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

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

--Finn Butler

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

--Brad Meltzer, 'The Inner Circle'

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

--John Green

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

--Nigella Lawson

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

--Tom Waits

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

--Buddhist Saying

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

--Phoebe Philo

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

--Haruki Murakami

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

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

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

--Thich Nhat Hanh

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

--Assata Shakur

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

--David Levithan, 'Every Day'

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

--David Levithan, 'Every Day'

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

--Jamie Tworkowski

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

--Alan Watts

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

--Ricky Gervais

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

--Ethan Newton

“You don’t know anyone at the party, so you don’t want to go. You don’t like cottage cheese, so you haven’t eaten it in years. This is your choice, of course, but don’t kid yourself: it’s also the flinch. Your personality is not set in stone. You may think a morning coffee is the most enjoyable thing in the world, but it’s really just a habit. Thirty days without it, and you would be fine. You think you have a soul mate, but in fact you could have had any number of spouses. You would have evolved differently, but been just as happy. 

You can change what you want about yourself at any time. You see yourself as someone who can’t write or play an instrument, who gives in to temptation or makes bad decisions, but that’s really not you. It’s not ingrained. It’s not your personality. Your personality is something else, something deeper than just preferences, and these details on the surface, you can change anytime you like.

If it is useful to do so, you must abandon your identity and start again. Sometimes, it’s the only way. 

Set fire to your old self. It’s not needed here. It’s too busy shopping, gossiping about others, and watching days go by and asking why you haven’t gotten as far as you’d like. This old self will die and be forgotten by all but family, and replaced by someone who makes a difference. 

Your new self is not like that. Your new self is the Great Chicago Fire—overwhelming, overpowering, and destroying everything that isn’t necessary. ”

--Julien Smith

“I want you to tell me about every person you’ve ever been in love with. Tell me why you loved them, then tell me why they loved you. Tell me about a day in your life you didn’t think you’d live through. Tell me what the word “home” means to you and tell me in a way that I’ll know your mother’s name just by the way you describe your bed room when you were 8. See, I wanna know the first time you felt the weight of hate and if that day still trembles beneath your bones. Do you prefer to play in puddles of rain or bounce in the bellies of snow? And if you were to build a snowman, would you rip two branches from a tree to build your snowman arms? Or would you leave the snowman armless for the sake of being harmless to the tree? And if you would, would you notice how that tree weeps for you because your snowman has no arms to hug you every time you kiss him on the cheek? Do you kiss your friends on the cheek? Do you sleep beside them when they’re sad, even if it makes your lover mad? Do you think that anger is a sincere emotion or just the timid motion of a fragile heart trying to beat away its pain? See, I wanna know what you think of your first name. And if you often lie awake at night and imagine your mother’s joy when she spoke it for the very first time. I want you tell me all the ways you’ve been unkind. Tell me all the ways you’ve been cruel. See, I wanna know more than what you do for a living. I wanna know how much of your life you spend just giving. And if you love yourself enough to also receive sometimes. I wanna know if you bleed sometimes through other people’s wounds.”

--Andrea Gibson

Be willing to be split open.

“No money is better spent than what is laid out for domestic satisfaction.”

--Samuel Johnson

“Empty pockets never held anyone back. Only empty heads and empty hearts can do that.”

--Norman Vincent Peale

“Here I am: a bundle of past recollections and future dreams knotted up in a reasonably attractive bundle of flesh.”

--Sylvia Plath

“Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray.”

--Rumi

“It’s the only time I feel like me, she said, & everyone else just thinks it’s dress up.”

--Brian Andreas

"Find out who you are and you will always be beautiful."

--Lou Doillon

“Every day, think as you wake up, today I am fortunate to have woken up, I am alive, I have a precious human life, I am not going to waste it, I am going to use all of my energies to develop myself, to expand my heart out to others, to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings, I am going to have kind thoughts towards others, I am not going to get angry, or think badly about others, I am going to benefit others as much as I can.”

--The Dalai Lama

“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.”

--Natalie Goldberg

“What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?”

--Ralph Ellison, 'Invisible Man'

“There are only two kinds of people in this world. The realists and the dreamers. The realists know where they are going and the dreamers have already been there.”

--Robert Orben

“Don’t let yourself feel worthless: often through life you will really be at your worst when you seem to think best of yourself; and don’t worry about losing your “personality,” as you persist in calling it: at fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon, and when you are my age you will give out, as I do, the genial golden warmth of 4 p.m.”

--F. Scott Fitzgerald, 'This Side of Paradise'

"Your life is always under construction. It is your job to learn how to untangle the threads and weave a tapestry that matches your desires."

--Dannye Williamsen

“It was one of those perfect autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.”

--P. D. James

“I believe in me. I’m a little screwed up but I’m beautiful.”

--Steve McQueen

Your ship comes in because you’re the captain.

“I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.”

--Roger Ebert

“Despite whoever created it, it’s my world, & the only one I’ve got. Might as well make the best of it, right? Might as well have a little fun while I’m here. Or a lot of fun. Might be dead tomorrow.”

--Ellen Hopkins

“If there is no wind, row.”

--Unknown

“This is a world where everybody’s gotta do something. Ya know, somebody laid down this rule that everybody’s gotta do something, they gotta be something. You know, a dentist, a glider pilot, a narc, a janitor, a preacher, all that … Sometimes I just get tired of thinking of all the things that I don’t wanna do. All the things that I don’t wanna be.”

--Charles Bukowski

“So now I have started living my own life. Imperfect and clumsy as it may look, it is resembling me now, thoroughly.”

--Elizabeth Gilbert

“Oh, it is wonderful to wake up in the morning with things to look forward to!”

--Dodie Smith, 'I Capture the Castle'

“I believe that one defines oneself by reinvention. To not be like your parents. To not be like your friends. To be yourself. To cut yourself out of stone.”

--Henry Rollins

“I will spread myself like wings. I am a billion tiny feathers. You have no idea what’s happened to me.”

--Dave Eggers

“Society goes on telling you, “This is right, and that is wrong”—that is conscience. It becomes ingrained, implanted in you. You go on repeating it. That is worthless; that is not the real thing. The real thing is your own consciousness. It carries no ready-made answers about what is wrong and what is right, no. But immediately, in what-ever situation arises, it gives you light —you know immediately what to do”

--Osho

“I do not think that I will ever reach a stage when I will say, ‘This is what I believe. Finished.’ What I believe is alive and open to growth.”

--Madeleine L’Engle

“When I work hard for something, I don’t like people telling me, Oh you’re so lucky. I aint lucky. Your ship comes in because you’re the captain.”

--Patti Smith

“The things we hate about ourselves aren’t more real than things we like about ourselves.”

--Ellen Goodman

“Because there’s nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline, no matter how many times it’s sent away.”

--Sarah Kay

“To believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. Enough labor for one human life.”

--Czeslaw Milosz, 'Learning'

“You only lose what you cling to.”

--Buddha

Saying yes begins things.

“Only buy what you absolutely love…it doesn’t mean they have to be expensive, just that you love them. Then start to mix them up in as many looks as possible…the more time that goes by, the more editing you can do until you have a refined selection, and, every day you could literally wear a different outfit that is an expression of your personal style.”

--Norma Kamali

"I’m going to make everything around me beautiful - that will be my life.”
--E. D. W.

"Bad taste bothers me."

--Giorgio Armani

“You don’t make me feel like you used to.

That’s why I’m leaving

That’s why people leave each other

They come to their senses and get selfish again.”

--Henry Rollins, 'See a Grown Man Cry, Now Watch Him Die'

“It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”

--J.K Rowling

“There are the friends you meet for the occasional happy hour, and there are friends with whom you have longstanding Taco Tuesdays. Taco Tuesday means a bottle of wine for each person and peeling back the business-casual mask of the weekday while relaying mortifying tales of performed adulthood to one another. You hit reply all. You cried at your desk. You said “I love you” when you were unprepared or drunk or sober. Any day can be Taco Tuesday. These are the people who fill in your blanks. These are the right people.”

--The Hairpin, 'What We Have Going For Us'

"Why not go out on a limb? That's where the fruit is."

--Mark Twain

“Burnout brings strong emotions like anger, fear, jealousy and sadness. Use those feelings to light your creativity on fire.”

--Melissa Gorzela

"In the long run, every project I do is about living, about the flow of life, the riches of the family, where the sun sets, where the sun rises, the climate, the periphery of a building."

--Mike Meire'

"This was an industry that once thrived on exposure. Today I find that the most interesting people are hidden."

--Zac Efron

“She tries it on, like a dress.

She decides it doesn’t fit,

and starts to take it off.

Her skin comes, too.”

--Lola Haskins, 'Love'

“Why don’t you tell me that “if the girl had been worth having, she’d have waited for you?” No, sir, the girl really worth having won’t wait for anybody.”

--F. Scott Fitzgerald

“The happiest people are those who think the most interesting thoughts. Those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good company, good conversation, are the happiest people in the world. And they are not only happy in themselves, they are the cause of happiness in others.”

--William Phelps

"Cynics always say no. But saying yes begins things. Saying yes is how things grow. Saying yes leads to knowledge. “Yes” is for young people. So for as long as you have the strength to, say yes.”

--Stephen Colbert

Cut yourself out of stone.

“Be proud of your mistakes. Well, proud may not be exactly the right word, but respect them, treasure them, be kind to them, learn from them. And, more than that, and more important than that, make them. Make mistakes. Make great mistakes, make wonderful mistakes, make glorious mistakes. Better to make a hundred mistakes than to stare at a blank piece of paper too scared to do anything wrong.”

--Neil Gaiman

“Never be in a hurry; do everything quietly and in a calm spirit. Do not lose your inner peace for anything whatsoever, even if your whole world seems upset."

--Saint Francis de Sales

“Isn’t elegance forgetting what one is wearing?”

--Yves Saint Laurent

“Never be the first to arrive at a party or the last to go home, and never, ever be both.”

--David Brown

"Be very, very careful what you put in that head because you will never, ever get it out.”

--Thomas Cardinal Wolsey

“I believe that one defines oneself by reinvention. To not be like your parents. To not be like your friends. To be yourself. To cut yourself out of stone.”

--Henry Rollins

“The truth is that there are a lot of people like you, us, with strange hobbies or talents or gifts and we try to hide it because we’re afraid that it makes us seem weird or it will turn people off, but that’s a mistake. What makes me unique has brought every person I love into my life.”

--Ned, 'Pushing Daisies'

“If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.”

--C.S. Lewis

“There is a voice inside of you, that whispers all day long, 'I feel that this is right for me, I know that this is wrong.' No teacher, preacher, parent, friend or wise man can decide what’s right for you— Just listen to the voice that speaks inside.”

--Shel Silverstein

“I will love you if you don’t marry me. I will love you if you marry someone else, your co-star, perhaps, or Y., or even O., or anyone Z. through A., even R. Although sadly I believe it will be quite some time before two women can be allowed to marry and I will love you if you have a child, and I will love you if you have two children, or three children, or even more, although I personally think three is plenty, and I will love you if you never marry at all, and never have children, and spend your years wishing you had married me after all, and I must say that on late, cold nights I prefer this scenario out of all the scenarios I have mentioned. That, Beatrice, is how I will love you even as the world goes on its wicked way.”

--Lemony Snicket, 'The Beatrice Letters'

If you relax, it comes.

"I like women who haven't lived with too many men. I don't expect virginity but I simply prefer women who haven't been rubbed raw by experience. There is a quality about women who choose men sparingly; it appears in their walk, in their eyes, in their laughter and in their gentle hearts. Women who have had too many men seem to choose the next one out of revenge rather than with feeling. When you play the field selfishly everything works against you: one can't insist on love or demand affection. You're finally left with whatever you have been willing to give which often is: nothing. Some women are delicate things, some women are delicious and wondrous. If you want to piss on the sun go ahead but please leave them alone."

--Charles Bukowski

“Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake.”

--Victor Hugo

“Sometimes I’m terrified of my heart; of its constant hunger for whatever it is it wants. The way it stops and starts.”

--Edgar Allan Poe

“You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.”

--Eckhart Tolle

“Any idiot can face a crisis - it’s day to day living that wears you out.”

--Anton Chekhov

“…she laughed, I love it when she laughs, although the truth is I am not in love with her…”

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

“Worrying is carrying tomorrow’s load with today’s strength- carrying two days at once. It is moving into tomorrow ahead of time. Worrying doesn’t empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength.”

--Corrie Ten Boom

“Don’t seek, don’t search, don’t ask, don’t knock, don’t demand – relax. If you relax, it comes. If you relax, it is there. If you relax, you start vibrating with it.”

--Osho

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

I got a sweet little angel

"You spend too much time reading, Spenser. You know more stuff that don't make you money than anybody I know."

--Robert B. Parker, 'Mortal Stakes'

“It takes a lot of forms … The world is being constantly circled as though by gulfstream forces, ideas, and creativity that want to be made manifest, and they’re looking for portals to come through in people, and if you don’t do it, they’ll go find someone else. So you have to convince it that you’re serious and you have to show it respect and you have to talk to it and let it know that you’re there.”

--Liz Gilbert, on creativity/genius/muses

“Happiness is not a big house… It’s being in each other’s way. That’s what brings memories.”

--Karina Gentinetta

“I know that I’m good inside. And if people don’t, I shouldn’t mind.”

--Laura Marling, Mama, How Far I’ve Come

"Leave early enough to be missed but stay long enough to be remembered."

--Lisa Taddeo

The days that make us happy make us wise.

“Enough of laziness and doing nothing! Open this notebook every day and write down half a page at the very least. If you have nothing to write down, then at least, following Gogol’s advice, write down that today there’s nothing to write. Always write with attention and look on writing as a holiday.”

--Daniil Kharms, Today I Wrote Nothing: Selected Writings

"Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul."

--Simone Weil

"To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul."

--Simone Weil

"Be content with what you have, rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you."

--Tzu

I got a sweet little angel,

I love the way she spreads her wings.

--B.B. King, Sweet Little Angel

“I love you, even if there isn’t any me, or any love, or even any life. I love you.”

--Zelda Fitzgerald

Leave the house before you find something worth staying in for.

I thank you God

for most this amazing day;

for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of sky;

and for everything which is natural, which is

infinite, which is yes.

--E.E. Cummings

In each of us lie good and bad, light and dark, art and pain,

choice and regret, cruelty and sacrifice.

We’re each of us our own chiaroscuro, our own bit of illusion

fighting to emerge into something solid, something real.

We’ve got to forgive ourselves that.

I must remember to forgive myself.

Because there is a lot of grey to work with.

No one can live in the light all the time.

--Libba Bray, Gemma Doyle Trilogy

"It's more interesting to have just a picture of a small detail - then you can dream all the rest around it. Because when you see the whole thing, what is there to imagine?"

--Dries Van Noten

"Plant lots of flowers, so when you take the time to smell them, they'll be there."

--Bette Midler

There is shadow under this red rock,

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you.

--TS Eliot, The Waste Land

Everybody is somebody else's weirdo.

"Happiness? The color of it must be spring green…."

--Frances Mayes, American memoirist

"No Winter lasts forever; no Spring skips its turn."

--Hal Borland

"Nothing in the world is more common than unsuccessful people with talent, leave the house before you find something worth staying in for. "

--Banksy

“I mean, they say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time.”

--Banksy

“Because we grew up surrounded by big dramatic story arcs in books and movies, we think our lives are supposed to be filled with huge ups and downs! So people pretend there is drama where there is none.”

--Kurt Vonnegut

“Isn’t it strange that we talk least about the things we think about most.”

--Charles Lindbergh

“A career is born in public, talent in privacy.”

--Marilyn Monroe

“I don’t know what’s worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what you’ve always wanted to be, and feel alone.”

--Daniel Keyes, 'Flowers for Algernon'

“For everyone, there are those moments when you have great days with someone you wouldn’t expect to. Then you have to go back to your real lives, but it makes an impression on you.”

--Sofia Coppola

“The biggest scars are unseen and unremembered, always from a smile you forgot long ago. We would never get anything done otherwise.”

--Iain Thomas

“Here I am, a bundle of past recollections and future dreams, knotted up in a reasonably attractive bundle of flesh. I remember what this flesh had gone through; I dream of what it may go through. I record here the actions of optical nerves, of taste buds, of sensory perception. And, I think: I am but one more drop in the great sea of matter, defined, with the ability to realize my existence.”

--Sylvia Plath

“A year from now you will wish you had started today.”

--Karen Lamb

Because of you

I can feel

myself

slowly but

surely

becoming

the me

I have always

dreamed

of

being.

--Tyler Knott Gregson, 'Becoming'

“Well, after I’ve been to university, I’m going to be French, and I’m going to Paris, and I’m going to smoke and wear black, and listen to Jacques Brel, and I won’t speak. Ever.”

--'An Education'

“When you like your work, everyday is a holiday.”

--Frank Tyger

“People often ask me questions that I cannot very well answer in words, and it makes me sad to think they are unable to hear the voice of my silence.”

--Inayat Khan

“The music was too loud for us to talk. Once we got out of Jefferson Park, we rolled down the one window that worked so the world would know we had good taste in music.”

--Quentin Jacobsen, 'Paper Towns'

"I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world."

--Mary Anne Radmacher

“I think she was afraid to love sometimes. I think it scared her. She was the type to like things that were concrete, like the ocean. Something you could point to and know what it is. I think that’s why she always struggled with God. And I think that’s why she also struggled with love. She couldn’t touch it. She couldn’t hold on to it and make sure it never changed. But sometimes it’s those things you can’t touch that you need to hold on to the most.”

--Carrie Ryan

“I don’t want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic. I try to give that to people. I do misrepresent things. I don’t tell truths. I tell what ought to be truth.”

--Blanche DuBois, 'A Streetcar Named Desire'

“I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.”

--Vladimir Nabokov, 'Lolita'

“I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.”

--Eleanor Roosevelt

“Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we’re still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants. We put on display our framed photographs, our parchment diplomas, our silver-plated cups; we monogram our linen, we carve our names on trees, we scrawl them on washroom walls. It’s all the same impulse. What do we get from it? Applause, envy, respect? Or simply attention, of any kind we can get?

At the very least we want a witness. We can’t stand the idea of our own voices falling silent finally, like a radio winding down.”

--Margaret Atwood

"To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable; and wealthy, not rich; to study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly… to listen to stars and buds, to babes and sages, with open heart; await occasions, hurry never… This is my symphony."

--William Henry Channing

Are you the love letter unwritten?

The song left abandoned in the neck of the guitar?

Are you the moments that pass between strangers

as neither says “hello” ?

--Dallas Clayton, 'Be More'

Live without pretending, love without depending, listen without defending, speak without offending.

“There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.”

--Edith Wharton

“If you reach for the stars, all you’ll get are the stars, but we’ve found a whole new spin: if you reach for the heavens, you get the stars thrown in.”

--Mary Poppins, the Musical

I am prepared for amazing things to happen.

"Got you. You're mine now. For the rest of the day, week, month, year, life. Have you guessed who I am? Sometimes I think you have. Sometimes when you're standing in a crowd I feel those sultry, dark eyes of yours stop on me. Are you too afraid to come up to me and let me know how you feel? I want to moan and writhe with you and I want to go up to you and kiss your mouth and pull you to me and say "I love you I love you I love you" while stripping. I want you so bad it stings. I want to kill the ugly girls that you're always with. Do you really like those boring, naive, coy, calculating girls or is it just for sex? The seeds of love have taken hold, and if we won't burn together, I'll burn alone."

--Bret Easton Ellis, 'The Rules of Attraction'

You never really existed

and neither did I

I am just a thought in your dreams

and you are a dream in my thoughts

We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under: the first category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, in other words, for the look of the public. That is the case with the German singer, the American actress. The second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes. They are the tireless hosts of cocktail parties and dinners. Then there is the third category, the category of people who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love. And finally there is the fourth category, the rarest, the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers.

"If I had a straw

I’d suck wax into my mouth, let it pool,

take shape. As tired as I am, who knows

when they’d find me, sleeping with a replica

of empty space on my tongue. After a while,

sleep comes so hard and fast you can feel

like you are falling. Everybody knows that."

--Josh Bell, 'Meditation on Insomnia'

“What is happiness? It’s the reflection of a sunbeam: you see it playing on the wall, sitting in your palm, but as soon as you clench your fist, it slips out of your hand and darts about your face and fingers.”

--Nina Lugovskaya

“Inside the heart of each and every one of us there is a longing to be understood by someone who really cares. When a person is understood, he or she can put up with almost anything in the world.”

--Ed Hird

“Give yourself up to find yourself again.”

--Li Mu Bai, 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon'

“I let almost no one know me, and I lost the chance to know and learn from most of my peers. It took years after I’d graduated from Amherst to realize that people were actually far more complicated and interesting than books, that almost everyone else suffered the same secret fears and inadequacies as I, and that feeling alone and inferior was actually the great valent bond between us all. I wish I’d been smart enough to understand that when I was an adolescent.”

--David Foster Wallace

“Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him. It was music. I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization.”

--Kurt Vonnegut

“I don’t want to have to do this living. I just walk around. I want to be swept off my feet, you know? I want my children to have magical powers. I am prepared for amazing things to happen. I can handle it.”

--'Me & You & Everyone We Know'

“Think about your life, think about the person you want to be & just start being that person. Let the places that you go add to the person you are, but don’t let them replace it — never let the place you’re from, the place you’re at or the places you’re going become the most interesting thing about you. Don’t do that.”

--James Nord

Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence.

“Art is the reason I get up in the morning, but the definition ends there. It doesn’t seem fair that I’m living for something I can’t even define.”

--Ani DiFranco

“You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”

--Jim Rohn

“There’s just some stuff I like, and some of that stuff is shallow, and I don’t fucking care.”

--Ryan Adams

“Don’t you, when strangers and friends come to call, straighten the cushions, kick the books under the bed and put away the letter you were writing? How many of us want any of us to see us as we really are? Isn’t the mirror hostile enough?”

--Jeanette Winterson

“I hate the idea that someone out there hates me. I even hate that Al-Qaeda hates me. I think if they got to know me they wouldn’t hate me.”

--Pam, 'The Office'

“You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.”

--Woodrow Wilson

“The unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwelling on himself and start paying attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence. When you’re unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. You get to take yourself oh so very seriously.”

--Tom Robbins, 'Jitterbug Perfume'

"Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have."

--Steve Jobs

“There’s a thin sheet of glass between me and life. However clearly I see and understand life, I can’t touch it.”

--Fernando Pessoa, 'The Book of Disquiet'

“I’d woken up early, & I took a long time getting ready to exist.”

--Fernando Pessoa, 'The Book of Disquiet'

Tetris

“Things go so fast, so many new things that you just don’t know where to put them, and while you’re deciding where to put them there are even more things and then they build up and then they get bigger and then there’s no space and it is like Tetris and you have been waiting so long for a long piece but there hasn’t been a long piece and the pile is getting higher and you have been saving a space and you think how you could really use a long piece and how much it would help and clear up so many things but the screen is getting full and then there’s only one row left and you know if the next piece isn’t a long piece then there will be no way and it will be game over and then the next piece appears and it’s coming so fast and the crazy music is making you tense and making you frantic and you’re tapping the spacebar and flipping around and now you see the new piece and oh how you hope it’s a long piece but then you see the new piece and you see it’s not a long piece but instead another square piece and there’s just no space for a square piece dammit why’d they never let you have a long piece you saved a space and waited so long and played it so well and it was all you ever needed and don’t you know it would have fit so well in the space you kept open but now the space is blocked and if you want to go on you’ll need to start another game but there’s a chance you’re all out of credits.”

--Jonathan Harris

We are little haunted houses.

"Go, girl, seek happy nights to happy days."

--Shakespeare

"It seems all too common that people lose sight of their dreams, but you were never the type to follow the norm anyway."

--Damin

“I was sand, I was snow—written on, rewritten, smoothed over.”

--Margaret Atwood, 'The Blind Assassin'

We all have dreams in our heads, words in our mouths, stories on our skin and ghosts in our hearts. We are little haunted houses. Dreaming. Dreaming. Dreaming.

--endofmarch

"Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring--it was peace."

--Milan Kundera

"I find it a huge strain to be responsible for my tastes and be known and defined by them."

--Jonathan Franzen, 'Strong Motion'

"Imagine that human existence is defined by an Ache: the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe; of our desires forever outnumbering our means of satisfying them."

--Jonathan Franzen, 'How to Be Alone: Essays'

"Nothing got inside the head without becoming pictures."

--Jonathan Franzen, 'The Corrections'

“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

“Pick what you love to do, and the success will come.”

--Rachel Zoe

“Who am I? I am who I am and tomorrow someone else entirely. You are too nostalgic, you want memory to secure you, console you. The past is a bore. What matters is only oneself and what one creates from what one has learned. Imagination uses what it needs and discards the rest.”

--Janet Fitch

“That was the thing about words, they were clear and specific—chair, eye, stone—but when you talked about feelings, words were too stiff, they were this and not that, they couldn’t include all the meanings. In defining, they always left something out.”

--Janet Fitch

“I travel light. I think the most important thing is to be in a good mood and enjoy life, wherever you are.”

--Diane Von Furstenberg

"She thought with a sort of pride that she had no place anywhere. Normal people think I belong with them. But I couldn’t stay an hour among them. I need to live out there, on the other side of the wall. But they don’t want me there."

--Jean-Paul Sartre, 'The Room'

"My business is words. Words are like labels, or coins, or better, like swarming bees. I confess I am only broken by sources of things; as if words were counted like dead bees in the attic, unbuckled from their yellow eyes and their dry wings. I must always forget how one word is able to pick out another, to manner another, until I have got something I might have said… but did not."

--Anne Sexton

I Remember

By the first of August

the invisible beetles began

to snore and the grass was

as tough as hemp and was

no color - no more than

the sand was a color and

we had worn our bare feet

bare since the twentieth

of June and there were times

we forgot to wind up your

alarm clock and some nights

we took our gin warm and neat

from old jelly glasses while

the sun blew out of sight

like a red picture hat and

one day I tied my hair back

with a ribbon and you said

that I looked almost like

a puritan lady and what

I remember best is that

the door to your room was

the door to mine.

--Anne Sexton

We've still got the taste dancing on our tongues

"I am suddenly consumed by nostalgia for the little girl who was me, who loved the fields and believed in God, who spent winter days home sick from school reading Nancy Drew and sucking menthol cough drops, who could keep a secret."

--Audrey Niffenegger, 'The Time Traveler's Wife

"I feel like cotton candy: sugar and air."

--Margaret Atwood

"Do stuff... be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager, stay eager."

--Susan Sontag

“Something wonderful, if you took the long view, was about to happen. If you took the short or medium view, something terrible was about to happen. It’s like the difference between seeing a beautiful new star in the winter sky and actually being close to the supernova. It’s the difference between the beauty of morning dew on a cobweb and actually being a fly.”

--Terry Pratchett

"We've still got the taste dancing on our tongues"

--Ellie Goulding

“Sanity is a cozy lie.”

--Susan Sontag

“His soul sounds like my drums and looks like doves. He is fireworks. He is the black-haired angel playing his bass on the top of the tree, on the top of the cake. I want him to see the flowers in my eyes and hear the songs in my hands.”

--Francesca Lia Block

Don't leave. Please. Stay. It's nice to be in the dark, right? You can relax a little. No brittle smiles. No air kisses. No sarcasm. Forget the stress. The worry. The petty skirmishes. Life is too short. Too short for cruelty. Close your eyes.

"Time is a gift, given to you, given to give you the time you need, the time you need to have the time of your life."

--Norton Juster, 'The Phantom Tollbooth'

“Have you ever heard the wonderful silence just before the dawn? Or the quiet and calm just as a storm ends? Or perhaps you know the silence when you haven’t the answer to a question you’ve been asked, or the hush of a country road at night, or the expectant pause of a room full of people when someone is just about to speak, or, most beautiful of all, the moment after the door closes and you’re alone in the whole house? Each one is different, you know, and all very beautiful if you listen carefully.”

--Norton Juster, 'The Phantom Tollbooth'

"She seems to have thoughts and emotions. Sometimes I think I understand them, but often I don't. Like a photograph, she cannot say what she let's me see. She is an embodied secret. And I must be a photograph to her."

--Jonathan Safran Foer, 'Eating Animals'

"If nothing matters, there's nothing to save."

--Jonathan Safran Foer, 'Eating Animals'

"Not only the willful causing of unnecessary suffering, but the indifference to it. Cruelty depends on an understanding of cruelty, and the ability to choose against it. Or to choose to ignore it."

--Jonathan Safran Foer, 'Eating Animals'

"The human heart has hidden treasures, In secret kept, in silence sealed; The thoughts, the hopes, the dreams, the pleasures... Whose charms were broken if revealed."

--Charlotte Brontë

"Some might think that the creativity, imagination, and flights of fancy that give my life meaning are insanity."

--Vladimir Nabokov

"And presently I was driving through the drizzle of the dying day, with the windshield wipers in full action but unable to cope with my tears."

--Vladimir Nabokov, 'Lolita'

"Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness, dear, my happiness will remain, in the moist reflection of a street lamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the canal's black waters, in the smiles of a dancing couple, in everything with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness."

--Vladimir Nabokov, 'Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters 1940-1977'

"Everyone has the right to tell the truth about her own life."

--Ellen Bass

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

Beauty is not something you can count on.

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

--Karl Lagerfeld

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

--Yun-men

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

--Emmanuelle Beart

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

--Chris McCandless

“Every single thing

you’ve secretly waited for,

I have inside me.”

--Tyler Knott Gregson

“You are the true love

I have waited my whole life

to wrap myself in.”

--Tyler Knott Gregson

“My face is waiting

to smile back with yours in so

many photographs.”

--Tyler Knott Gregson

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

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

--Hackers

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

--Jane Bird

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

--Lee Kleinhelter

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

--Emerson

"Why'd you read then?"

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

--W. Somerset Maugham

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

--Janet Fitch

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

--Susan Jeffers

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

--John Galliano

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

--Helen Keller

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

--Maira Kalman

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

--Mahatma Gandhi

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

--Elizabeth Gilbert

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

--Jonathan Safran Foer

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

--John Green

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

--Kathleen Norris

Absence Makes the Heart

"Cherish your solitude. Take trains by yourself to places you have never been to. Sleep 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 whenever you don't want to do something. Say yes to your instincts 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. Believe in kissing."

--Eve Ensler

Someday my prince will come to his senses.

“Expecting the worst was the best I could do.”

--Adam Clay

“Someday I will look back on this time and think that was the spring when I started looking people in the eye.”

--Kristina S. B.

I sometimes think that people’s hearts are like deep wells. Nobody knows what’s at the bottom. All you can do is imagine by what comes floating to the surface every once in a while.

Fragments of ideas float around my brain as I tirelessly try to fit them together. With so many words in my head, I am always afraid of writing them down improperly. Or forgetting them in the first place. I cannot seem to write fast enough because somehow a thought always gets lost.

"It would have been nice to send a picture of how you feel beside a picture of how I wish you could feel."

--Bob Hicok, 'The Personal Touch'

It would be peaceful to be a sail

except during the storm.

During the storm, I would like to be

the storm. If you’re the storm,

there’s nothing frightening

about the storm except when it stops,

then you’re dead and the maps

are drowned. Within my heart

is another heart, within that heart,

a man at war writes home.

--Bob Hicok, 'Absence Makes the Heart. That's it: Absence Makes the Heart'