I want to be somebody’s favorite hiding place

“That’s what people do who love you. They put their arms around you and love you when you’re not so lovable.”

--Deb Caletti

“Sometimes you’ve got to be able to listen to yourself and be okay with no one else understanding.”

--Christopher Barzak

“Gracious, soft-voiced girls, who were brought up on memories instead of money.”

--F Scott Fitzgerald, 'The Ice Palace'

"Don’t be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen."

--George Saunders

“I’m the kind of person who likes to be by himself. To put a finer point on it, I’m the type of person who doesn’t find it painful to be alone. I find spending an hour or two every day running alone, not speaking to anyone, as well as four or five hours alone at my desk, to be neither difficult nor boring. I’ve had this tendency ever since I was young, when, given a choice, I much preferred reading books on my own or concentrating on listening to music over being with someone else. I could always think of things to do by myself.”

--Haruki Murakami, 'What I Talk About When I Talk About Running'

“We gotta start teaching our daughters to be somebodies instead of somebody’s.”

--Kifah Shah

“Lately I’ve been thinking about who I want to love, and how I want to love, and why I want to love the way I want to love, and what I need to learn to love that way, and who I need to become to become the kind of love I want to be…and when I break it all down, when I whittle it into a single breath, it essentially comes out like this: 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.”

--Andrea Gibson

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'

Everything takes time.

All quotes by author David Foster Wallace

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

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

--'This Is Water'

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

--'Infinite Jest'

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

--'Infinite Jest'

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

--'Infinite Jest'

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

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

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

--'Brief Interviews With Hideous Men'

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

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

--'Girl With Curious Hair'

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

--'Girl With Curious Hair'

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

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

Fearlessly be yourself.

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

--Matt Berninger

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

--Chuck Palahniuk

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

--Anthony Rapp

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

--Uma Thurman

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

--Joan Didion

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

--Unknown

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

--A tidbit from how to be alone

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

--Ray Eames

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

--Pablo Picasso

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

--Meg Rosoff, 'How I Live Now'

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

--Karen Marie Moning

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

--Oscar Wilde

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

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

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

--Rainer Maria Rilke

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

--Bette Davis

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

--Jack Kerouac, 'The Dharma Bums'

“This morning, with her, having coffee.”

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

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

--Florence Broadhurst

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

--Charlotte Gainsbourg

Everything in its perfect time. Everything is unfolding.

“Fear is the cheapest room in the house

I would like to see you living

in better conditions.”

--Hafiz

“Why did he write to her,

“I can’t live without you”?

And why did she write to him,

“I can’t live without you”?

For he went west, she went east,

And they both lived.”

--Carl Sandburg

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

--Edward Thomas

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

--Adele in the March Issue of Vogue

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

--R.D. Larson

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

--Ernest Hemingway

“Creativity is just connecting things.”

--Steve Jobs

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

--Nick Wooster

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

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

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

--Phyllis Nefler, 'Troop Beverly Hills'

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

--Dalai Lama

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

--Hunter S. Thompson

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

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

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

--Jeanette Winterson, Why I adore the night

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

--Stephen Hawking

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

--Henry David Thoreau

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

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

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

--Pearl Cleage

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

--Norman Vincent Peale

“Be empty of worrying.

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

When the door is so wide open?”

--Rumi

“Nothing good gets away.”

--John Steinbeck

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

--Abraham Hicks

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

--Kyoko Escamilla

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

--Ray Bradbury

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

--Richard P. Feynman

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

--Lillian Hellman

"it has been a beautiful

fight

still is."

--Charles Bukowski

There’s time. There is time. There’s so much time.

“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

“When I am silent, I fall into the place where everything is music.”

--Rumi

“If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”

--Ernest Hemingway, 'A Farewell to Arms'

“What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us. What we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal.”

--Albert Pine

“And, if you believe, in very simple terms, that people mean you well, and will treat you kindly, they will. And, if you believe that the world is against you, then so it will be in your experience. And, if you believe that you will begin to deteriorate at age 22, then so you shall.”

--Jane Roberts

“I hate to hear you talk about all women as if they were fine ladies instead of rational creatures. None of us want to be in calm waters all our lives.”

--Jane Austen

“Things usually make sense in time, and even bad decisions have their own kind of correctness.”

--Miranda July

“My name is Russell Greene. Maybe you passed me and my family out on the highway. Maybe you were driving some fancy sports car or an old beat up four-door. Maybe you had someplace to be. Or maybe like us you’re living out your dream with your house hitched up behind you, and America the Beautiful up ahead. But whoever you are you be sure to give us a wave the next time you drive by. Cause we’re your neighbors, and we’re all on the road together.”

--Opening credits narration of 'Promised Land'

“So I wait for you like a lonely house

till you will see me again and live in me.

Till then my windows ache.”

--Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“She said there is a glow to love: she had actually seen it. It is like the entire sun coming to rest in the belly of a kneeling sheep. It is like a glint from the beads of an Italian necklace that hung at her mother’s throat. It is like two lovers flashing mirrors through space and time.”

--Gail Jones, 'Sixty Lights'

“I have disappeared into my love for you - and I think you should either give me back or join me here and lose yourself as well.”

--Charles Hunter

"You can try to escape the story of your life, but you can’t. It happened…heart broke. I knew you when you were young. Heart broke too. I will know you when we are old too. And maybe wise. I know you now. Your story. Mine isn’t the one I would have chosen in the beginning. But, I’ll take it. It is my story. It’s only mine. And, it’s not over. There’s time. There is time. There’s so much time."

---Laura Dern, 'Enlightened'

“Every moment and every event of every man’s life on earth plants something in his soul.”

--Thomas Merton

“You are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing.”

--E.E. Cummings

“Elegance doesn’t mean being noticed, it means being remembered.”

--Giorgio Armani

“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there’s nothing left to add, but when there’s nothing left to take away”

--A. Saint-Exupery

“She is a girl and would not be afraid to walk the whole world with herself.”

--Augusta Gregory, 'Visions And Beliefs In The West Of Ireland'

“What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story.”

--F. Scott Fitzgerald, 'The Love of the Last Tycoon'

“Don’t feel stupid if you do not like what everyone else pretends to love.”

--Patrick Mimran

“Go out and do something. It isn’t your room that’s a prison, it’s yourself.”

--Sylvia Plath

“There’s a plane leaving for anywhere you want right now, and in an hour, and in a day, and in a year. You can get out whenever you want, it’s comforting I think.”

--Unknown

“A real education takes place, not in the lecture hall or library, but in the rooms of friends, with earnest frolic and happy disputation. Wine can be a wiser teacher than ink, and banter better than books.”

--Stephen Fry

“What people seem to forget is there’s always more than a single road to any given destination. If you get lost, make the best of it. If you hit a dead-end, turn around and try another way. Just don’t give up.”

--Unknown

“I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights sleep, worked too long and too hard in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I’ve lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment.”

--John Steinbeck

“When anything is blocking my head or there’s worry in my life, I just go sit on Mars or something and look back here at Earth. All you can see is this tiny speck. You don’t see the fear. You don’t see the pain. You don’t see thought. It’s just one solid speck. Then nothing really matters. It just doesn’t.”

--Heath Ledger

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'

I disappear a lot.

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

--The White Rabbit, 'Alice In Wonderland'

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

--Kathryn Stockett, 'The Help'

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

--Henry David Thoreau

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

--Osho

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

--Morrie Schwartz

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

--Thom Yorke

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

--Charles Bukowski

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

--Maya Angelou

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

--F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

--Hara Estroff Morano

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

--Ashton Darian

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

--Virginia Woolf

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

--Barack Obama

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

--Sofia Coppola

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

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

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

--Sylvia Plath

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

--Charles Bukowski

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

--Bob Dylan

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

--Douglas Coupland

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

--Yo La Tengo!, 'Autumn Sweater'

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

--Jim Morrison

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

--Steven Morrissey

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

--Claude Monet

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

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

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

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

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

--Theodore I. Rubin

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

--Dean Spade, ‘For Lovers and Fighters’

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

--Harry Truman

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

--Oscar Wilde

It takes life to love Life.

"What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness,

Anger, discontent and drooping hopes?

Degenerate sons and daughters, life is too strong for you--

It takes life to love Life."

--Lucinda Matlock

"There is something about the outside of a horse

that is good for the inside of a man."

--W. Churchill

“Caring is a powerful business advantage.”

--Scott Johnson

“What is your life about, anyway? Nothing but a struggle to be someone. Nothing but a running from your own silence.”

--Rumi

“You know the typical crowd, Wow, it’s Friday night, what are you going to do? Just sit there? Well, yeah. I’ve never been bothered with the need to rush out into the night. That’s all. Sorry for all the millions, but I’ve never been lonely. I like myself. I’m the best form of entertainment I have.”

--Charles Bukowski

“Is it really that bad if someone sees who you are? Why is it humans have a problem with letting someone else see that they are human?”

--Joseph Gogler

“I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.”

--Tropic of cancer

“You are the soul of the soul of the universe, and your name is Love.”

--Rumi

“Simply to be desired is not a high enough aspiration. Outfits that say little more than ‘look at my body’ should be outlawed from one’s wardrobe. English style has always been about expressing one’s intelligence, charm and views through one’s choice of image. Expressing who you are and what you want to be. If what you’re saying is just ‘be my boyfriend’ then you’re not saying much. Looking sexy should always come second to looking interesting - to look interesting is to look beautiful.”

--Luella’s Guide to English Style

“When things are good, say good things. When things are bad, say twice as many good things.”

--R. Todd Michael

“Just look at the animals, at the birds; nobody is worried, nobody is sad, nobody is frustrated. You don’t see a buffalo freaking out. He is perfectly contented chewing the same grass every day. He is almost enlightened. There is no tension; there is a tremendous harmony with nature, with himself, with everything as it is. Buffaloes don’t make parties to revolutionize the world, to change buffaloes into super buffaloes, to make buffaloes religious, virtuous. No animal is concerned at all with human ideas. And they all must be laughing: What has happened to you? Why can’t you be just yourself as you are? What is the need to be somebody else?

So the first thing is a deep acceptance of yourself.”

--Osho

“There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.”

--Jane Austen

“Passion is energy. Feel the power that comes from focusing on what excites you.”

--Oprah Winfrey

“Some women choose to follow men, and some women choose to follow their dreams. If you’re wondering which way to go, remember that your career will never wake up and tell you that it doesn’t love you anymore.”

--Lady Gaga

“I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.”
--Mark Twain

Seize this very minute.

“I love the way you can fall in love with a piece of literature; how words alone can get your heart doing that.”

--Laura Marling

“You have to find the right distance between people. Too close, and they overwhelm you, too far and they abandon you.”

--Hanif Kureishi

“The hardest period in life is one’s 20s. It’s a shame because you’re your most gorgeous and you’re physically in peak condition. But it’s actually when you’re most insecure and full of self-doubt. When you don’t know what’s going to happen, it’s frightening.”

--Helen Mirren in Esquire

"Cherish your solitude. Take trains by yourself to places you have never been. Sleep out alone under the stars. Learn how to drive a stick shift. Go so far away that you stop being afraid of not coming back. Say no when you don't want to do something. Say yes if your instincts are strong, even if everyone around you disagrees. Decide whether you want to be liked or admired. Decide if fitting in is more important than finding out what you're doing here."

--Eve Ensler

“If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery—isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.”

--Charles Bukowski

“I keep the telephone of my mind open to peace, harmony, health, love, and abundance. Then, whenever doubt, anxiety, or fear try to call me, they will keep getting a busy signal-and soon they’ll forget my number.”

--Edith Armstrong

"Seize this very minute; What you can do, or dream you can, begin it; Boldness has genius, power and magic in it."

--Johnston Wolfgang von Goethe

“You do the right thing even if it makes you feel bad. The purpose of life is not to be happy but to be worthy of happiness.”

--Tracy Kidder

“She remembered something a woman in Paris had told her once. A woman in her forties, much married, elegant, a little world-weary. ‘There is nothing easier in this world,’ this woman had claimed, ‘than getting a man to kiss you.’ ‘Oh really?’ Eva had said, ‘so how do you do that?’ ‘Just stand close to a man,’ the woman had said, ‘very close, as close as you can without touching - he will kiss you in one minute or two. It’s inevitable. For them it’s like an instinct - they can’t resist. Infallible.”

--William Boyd

“Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country."

--Anais Nin

You belong.

"You should above all things be glad and young

For if you're young, whatever life you wear

it will become you; and if you are glad

whatever's living will yourself become."

--EE Cummings

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

--Jerry Garcia

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

--Audrey Hepburn

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

--F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

--Andy Warhol

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

--Bob Dylan on Creativity

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

--Shyma Perera, 'Bitter Sweet Symphony'

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

--Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell To Arms

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

--Zadie Smith

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

--Zelda Fitzgerald

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

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

--Josephine Humphreys, 'Rich In Love'

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

--Alan Watts

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

--Charles Bukowski

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

--Johnny Depp

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

--Ashli Wood

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

--Abu adh-Dhiya

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

--Robert Louis Stevenson

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

--Ella Fitzgerald

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

--Kate Moller

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

--Rumi

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

--Florence Welch, Nylon magazine

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

--Oprah Winfrey

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

--Jack Kerouac

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

--Franz Kafka

Be in love with your life.

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

--Oliver Goldsmith

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

--Kimya Dawson

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

--Haruki Murakami

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

--Audrey Niffenegger

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

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

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

--Audrey Hepburn

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

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

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

--Elizabeth Gilbert, 'Eat Pray Love'

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

--L.M. Montgomery

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

--Max Lucado

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

--William Shakespeare

“On the other side

I can see us waiting for

all we know we’ll be.”

--Tyler Knott Gregson

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

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

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

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

--Charles Dickens, 'Great Expectations'

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

--I Wrote This For You

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

--Jack Kerouac

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

--Jhumpa Lahiri

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

--Diana Ross

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

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

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

--Salman Rushdie

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

of non-definitive acts,

something other than the desperation.

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

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

and seduced you

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

You want a better story. Who wouldn't?

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

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

--Oprah Winfrey

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

--Dries Van Noten

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

--Fernando Pessoa

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

--Neil Gaiman, 'Coraline'

You’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

Laziness will not do.

“Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.”

--Mark Twain

“I think there are people who want to be looked at. As a writer or observer, I’m more interested in looking.”

--Sofia Coppola

"Life is a whim of several billion cells to be you for a while."

--Groucho Marx

“Praise and blame, gain and loss, pleasure and sorrow come and go like the wind. To be happy, rest like a giant tree, in the midst of them all.”

--Buddha

“When so many are lonely, as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.”

--Tennessee Williams

"I want to get more familiar with you. I love you. I loved you when you came and sat on the bed--all that second afternoon was like warm mist--and I hear again the way you say my name--with that queer accent of yours. You arouse in me such a mixture of feelings, I don't know how to approach you. Only come to me--get closer and closer to me. It will be beautiful, I promise you."

--Henry Miller

"Where it all ends I can't fathom, my friends.

If I knew, I might toss out my anchor."

--Jimmy Buffett

“To love what you do and feel that it matters—how could anything be more fun?”

--Katharine Graham

“It ain’t dying I’m talking about, it’s living. I doubt it matters where you die, but it matters where you live.”

--Larry McMurtry, 'Lonesome Dove'

“So avoid using the word ‘very’ because it’s lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don’t use very sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason, boys - to woo women - and, in that endeavor, laziness will not do.”

--'Dead Poets Society'

“Start copying what you love. Copying, copying, copying. And at the end of the copy, you will find yourself.”

--Yohji Yamamoto

"…I love your feet only because they walked upon the earth and upon the wind and upon the waters, until they found me…"

--Pablo Neruda

“Be hole, be dust, be dream, be wind

Be night, be dark, be wish, be mind,

Now slip, now slide, now move unseen,

Above, beneath, betwixt, between.”

--Neil Gaiman

“I get my ideas out of my dreams…if you’re lucky enough to use something you see in a dream, it is purely original. It’s not in the world — it’s in your head. I think that is amazing.”

--Alexander McQueen

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