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’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life.

"Finding your passion isn't just about careers and money. It's about finding your authentic self. The one you've buried beneath other people's needs."

--Kristin Hannah, 'Distant Shores'

"There is no shame in being hungry for another person. There is no shame in wanting very much to share your life with somebody."

--Augusten Burroughs

“And I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more.”

--Franz Kafka

“For you, a thousand times over.”

Khaled Hosseini, 'The Kite Runner'

“Sorrow is how we learn to love. Your heart isn’t breaking. It hurts because it’s getting larger. The larger it gets, the more love it holds.”

--Rita Mae Brown, 'Riding Shotgun'

“The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.”

--Albert Ellis

"We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures."

--Thornton Wilder

“The end of a trip leaves me with a sad aftertaste the same as the end of a novel… When I am returning from a trip, the best part is not going through the airport or getting home, but the taxi ride in between: you’re still traveling, but not really.”

--Édouard Levé

“I just try things. And the things I like, sometimes they work, and sometimes they don’t. You can look at pictures where I just look terrible. But the older I get, the more I know what works. It’s for the better.”

--Andre3000

“I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life—and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.”

--Georgia O’Keefe

“It’s just that I feel so sad these wonderful nights. I sort of feel they’re never coming again, and I’m not really getting all I could out of them.”

--F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I have more memories than if I’d lived a thousand years.”

--Charles Baudelaire, from “Spleen (II)”, in “The Flowers of Evil”, trans. William Aggeler

“I’ve got a bad case of the 3:00 am guilts - you know, when you lie in bed awake and replay all those things you didn’t do right? Because, as we all know, nothing solves insomnia like a nice warm glass of regret, depression and self-loathing.”

--D.D. Barant, 'Dying Bites'

“If you read one book a week, starting at the age of 5, and live to be 80, you will have read a grand total of 3,900 books, a little over one-tenth of 1 percent of the books currently in print.”

--Lewis Buzbee, 'The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop'

“The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.”

--Fernando Pessoa

“Nothing is more alienating to anyone unaccustomed to it than hearing one’s own voice played back on a tape recorder. What the apparatus records - what the objectified ‘others’ hear - is not what resonates inside my head when I speak. The recording makes me conscious that I have no true voice. Instead, I have two voices that do not harmonize, that contradict each other: an interior voice and an exterior one. Others never hear me just as I hear myself. Moreover, this splitting of the voice, or opacity of voice to speaker, can never be directly represented. I can never communicate to another person the sound of my inner voice.”

--Gillian Wearing

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

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'

Just say it out loud.

“Suddenly I realize

That if I stepped out of my body I would break

Into blossom.”

--James Wright, 'A Blessing'

“The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.”

--Terence McKenna

“Nothing will work unless you do.”

--Maya Angelou

“Life is never just one note. This is no different. …NO ONE - not one single person - on this earth is all alone with any feeling they have. Everyone has felt something similar at some time - and maybe they’re as scared of it as you are. Just say it! Just say it out loud.”

--o, world

“Admit what you’ve lost and live with the cost; at times it does hurt to be healed.”

--Brian Yorkey, 'Next to Normal'

“Everything has its own place and function. That applies to people, although many don’t seem to realize it, stuck as they are in the wrong job, the wrong marriage, or the wrong house. When you know and respect your Inner Nature, you know where you belong. You also know where you don’t belong.”

--The Tao of Pooh

“I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched.”

--Edgar Allan Poe

“A mind that is stretched to a new idea never returns to its original dimension”

--Oliver Wendell Holmes

“You’ve got to know the rules to break them. That’s what I’m here for, to demolish the rules but to keep the tradition.”

--Alexander McQueen

"Failing at something you love to do feels much better than succeeding at something you care nothing about."

--Dallas Clayton

“We need to remember what’s important in life: friends, waffles, and work. Or waffles, friends, work … doesn’t matter. But work is third.”

--Leslie Knope, 'Parks & Recreation'

“I meet you. I remember you. Who are you? You’re destroying me. You’re good for me. How could I know this city was tailor made for love? How could I know you fit me like a glove? I like you. How unlikely. How low all of a sudden. How sweet. You cannot know.”

--Hiroshima Mon Amour, Alain Resnais, 1959

“It’s your choice to decide what looks good on you. What world you fit in. What do you feel about that. And don’t be afraid of having to be one look. Be anything you want to be. And be many things.”

--Ralph Lauren

"I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought, there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it's true I'm here, and I'm just as strange as you."

--Frida Kahlo

“Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.”

--Charles Baudelaire

“At times it feels like music is an excuse to be a human. It feels like people need that excuse to go and put their arms in the air and sing their hearts out.”

--Marcus Mumford

“The more I think it over, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.”

--Vincent Van Gogh

“I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.”

--Vladimir Nabokov

“I can never say what I want to say. It’s been like this for a while now. I try to say something, but all I get are the wrong words-the wrong words or the exact opposite words from what I mean. I try to correct myself, and that only makes it worse. I lose track of what I was trying to say to begin with. It’s like I’m split in two and playing tag with myself. One half is chasing the other half around the big, fat post. The other me has the right words, but this me can’t catch her.”

--Haruki Murakami, 'Norwegian Wood'

“I have faith in the fact that, as I change, so will the things that I’m interested in, as long as I keep up my own change.”

--Michelle Williams in Interview Magazine

“I had always been kind of obsessed with making a home of my own and was always drawing rooms that I wanted to live in, down to pictures on the wall and the faces that would be in the photographs, and how the couches would be situated.”

--Michelle Williams in Interview Magazine

“…I would roll down the window and hang my head out like a dog, and let the 60-mile-an-hour wind slap me. It was the only way i could get the day off me.”

--Michelle Williams in Interview Magazine

“I still have a hard time giving up on the day and admitting exhaustion.”

--Michelle Williams in Interview Magazine

All photographs are self portraits.

"People think they know the mystery of living in your skin. They don't. There's no one who knows except the person who carts it around her own self."

--Colum McCann

They had dug their feet down into happiness and weren’t prepared to let go.

“I can’t think of anything lonelier than spending the rest of my life with someone I can’t talk to, or worse, someone I can’t be silent with.”

--Mary Ann Shaffer

“Anxiety is practising failure in advance. Anxiety is needless and imaginary. It’s fear about fear, fear that means nothing.”

--Seth Godin

“My mother says that pain is hidden in everyone you see. She says try to imagine it like big bunches of flowers that everyone is carrying around with them. Think of your pain like a big bunch of red roses, a beautiful thorn necklace. Everyone has one.”

--Francesca Lia Block

“You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place, I told him, like you’ll not only miss the people you love but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you’ll never be this way ever again.”

--Azar Nafisi

“You’re going to meet the most extraordinary men, the sexiest, brightest, funniest men, and you’re going to fall in love with so many of them, and you won’t know until the end of your life who your greatest friends were or your greatest love was.”

--'Milk'

“…acquired tastes can be rewarding. Acquired taste jump-starts new satisfactions where I do not initially find them. Through acquired taste, I grow in my capacity to enjoy what the world has to offer.”

--NYtimes.com

“I love you also means I love you more than anyone loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that no one loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that I love no one else, and never have loved anyone else, and never will love anyone else.”

--Jonathan Safran Foer

"I want someone who will be monogamous, and nice to his mother. And I want someone who likes musicals, but knows to just shut his mouth when I’m watching Lost. And I want someone, who thinks being really into cars is lame, and strip clubs are gross. I want someone who will actually empty the dishwasher instead of just taking out forks as needed, like I do. I want someone with clean hands and feet, and beefy forearms like a damn Disney prince. And I want him to genuinely like me, even when I’m old… that’s what I want."

--Liz Lemon, '30 Rock'

"All photographs are self portraits."

--Minor White

“What I hope most of all is that you understand what I mean when I tell you that though I do not know you and even though I may never meet you, laugh with you, cry with you, or kiss you, I love you. With all my heart, I love you.”

--'V for Vendetta'

“Instead of focusing on how much you can accomplish, focus on how much you can absolutely love what you’re doing.”

--Leo Babauta

“Sometimes she has imagined what it would be like to fly, to live in the river, to run like a horse. She has dreamed of that freedom, that power, and fears the wildness in herself that wants to live as beasts live, moved purely by need and desire. She has felt torn between the heat of her limbs and the thoughts in her mind telling her to be careful and good and always calm.”

--Francesca Lia Block

“We’re making it up. The world, the universe, life, reality. Especially reality.”

--Tom Robbins

“If people sat outside and looked at the stars each night, I’ll bet they’d live a lot differently.”

--Bill Watterson

“What if she was meant to be, or could have been, someone important in my life? I think that’s what scares me: the randomness of everything. That the people who could be important to you might just pass you by. Or you pass them by. How do you know. I felt that by walking away I was abandoning them, that I spent my entire life, day after day, abandoning people.”

--Peter Cameron

“Don’t try to be different. Just be good. To be good is different enough.”

--Arthur Freed

Unfinished business always comes back to haunt you.

You build your world around someone, and then what happens when he disappears? Where do you go - into pieces, into atoms, into the arms of another man? You go shopping, you cook dinner, you work odd hours, you make love to someone else on June nights. But you’re not really there, you’re someplace else where there is blue sky and a road you don’t recognize. If you squint your eyes, you think you see him, in the shadows, beyond the trees. You always imagine that you see him, but he’s never there. It’s only his spirit, that’s what’s there beneath the bed when you kiss your husband, there when you send your daughter off to school. It’s in your coffee cup, your bathwater, your tears. Unfinished business always comes back to haunt you, and a man who swears he’ll love you forever isn’t finished with you until he’s done.

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.”

Time takes it all.

"Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them."

--Dalai Lama

"Strangely enough, this is the past that somebody in the future is longing to go back to."

--Ashleigh Brilliant

I've learned to let go, not hold on so tight. To open the jar at just the right moment, and enjoy the light.

"She wanted to be irresponsible, she wanted to be looked after, to be told that she didn't have to worry about a thing and that someone else would take care of everything. How easy life would be without having grown-up problems to worry about. And then she could grow up all over again..."

--Cecilia Ahern

Time takes it all. Whether you want it to or not. Time takes it all, time bears it away, and in the end, there is only darkness. Sometimes we find others in that darkness. And sometimes we lose them there again.

“And my first bit of free advice is this: You are alive. Your whole life is still before you. More terrible things will happen to you. Wonderful things will happen, too. Don’t run from life. Embrace it.”

--Robin Jones Gunn

“I have only known her for two years. But if you took every memory, every moment, if you stretched them end to end—they’d reach forever.”

--Jodi Picoult, 'My Sister’s Keeper'

“I like to smell things and look at things, and sometimes stay up all night, walking, and watch the sun rise.”

--Ray Bradury

“The positive way to look at this is that from here things can only go up. But I’ve been up, and I always felt like a trespasser. A transient at the top. It’s like I’ve got a visa for happiness, but for sadness I’ve got a lifetime pass.”

--Carrie Fisher

Imagine if you suddenly learned that the people, the places, the moments most important to you were not gone, not dead, but worse, had never been. What kind of hell would that be?

"Fame to me is only a temporary and partial happiness, that's not what fulfills me. It warms you a bit, but the warming is temporary. It might be kind of a relief to be finished. It's sort of like you don't know what kind of yard dash you're running, and then you're at the finish line and you sort of sigh -- you've made it. But fame will go by -- and so long. I've had you, fame. I've always known it was fickle."

--Marilyn Monroe, in her last interview, which Life published a week before her death

Someone stop her

“I realize full well how hard it must be to go on living alone in a place from which someone has left you, but there is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.”

--Haruki Murakami

You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.

"The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before."

--Neil Gaiman

"Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are."

--Anais Nin

"To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time."

--Leonard Bernstein

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

--Maya Angelou

Rediscover you. Admire yourself more often. You are as beautiful as your heart remembers.

Starting over is the bravest kind of starting there is.

"That’s the nice thing about dreams, the way you wake up before you fall."

— Marya Hornbacher

The most universal secret is 'I hurt'.

“You just analyze everything until it barely even exists.”

--My So-Called Life

“You are today where your thoughts have brought you; you will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you.”

--James Allen

“Your clothes should be tight enough to show you’re a woman but loose enough to show you’re a lady.”

--Marilyn Monroe

“I’m thankful for women. I think women are more intelligent than men. Also, without women, there would be no cookies.”

--Norm MacDonald

i'm lovesick

homesick

sick of what i've got

and sick for what i've lost

i just want

i just want to be well

i've got just enough

of what i used to have

to remind me of what i can't have

and just enough

of what i've got

to keep me lovesick

homesick

sick of what i've got

and sick for what i've lost

and i just want

i just need

to be well.

Someone stop her

the girl

with all the beautiful things

slow

slow her down

she enjoys

only

the finding and

not

the having

someone stop her

teach

her to see what

she has

already found

teach her

to enjoy it a little

longer

show

her she has found

enough

she has enough

someone

stop her

There's a hell of a good universe next door: let's go.

"Promise me you'll always remember: You're braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think."

--Christopher Robin to Pooh

It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.

"Just when you think it can't get any worse, it can. And just when you think it can't get any better, it can."

--Nicholas Sparks, 'At First Sight'

Sacrifice. We all make them. You kept thinking about what you lost. You didn’t get it. Sacrifice is a part of life. It’s supposed to be. It’s not something to regret. It’s something to aspire to.

"We're all susceptible to it, the dread and anxiety of not knowing what's coming. It's pointless in the end, because all the worrying and the making of plans for things that could or could not happen, it only makes things worse. So walk your dog or take a nap. Just whatever you do, stop worrying. Because the only cure for paranoia is to be here, just as you are."

--'Grey's Anatomy'

Pain beats regret every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

"Adopt the pace of nature; her secret is patience."

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

You can't stop the future, you can't rewind the past. The only way to learn the secret is to press play.

"Hope is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without words, and never stops at all."

--Emily Dickenson

"Listen; there's a hell of a good universe next door: let's go."

--E.E. Cummings

Travel, travel, travel. Do not settle into the life of the normal average citizen, be more. Realize that time helps, when nothing else can. And that there are two types of people in this world, those who are unhappy, and those who do whatever it takes to ensure their happiness, and you are one of those people.

“There is no such thing as was. To me, no man is himself, he is the sum of his past. There is no such thing really as was, because the past is. It is part of every man, every woman, and every moment.”

--William Faulkner

"Some men have thousands of reasons why they cannot do what they want to, when all they need is one reason why they can."

--Willis Whitney

"Charm. It's a sort of bloom on a woman. If you have it you don't need to have anything else; and if you don't have it, it doesn't much matter what else you have."

--James Matthew Barrie

"It is good that the young are beautiful; it is the only advantage they have."

--The Duchess of Windsor

We would often be sorry if our wishes were granted.

"There are two days in the week on which I never worry; One is yesterday and the other is tomorrow."

--Robert Burdette

Independence is the part that drew you in

You said I like the way you know a thing or two

You gotta have hope

You gotta have something

There's always a reason to break

Hope

'Cause nothing less

Will save the day

"Isn't it sad to be in a place where everything is so unbelievable you'd believe anything?"

--'Go Ask Alice'

"If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?"

--'Alice in Wonderland'

"I do not know anyone who has got to the top without hard work. That is the recipe. It will not always get you to the top, but should get you pretty near.”

--Margaret Thatcher

She only drinks coffee at midnight

When the moment is not right

Her timing is quite unusual

You see her confidence is tragic

but her intuition: magic

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

Chocolate is a bandaid no matter what they say.

She had been too busy trying to transform herself into the kind of person who doesn't need anything from anybody, a wall of pure bricks. In the meantime, she had forgotten that when people walk into walls of bricks, they get hurt.

I read somewhere that if you think you're going to cry, you can recite the colors of things to make it stop. Green tree. Red windmill. Blue sky. Blue jeans. Blue eyes.

Chocolate is a bandaid no matter what they say, shoes don't stretch, and men don't change.

Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we've missed the chance to have had other people hurt us. To a younger me this sounded like luck; to an older me this sounds like a quiet tragedy.

It came time for me to learn that I could pick myself up off the ground.

"There were times when he caught me, but there were more times he let me fall and finally it came time for me to learn that I could pick myself up off the ground, and walk away."
--Charlie Brown

So basically if you want to know about this, about what it is going on. Then you should just picture some one standing still with a cup in their hand, there is still half of the Pepsi remaining. And another person comes straight in through the door and goes up to the person, of course not saying anything. And then takes the cup out of the persons hand and throws it on the floor. All the pieces remaining, shattered. All the Pepsi, wasted. Everything a mess. But then it gets worse because this person who broke your cup. Who ruined your Pepsi that you weren't done drinking. They tell you that now you need to clean it up. Now you are responsible for the mess. That they want nothing to do with it.

All you could do was take on as much weight as you can bear.

"Somewhere lodged in the lung of a New Yorker is an atom that once belonged to a man who went to work two years ago and never came back. His widow dreads today, because people will be coming and calling, and she'll have to insist that she's okay. It's hard but last year was harder. The kids will be sad and distant, but they take their cues from her, and they sense that it's hard - but that last year was harder. But what really kills her, really really kills her, is knowing that the youngest one doesn't remember daddy at all anymore. And she's the one who has his eyes. Two years in; the rest of our lives to go."
--Written in a New York Paper on 9/11/03

"All you could do was take on as much weight as you can bear. And if you're lucky, there's someone close enough by to shoulder the rest."
--Sarah Dessen

"The soul would have no rainbow had the eyes no tears."
--John Vance Cheney

"And then I felt sad because I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can't ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one. You wonder when your turn is going to be, or if it's already happened."
--Douglas Coupland

The glass is always half empty.

It had been a long time in coming, like the swollen soot clouds of a coming storm, like the too-ripe fruit ready to fall, like the sun baking chocolate dirt desperate to bloom. So she let it come, the slow wet rising reaching her eyes, beginning to fall and fall.

The things about life that I've learned is that you're going to get hurt. You're going to have emotional nights and cry yourself to sleep for hours. You're going to suffer some kind of heartbreak, some kind of loss. But you will also have those moments where you heal. Those moments are the best. You feel like you smile for the first time again. You feel like you're alive again. Life just kind of restarts.

Today is one of those gray cloudy days where it seems like the sky just doesn't give a piece of crap. There's no texture. It's one flat shade of gray. It makes me wonder if the sky ever gets tired of its job.

I guess I just prefer to see the dark side of things. The glass is always half empty. And cracked. And I just cut my lip on it. And chipped a tooth.

It seems like the simplest concept: just push them all away and you’ll never get hurt. However, the simplest isn’t always the most effective. Someday, somebody’s gonna find their way in, and they’re going to leave you on your knees.

Sometimes, love lost does not hurt half as bad as a love that never had a chance to grow. Sometimes you meet people that change everything, but more often, you change everything for someone you never even meet.

This life, it hurts sometimes, and you cry to sleep and you wake up heavy-hearted, but remember: the earth does not stop. Your heart keeps going and your limbs keep moving and you sleep it off, you wake up new, and you face the day with eager, shining eyes, and you love with a full, full heart.

“Sure, it’s good to feel things, and if it hurts, we’re doing it to ourselves, or so the saying goes, but there should be a different music here. There should be just one safe place in the world, I mean this world. People get hurt here. People fall down and stay down and I don’t like the way the song goes.”
--Richard Siken

At heart, I have always been a coper.

And if you could change it would you? I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t change one second of the journey because if it wasn’t for that journey I wouldn’t be at the exact place that I am right now. And that thought scares me because I like where I’m at right now. If it wasn’t for the pain, I wouldn’t have the knowledge I have right now, if it wasn’t for the struggle I wouldn’t appreciate what’s to come. If it wasn’t for the risk, I would be left wondering for the rest of my life what if? So no, I don’t regret a single second of anything I’ve experienced the past year because I learned the realities of life. Sometimes things don’t work out, sometimes love isn’t strong enough, and sometimes you have no control over what happens in your life. And I think knowing that puts me ahead of the game.

"At heart, I have always been a coper, I've mostly been able to walk around with my wounds safely hidden, and I've always stored up my deep depressive episodes for the weeks off when there was time to have an abbreviated version of a complete breakdown. But in the end, I'd be able to get up and on with it, could always do what little must be done to scratch by."
--Elizabeth Wurtzel

"Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell."
--Edna St. Vincent Millay

It's enough to break your heart.

"Do you know how sometimes when you are riding your bike and you start skidding across sand, or when you miss a step and start tumbling down the stairs - you have those long, long seconds to know that you are going to be hurt, and badly?"
--Jodi Picoult, 'My Sister's Keeper'

There are random moments where sometimes the pain is too much to handle; triggered by a thought, or a memory, or even a song. They are too much to handle sitting up; so I go to lay down. Instead of falling asleep and succumbing to the dream world, I daydream. I daydream about could be’s and what if’s, stories I could write down but would rather not, but mostly I daydream about you. Because thinking about you makes me smile, and when I smile on the outside I am definitely smiling inside. I only wish we could be a little bit closer in distance.

"Dreams are always crushing when they don't come true. But it's the simple dreams that are often the most painful because they seem so personal, so reasonable, so attainable. You're always close enough to touch, but never quite close enough to hold and it's enough to break your heart."
--Nicholas Sparks, 'Three Weeks with My Brother'