Jill A. Davis

What happened to us, you know? I don't know who I am anymore or how I got here. I miss who I used to be. I wanna have a home again, you know? And real friends. You know, the kind of friendships we used to believe in. I miss that, and I miss you. I guess I just miss all of it.

In a world where most things were a clutter, having a peaceful home was vital to her sanity. It was her refuge, her nest, where she could hide from the problems outside her door. At least in her home she was in control, there, unlike in the rest of her life, she allowed in only those whom she wanted, she could decide how long they should stay, and where in her home they could be. Not like a heart, which let people in without permission, held them in a special place she never had any say in, and then yearned for them to remain there longer than planned.

Andrew: "You know that point in your life when you realize that the house that you grew up in isn't really your home anymore? All of the sudden even though you have some place where you can put your stuff, that idea of home is gone..."

Sam: "I still feel at home in my house."

Andrew: "You'll see when you move out it just sort of happens one day and it's just gone. And you can never get it back. It's like you get homesick for a place that doesn't exist. I mean it's like this rite of passage, you know. You won't have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for you kids, for the family you start, it's like a cycle or something. I miss the idea of it. Maybe that's all family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place."

--'Garden State'

What is family? They were the people who claimed you. In good, in bad, in parts or in whole, they were the ones who showed up, who stayed in there, regardless.

I watched my mother do what she did best, and realized there would never be a way to cut myself from her entirely. No matter how strong or weak I was, she was a part of me, as crucial as my own heart. I would never be strong enough, in all my life, to do without her.

"All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

--Leo Tolstoy