Love is not about possession. Love is about appreciation.

“Let someone love you just the way you are – as flawed as you might be, as unattractive as you sometimes feel, and as unaccomplished as you think you are. To believe that you must hide all the parts of you that are broken, out of fear that someone else is incapable of loving what is less than perfect, is to believe that sunlight is incapable of entering a broken window and illuminating a dark room.”

--Marc Hack

“People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that’s what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A soul mate’s purpose is to shake you up, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light can get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you have to transform your life…”

--Unknown

“I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do.”

--Audre Lorde

“I don’t know a perfect person. I only know flawed people who are still worth loving.”

--John Green

“The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.”

--Ernest Hemingway

“If there is such a thing as marriage, it takes place long before the ceremony: in a car on the way to the airport; or as a gray bedroom fills with dawn, one lover watching the other; or as two strangers stand together in the rain with no bus in sight, arms weighed down with shopping bags. You don’t know then. But later you realize — that was the moment. And always without words.”

--Simon Van Booy, 'Love Begins in Winter'

“We were together. I forget the rest.”

--Walt Whitman

“Eventually soulmates meet, for they have the same hiding place.”

--Robert Brault

“At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.”

--Albert Schweitzer

“I have been loving you a little more every minute since this morning.”

--Victor Hugo, 'Les Misérables'

“‎One of the deepest feminine pleasures is when a man stands full, present, and unreactive in the midst of his woman’s emotional storms. When he stays present with her, and loves her through the layers of wildness and closure, then she feels his trustability, and she can relax…”

--Osho

“If you love a flower, don’t pick it up. Because if you pick it up it dies and it ceases to be what you love. So if you love a flower, let it be. Love is not about possession. Love is about appreciation.”

--Osho

“We all have the potential to fall in love a thousand times in our lifetime. It’s easy. The first girl I ever loved was someone I knew in sixth grade. Her name was Missy; we talked about horses. The last girl I love will be someone I haven’t even met yet, probably. They all count. But there are certain people you love who do something else; they define how you classify what love is supposed to feel like. These are the most important people in your life, and you’ll meet maybe four or five of these people over the span of 80 years. But there’s still one more tier to all this; There is always one person you love who becomes that definition. It usually happens retrospectively, but it happens eventually. This is the person who unknowingly sets the template for what you will always love about other people, even if some of these loveable qualities are self-destructive and unreasonable. The person who defines your understanding of love is not inherently different than anyone else, and they’re often just the person you happen to meet the first time you really, really, want to love someone. But that person still wins. They win, and you lose. Because for the rest of your life they will control how you feel about everyone else.”

--Chuck Klosterman, 'Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story'

Enjoy it while it lasts.

“My advice is to go ahead and wear an apron when you’re cooking dinner. Always send a handwritten thank you note on your personal stationary. Enjoy tea served from an actual tea pot. Put your cigarettes in a case. Dream. Dress up when you go out. Be polite. Believe in art and its incredible power to reach across ethnic and social boundaries to enhance our souls. Ditch the handhelds when you’re out. Listen to Mozart. Watch “It Happened One Night”. Live elegantly. And enjoy it while it lasts.”

--Unknown

"You can't help it. Sometimes you just look at someone and realize that they are one of the best things that ever happened in your life."

--Unknown

“You are, at once, both the quiet and the confusion of my heart.”

--Franz Kafka

“Make sure you marry someone who laughs at the same things you do.”

--J.D.Salinger

“Find a woman who makes you feel more alive. She won’t make life perfect but she’ll make it infinitely more interesting. And then love her with all that’s in you.”

--Gayle G. Roper, 'Shadows on the Sand: A Seaside Mystery'

"The number one rule in relationships, from what I hear, is to never just leave."

--Frank Ocean

“In relationships, the little things are the big things.”

--Stephen Covey

“Fight for one another, not with one another.”

--Mark Driscoll

“Why should you worry about the future? You don’t even know the present properly. Take care of the present and the future will take care of itself.”

--Ramana Maharshi

“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.”

--Buddha

“I never change, I simply become more myself.”

--Joyce Carol Oates

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

--Paulo Coehlo

Little blades, she was helpless.

“Regardless of any decision made,

i find myself questioning them in hope 

i will see an alternate life.”

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

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

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

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

--Vladimir Nabokov

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

--Nell Freudenberger as told to RL Magazine

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

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

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

--Steve Maraboli

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

— Neil Gaiman commencement address

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

--Zelda Fitzgerald

"All happiness depends on a leisurely breakfast."

--John Gunther

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

--Christopher Morley

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

--Willa Cather's 'My Antonia'

The shoulder blades

sticking out as if they

wanted to grow wings through

that skin. Little blades,

she was helpless.

--Charles Bukowski

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

--Levi the Poet

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

--Emily Post

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

--J.D. Salinger

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

--Neil Gaiman

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

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

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

--F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

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

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

--F. Scott Fitzgerald

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'

holding my breath with the wonder of it all.

All quotes from StoryPeople

Why is the world so confusing? he said & I said it's only confusing if you believe it has to make sense & he looked at me & shook his head. I can't believe they let just anyone have children, he said.

Sitting there in your pajamas & all the time in the world & if I could keep any moment it would be this: watching you & holding my breath with the wonder of it all.

1: trying on new looks because the old ones take too long in the morning & everyone just thinks "O, she's wearing that old thing again" anyway 2: really small mirror so she doesn't have to take the shock all at once

Loving the sound of her own voice as long as she doesn't have to nag

She learned to love him before he thought it was even possible, so he didn't have a chance to hide & mess it up & while it was a little scary at times, mainly he could not even imagine the world without her there.

when he was three, he used to make cooking noises with his mouth & we would wake to the sound of bacon frying & eggs being stirred with a fork so we had some idea that food was in his future

melting in the slow heat of a summer night, damp with the dark air & thoughts of you

I'm sick & tired of all these judgmental people, she said, & I hope they burn in hell for it.

Are you a princess? I said & she said I'm much more than a princess, but you don't have a name for it yet here on earth.

Whenever I go on a trip, I think about all the homes I've had & I remember how little has changed about what comforts me.

finally stretching out into his life because it doesn't look like there are any real alternatives

Tied together by stuff too difficult to explain to someone new

There are things you do because they feel right & they may make no sense & they may make no money & it may be the real reason we are here: to love each other & to eat each other's cooking & say it was good.

I held out my hands & asked where I could help & somebody grabbed me & pointed me towards the future & said, You've got your work cut out for you & I said, isn't there anything easier? & he laughed & said you could dig around in the past, but it's just busywork & that made perfect sense so I shrugged & started right where I was, along with everyone else

cave filled with stuff that people will kill for, which only goes to show you how confused people are about important things

I've learned not to look too closely, she said. Otherwise I'd just keep finding out stuff that'd bug me & we'd never get along.

Does everyone seem taller than usual? she said & I said that's what usually happens when you stop pretending you don't care

We stood out on the porch before we went inside & she told me her secret. Pretend you're just visiting, she said. That way you'll forget that they're family.

I think my life would be easier, she said, if I could just get my selves to agree on something.

sending postcards to himself saying 'Wish you were here' so when he gets back home he doesn't forget

Death take me now & spare me the pain, she said. It was difficult for me to get that excited. Get a grip, I said, it's only aerobics.

They drove south one winter until they could stand outside with no coats on & we never saw them again.

My grandmother told me once that a city has enough windows for everybody. I still want to believe her.

What's that supposed to be? I said. That's a Christmas dragon, he said. If Santa rode around with this instead of all those reindeer I think it'd put real teeth in the naughty-or-nice thing.

You seem very calm for a woman who's getting married, I said & she nodded. It's on my to-do list, she said, so there's no point in agonizing about it

When do you get to be a grown-up? she said. When you can read & write & lie without laughing, I said & her eyes got big & she said she didn't know it was that hard

this is a world filled with love & other things that have the sense not to waste time talking about everything under the sun & see how it glows with no help from us whatsoever

Things keep getting born in me.

THE BRIDE

I wonder if ever

I will be a bride

with a white lace gown,

standing in front of everyone

looking beautiful

because someone

loves me

that much.

There’s something about being wrong that’s important in life. It teaches you to reanalyze, to look at something from a new angle, to get the foot out of your mouth. Being wrong is one of the most profound experiences a person can have.

If you find you’re lacking anything, let me know and I’ll show you how to live without it.

"The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life."

--Jessica Hische

"My secret is being not terrible at a lot of things."

--Moby

“to love life, to love it even

when you have no stomach for it

and everything you’ve held dear

crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,

your throat filled with the silt of it.

When grief sits with you, its tropical heat

thickening the air, heavy as water

more fit for gills than lungs;

when grief weights you like your own flesh

only more of it, an obesity of grief,

you think, How can a body withstand this?

Then you hold life like a face

between your palms, a plain face,

no charming smile, no violet eyes,

and you say, yes, I will take you

I will love you, again.”

--Ellen Bass

“Have you ever lost yourself in a kiss? I mean pure psychedelic inebriation. Not just lustful petting but transcendental metamorphosis when you became aware that the greatness of this being was breathing into you. Licking the sides and corners of your mouth, like sealing a thousand fleshy envelopes filled with the essence of your passionate being and then opened by the same mouth and delivered back to you, over and over again - the first kiss of the rest of your life. A kiss that confirms that the universe is aligned, that the world’s greatest resource is love, and maybe even that God is a woman. With or without a belief in God, all kisses are metaphors decipherable by allocations of time, circumstance, and understanding.”

--Saul Williams, Said the shotgun to the Head

"Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, ‘So what.’ That’s one of my favorite things to say. ‘So what.’"

--Andy Warhol

"I want to keep my soul fertile for changes, so things keep getting born in me, so things keep dying when it’s time for them to die. I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made to figure things out, not read the same page recurrently."

--Donald Miller

I just want someone to think I’m special, to see me apart from the crowd, as worth knowing and loving. I don’t care if that sounds weak. I like independence, but sometimes it feels like a defense mechanism.

I want to walk like I'm the only woman on earth and I can have my pick.

If you want to see God laugh, make a plan.

"Being kissed on the back of the knee is a moth at the windowscreen."
--Anne Sexton

"The maid of honor - the unambiguous, grown-up equivalent of wearing best friend necklaces."
--Emily Giffin, 'Love The One You're With'

"Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself."
--David Foster Wallace

"What do women want? I want a red dress. I want it flimsy and cheap. I want it too tight. I want to wear it until someone tears it off me. I want it sleeveless and backless, this dress, so no one has to guess what's underneath. I want to walk down the street past Thrifty's and the hardware store with all those keys glittering in the window, past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly, hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders. I want to walk like I'm the only woman on earth and I can have my pick. I want that red dress bad. I want it to confirm your worst fears about me, to show you how little I care about you or anything except what I want. When I find it, I'll pull that garment from its hanger like I'm choosing a body to carry me into this world, through the birth-cries and the love-cries too, and I'll wear it like bones, like skin, it'll be the goddamned dress they bury me in."
--Kim Addonizio

His answer was "I do."

"His hello was the end of her endings, her laugh was their first step down the aisle. His hand would be hers to hold forever, his forever was as simple as her smile. He said she was what was missing, she said instantly she knew. She was a question to be answered, and his answer was I do."
--'Sex And The City'

I dreamed of a wedding. Elaborate elegance. A church filled with flowers and friends. I asked him what kind of wedding he wished for, and he replied, "one that would make you my wife."

Maybe we should all decide we're going to meet the man of our dreams when we're thirty-seven. Then we'll stop squeezing into tight shirts and walking around half-naked and analyzing every encounter as future husband material. We'll stop feeling the need to put on makeup to take out the trash just in case he's walking by. Maybe we should just assume that we'll meet our dream man at some future point, and stop driving ourselves crazy before then.