Fall in love with the back of your cereal box.

“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.”

--Edward Abbey

“I believe in the power of words, the heat that whiskey settles into my being, and that god willing there is a man out there that will love all the good and bad that is inside me.”

--Kat Keegan

“What on earth can you do on this earth but catch at whatever comes near you, with both your hands, until your fingers are broken?”

--Tennessee Williams

“Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.”

--Ernest Hemmingway

“It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living, I want to know what you ache for. It doesn’t interest me how old you are, I want to know if you are willing to risk looking like a fool for love, for your dreams, for the adventure of being alive. I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine. It doesn’t interest me where you live or how rich you are, I want to know if you can get up after a night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and be sweet to the ones you love. I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and truly like the company you keep in the empty moments of your life.”

--Jon Blais

“I know it sounds a little fussy and a little ridiculous, but finding your own rhythm is one of the most important things you can discover about yourself. And you have to observe it. As actors, we’re all encouraged to feel that each job is the last job. They plant some little electrode in your head at an early stage and you think, Be grateful, be grateful, be grateful. So, it’s not without a sense of gratitude that I work. But I couldn’t do this work at all unless I did it in my own rhythm. It became a choice between stopping and taking the time I needed."

--Daniel Day-Lewis

“It’s not hard to decide what you want your life to be about. What’s hard, she said, is figuring out what you’re willing to give up in order to do the things you really care about.”

--Shauna Niequist, 'Bittersweet'

“You’ll open me up like an orange, leaving a mess of pulp and sticky peels everywhere. Certain parts of my personality will be extracted and I’ll find myself feeling stuff I never knew was possible. It’s strange to think how many things we’re capable of without really knowing it until we have a proper catalyst — something or someone to bring it to the surface. Dig, dig, dig. No, you might need to dig a little deeper. I have a lot of crap sticking on top of the good stuff.”

--I want to know you, thought catalog

“Good taste, I am convinced, can be acquired through environment and education; the eye can be disciplined to differentiate between good and bad by a constant looking process.”

--Stanley Marcus

“She had not simply assured him that she loved him, but had gone so far—in answer to his question, what she loved him for—as to explain what for. She told him that she loved him because she understood him completely, because she knew what he would like, and because everything he liked was good. And this seemed to him perfectly clear.”

--Leo Tolstoy, 'Anna Karenina'

““Think how you love me,” she whispered. “I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember.” “You’ll always be like this to me.” “Oh no; but promise me you’ll remember.” Her tears were falling. “I’ll be different, but somewhere lost inside me there’ll always be the person I am tonight.””

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

“Pay attention, don’t let life go by you. Fall in love with the back of your cereal box.”

--Jerry Seinfeld

“We are very good at preparing to live, but not very good at living. We know how to sacrifice ten years for a diploma, and we are willing to work very hard to get a job, a car, a house, and so on. But we have difficulty remembering that we are alive in the present moment, the only moment there is for us to be alive.”

--Thich Nhat Hanh

"The most important thing in life, is to do what you love -- and what makes you happy. At the end of the day, your actions should reflect your -- Your business, your music, your photography, your friends -- your life."

--Andre Supa

Life just swallows you up, doesn't it?

All quotes by author Simon Van Booy

“He thinks I suffer from depression. But I’m just quiet. Solitude and depression are like swimming and drowning. In school many years ago, I learned that flowers sometimes unfold inside themselves.” 

--'Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories'

“You were unsure which pain is worse -- the shock of what happened or the ache for what never will.” 

--'Everything Beautiful Began After'

“I want to do things for people they will never forget. Maybe that’s the best thing I can do in life.” 

--'The Secret Lives of People in Love'

“The most significant conversations of our lives occur in silence.” 

--'Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories'

“I don’t see the point of truth anymore, it causes just as much heartbreak as lying.” 

--'The Secret Lives of People in Love'

“We see in others what we want and what we fear.” 

--'Everything Beautiful Began After'

“For some people, life is the process of knocking through walls to get out. For others, it is the building of walls.” 

--'The Secret Lives of People in Love'

“Hands have their own language.” 

“Coincidences mean you're on the right path.” 

--'Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories'

“Actually, years mean nothing. It's what's inside them.” 

--'Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories'

“Love requires imagination more than experience.” 

--'Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories'

“The love of a man is like a drop of color into something clear.” 

--'Everything Beautiful Began After'

“Should you ever feel too lonely...listen for the roar of the sea - for in it are all those who've been and all those who are to come.” 

--'The Coming and Going of Strangers'

“It’s true the people we meet shape us. But the people we don’t meet shape us also, often more because we have imagined them so vividly. There are people we yearn for but never seem to meet.” 

--'The Secret Lives of People in Love'

“I want to feel it somehow happened like that because things happen for a reason. I want to believe this more than anything because if it were just an accident, then God must have died before he could finish the world.” 

--'The Secret Lives of People in Love'

“You can’t put a price on the rituals of love, because you never know what will happen next. I suppose fear is part of the excitement and we can’t have one without the other.” 

--'Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories'

“But sometimes, when confronted by something of unfathomable beauty, the bars of the cage around us begin to tremble. So I ran away to protect myself and remained a prisoner.” 

--'The Secret Lives of People in Love'

“I suppose the key to a good life is to gently overlook the truth and hope that at any moment we can all be reborn.” 

--'The Secret Lives of People in Love'

“Life just swallows you up, doesn't it? Just swallows you up with its everyday things.” 

--'The Secret Lives of People in Love'

I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life.

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

--Kristin Hannah, 'Distant Shores'

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

--Augusten Burroughs

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

--Franz Kafka

“For you, a thousand times over.”

Khaled Hosseini, 'The Kite Runner'

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

--Rita Mae Brown, 'Riding Shotgun'

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

--Albert Ellis

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

--Thornton Wilder

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

--Édouard Levé

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

--Andre3000

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

--Georgia O’Keefe

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

--F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--Fernando Pessoa

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

--Gillian Wearing

Stop being who you were and become who you are.

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

--James Joyce

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

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

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

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

--Sierra Demulder

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

--Margaret Atwood, 'Cat’s Eye'

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

--Adele Coombs, 'Barefoot Dreaming'

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

--Iain Thomas

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

--Binki Shapiro for StyleLikeU

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

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

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

--Paulo Coehlo

tackle the motherfucking shit out of love.

“Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t. I’m not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people’s lives, never your own.”

--Julian Barnes, 'Flaubert’s Parrot'

“Rock won’t eliminate your problems. But it will let you sort of dance all over them.”

--Pete Townshend

“When you’re happy, you enjoy the music. But, when you’re sad, you understand the lyrics.”

--Frank Ocean

“She discovered with great delight that one does not love one’s children just because they are one’s children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.”

--Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, 'Love in the Time of Cholera'

“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I do not think I’m easy to define. I have a wandering mind. And I’m not anything that you think I am.”

--Syd Barrett

“If I’ve learned one lesson from all that’s happened to me, it’s that there is no such thing as the biggest mistake of your existence. There’s no such thing as ruining your life. Life’s a pretty resilient thing, it turns out.”

--Sophie Kinsella

“Being effortless is the coolest thing in the world.”

--Stella McCartney

“Dress for the story that you’d like to have people know about you before you even open your mouth.”

--Rachel Roy

“Have you ever analyzed things to the degree where you can’t really remember the difference between what’s real and what you’ve created in your head?”

--Edie Sedgwick

"We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy."

--Joseph Campbell

“It’s about misunderstandings between people and places, being disconnected and looking for moments of connection. There are so many moments in life when people don’t say what they mean, when they are just missing each other, waiting to run into each other in a hallway.”

--Sofia Coppola (trying to explain what lost in translation is about)

"So each had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some affection, some hobby, or at least some remote and distant hope…"

--Thomas Hardy, 'Tess of the D’Urbervilles'

"You deserve more than just somebody who’s nice to you. I think that so often these days, niceness seems like it should be enough because it seems like such a rare quality but when you get inside of it, you think, ‘mmmm … I can be pretty nice to myself.’ What about these other things?"

--Michelle Williams

“I love things that are old and beautiful and tell a story, even if it’s a sad one.”

--Michelle Williams

“I want love to be simple. I want to trust without thinking. I want to be generous with my affection and patience and love unconditionally. It is easier to love a person with their flaws than to weed through them. I want to love the whole person, not parts; and this is how I want to be loved.”

--Jewel Kilcher

“There is a mysterious force which draws together those who constantly think of each other. Fools call it “coincidence.”

--Cecil B. DeMille

"Our eyes are glued to the screen, but our thoughts are glued to the spot where our elbows are touching."

--Sonya Sones, 'Stop Pretending'

“I’ve remembered about buttercups, stink bugs and the stars. I read. And I’m finally getting some real writing done for the first time in months. It’s hard to find anything to say about life without immersing yourself in the world, but it’s also just about impossible to figure out what it might be, or how best to say it, without getting the hell out of it again.”

--Tim Kreider

“Don’t forget - no one else sees the world the way you do, so no one else can tell the stories that you have to tell.”

--Charles de Lint, 'The Blue Girl'

“You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight.”

--Elizabeth Gilbert, 'Eat, Pray, Love'

“You don’t need to explain your dreams. They belong to you.”

--Paulo Coelho

“It is untrue that bravery can be measured by a lack of fear. It takes guts to tremble. It takes tremble to love.”

--Unknown

“One day, you’re 17 and you’re planning for someday. And then quietly, without you ever really noticing, someday is today. And then someday is yesterday. And this is your life.”

--'One Tree Hill'

“You will be stupid. You will worry your parents. You will question your own choices, your relationships, your jobs, your friends, where you live, what you studied in college, that you went to college at all… If that happens, you’re doing it right.”

--Ira Glass

“When you find peace within yourself, you become the kind of person who can live at peace with others.”

--Peace Pilgrim

“The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherfucking shit out of love.”

--Cheryl Strayed, 'Tiny Beautiful Things'

“What I hate is ignorance, smallness of imagination, the eye that sees no farther than its own lashes.”

--Normand Elli, 'Egyptian Book of the Dead'

"Life has many ways of testing a person's will, either by having nothing happen at all or by having everything happen all at once."

--Paulo Coelho

“Sometimes you don’t need to talk things out. Sometimes, with the right person, things just need some time to percolate on their own, without the messy lunge and parry of discussion to hinder them.”

--Jonathan Tropper, 'Everything Changes'

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

I think I made you up inside my head.

“Relationships are both wonderful and tricky. The wonderful traits of a person are all sparkly and shiny, and we are attracted to that. But the real work is learning to find good in the gnarly aspects. It is a real art. Believing in the other person’s goodness and integrity enough to be content with working with the challenging parts. The sparkly parts are easy to love. Our job is to make the love bigger than an argument or an intense disagreement. You see, this is being authentic, vulnerable and true. And much more than a fairytale type romance. The real and honest and courageous decision is to love the warts and all. That is the true miracle.”

--Rachel Sat Siri Dougherty

“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

“Happiness often slips in through a door you didn’t know you left open.”

--John Barrymore

“I have never found anybody who could stand to accept the daily demonstrative love I feel in me, and give back as good as I give.”

--Sylvia Plath

“I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane. (I think I made you up inside my head.)”

--Sylvia Plath

“You don’t need to make your tastes a self-conscious statement about who you are. Just unapologetically like the things you like.”

--Adulting: Step 179: Stop enjoying things ironically. Just enjoy them.

“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”

--Margaret Atwood

"The sun was warm but the wind was chill. 

You know how it is with an April day."

--Robert Frost

“You can’t ever be really free if you admire somebody too much.”

--Tove Jansson

“Some people are uncomfortable with silences. Not me. I’ve never cared much for call and response. Sometimes I will think of something to say and then I ask myself; is it worth it? And it just isn’t.”

--Miranda July

“A daydreamer is prepared for most things.”

--Joyce Carol Oates

“Vulnerability is one of the last things we share with people, yet one of the first things they try to recognize.”

--Dallas Clayton 

“It’s great when you finally realise that being miserable doesn’t protect you from bad stuff happening.”

--Alain de Botton

“One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.”

--Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“A girl should be two things: who and what she wants.”

--Coco Chanel

“God is within her, she will not fall;

God will help her at break of day.”

--Psalm 46:5

“The world is simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.”

--Henry Miller

“The essence of pleasure is spontaneity.”

--Germaine Greer

“Every stylish girl knows that when the sun goes down, the heel goes up.”

--Nina Garcia

“There is in the soul a desire for not thinking. For being still. Coupled with this a desire to be strict, yes, and rigorous. But the soul is also a smooth son of a bitch, not always trustworthy. And I forgot that.”

--Raymond Carver, 'All of Us: The Collected Poems'

“Some changes look negative on the surface but you will soon realize that space is being created in your life for something new to emerge.”

--Eckhart Tolle

“It is one of the defects of my character that I cannot altogether dislike anyone who makes me laugh.”

--W. Somerset Maugham, 'The Moon and Sixpence'

I have grown to love secrecy.

"This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meaness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they are a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight."

--Rumi

"When I have a camera in my hand, I know no fear."

--Alfred Eisenstaedt

"I’m really insecure in a lot of ways and I suppose my confidence comes out in my clothes."

--Alexander McQueen

“What you wear is how you present yourself to the world, especially today, when human contacts are so quick. Fashion is instant language.”

--Miuccia Prada

“Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.”

--Gore Vidal

"You cannot really be too concerned with what people think of you. You’re on you’re own adventure of growth and discovery. So it’s not always good to be who people think you are, especially if you subscribe to it as well … which is easily done, because then you don’t have to figure out who you are, you just ask somebody else."

--Tom Waits

"You’ll have bad times, but it’ll always wake you up to the good stuff you weren’t paying attention to."

--Sean, 'Good Will Hunting'

“There are silences harder to take back than words.”

--James Richardson

“You’re going to discover that conversations are best at 4am. The heavier the eyelids, the sincerer the words. Those are the talks you’ll remember. It’s ok not to know the answer and silence is not awkward. It’s shared, so share it more often than not.”

--Jeff Stuckel

“You explain quite a lot by saying little…and even more with nothing at all.”

--Georgia Whots, “Her Last Letter to Ghosts”, 1923

“I love myself when I am laughing… and then again when I am looking mean and impressive.”

--Zora Neale Hurston

“Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.”

--F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I marvel at how even the wrong choices can keep us on the right path. How the worst mistake can wind up being the best thing that ever happened to us.”

--Katie Klein, 'Cross My Heart'

“If you meet someone whose soul is not aligned with yours, send them love & move along.”

--Wayne W. Dyer

“Some people are old at 18 and some are young at 90. Time is a concept that humans created.”

--Yoko Ono, 1977

“Alice: How long is forever?

White Rabbit: Sometimes, just one second.”

--Lewis Carrol

“Everything you own should have value, either because it’s functional or beautiful or you just love it.”

--Peter Walsh

“Heart-shattered lives ready for love, don’t for a moment escape God’s notice…”

--Psalm 51

“Bizarre travel plans are dancing lessons from God.”

--Kurt Vonnegut

“I’ll try to be around and about. But if I’m not, then you know that I’m behind your eyelids, and I’ll meet you there.”

--Terence McKenna

“I’d imagine the whole world was one big machine. Machines never come with any extra parts, you know. They always come with the exact amount they need. So I figured, if the entire world was one big machine, I couldn’t be an extra part. I had to be here for some reason.”

--Hugo Cabret, 'Hugo'

“From war and dust; love.

From love and thought; opinion.

From opinion; war and dust.”

--Georgia Whots, 'All Wars, Loss & Gain

“Here is a new spiritual practice for you: don’t take your thoughts so seriously.”

--Eckhart Tolle

“When I like people immensely I never tell their names to any one. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy.”

--Oscar Wilde

“Learn to say ‘no’ to the good so you can say ‘yes’ to the best”.

--John C. Maxwell

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

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

We're all just walking each other home.

All quotes by Ram Dass

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I never tried to be anything other than a dreamer.

"The greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change her future by merely changing her attitude."

--Oprah Winfrey

“O! It’s nice to get up in the morning. But it’s nicer to stay in bed.”

--Harry Lauder

“I have had a holiday, and I'd like to take it up professionally."

--Kylie Minogue

"Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting."

--Cormac McCarthy

“Fashion isn’t just frocks. It’s how we do our houses, our gardens - it’s what we eat and drink.”

--Grace Coddington

“If you are all wrapped up in yourself, you are overdressed.”

--Kate Halverson

“I believe part of the process of figuring yourself out is a way of connecting the dots between the fabulous and influential people around us all, like some sort of hidden constellation—you only have to know where to look.”

--Ashley Olsen

“Long hair minimizes the need for barbers; socks can be done without; one leather jacket solves the coat problem for many years; suspenders are superfluous.”

--Albert Einstein

“All I’ve ever done is dream. That, and only that, has been the meaning of my existence. The only thing I’ve ever really cared about is my inner life. My greatest griefs faded to nothing the moment I opened the window onto my inner self and lost myself in watching. I never tried to be anything other than a dreamer. I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be. Anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed to be full of poetry. The only thing I ever loved was pure nothingness…”

--Fernando Pessoa

“I got my feet on the ground and I don’t go to sleep to dream.”

--Fiona Apple

“You will recognize your own path when you come upon it because you will suddenly have all the energy and imagination you will ever need.”

--Sara Teasdale

“I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.”

--Albert Camus

“I am still so naive; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?”

--Sylvia Plath

“How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.”

--Anais Nin

“That’s who you really like. The people you can think out loud in front of.”

--John Green

"Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we're quoting."

--John Green

“I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognized wiser than oneself.”

--Marlene Dietrich

“I wouldn't mind living my life capturing the moments of others.”

--Unknown

“If he wrote it he could get rid of it. He had gotten rid of many things by writing about them.”

--Ernest Hemingway, 'Fathers and Sons'

“It pains me to realize I’ll never get to actually live in these well written worlds, but at least I can stay for a little while.”

--Unknown

“I guess that’s the beauty of books. When they finish they don’t really finish.”

--Markus Zusak

“Stories you read when you’re the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you’ll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit.”

--Neil Gaiman

“Anyone who knows me, should learn to know me again;

For I am like the Moon,

you will see me with new face everyday.”

--Rumi

“I want to sing like the birds sing, not worrying about who hears or what they think.”

--Rumi

“Appreciate how rare and full of potential your situation is in this world, then take joy in it, and use it to your best advantage.”

--Dalai Lama

“As long as one keeps searching, the answers come.”

--Joan Baez

“Very little is needed to make a happy life. It is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.”

--Marcus Aurelius

“It is not about how others are or how society is. The most important thing is to ask yourself, “What should I do?” and “What can I do?” One who stands up with moral courage and conviction can change society and create waves of transformation around the world.”

--Daisaku Ikeda

“So I dressed with remaining ceramics, furniture and objects; so I placed a message in each, a small story, at times ironic and obviously wordless, but audible to those who believe in poetry.”

--Piero Fornasetti

Give up to grace.

"Some of my best moments on earth have been spent with my dogs."

--Oprah Winfrey

“Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness.”

--Allen Ginsberg

“We all basically have a lot of magic; it’s only those of us who choose to accept it that really understand it. It’s there for everyone.”

--Stevie Nicks

“Raise your words, not your voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.”

--Rumi

“I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.”

--Ernest Hemingway

“The more you struggle to live, the less you live. Give up the notion that you must be sure of what you are doing. Instead, surrender to what is real within you, for that alone is sure….you are above everything distressing.”

--Spinoza

“The happiest of all lives is a busy solitude.”

--Voltaire

“Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.”

--Iris Murdoch

“And the rest is rust and stardust.”

--Vladimir Nabokov, 'Lolita'

"I have dined with kings, I've been offered wings, and I've never been too impressed."

--Bob Dylan

“You can’t give up something you really believe in for financial reasons. If you die by the roadside - so be it. But at least you know you’ve tried. Ten minutes in the music scene was the equal of one hundred years outside of it.”

--Robert Plant

“The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can’t be any large-scale revolution until there’s a personal revolution, on an individual level. It’s got to happen inside first.”

--Jim Morrison

“You think you’re lost without any place left to go, like you need one of those kisses long and slow. At first glance it’s not what it seems, but there’s some things that I just know, like you take two sugars with a splash of cream. Take a guess where I stand. Pick a number from one to two. Take a look at the back of your hand. Just like you know it, you know me too.”

--Dwight Yoakum, 'The Back of Your Hand'

“The goal in life is to discover that you’ve always been where you were supposed to be.”

--Aldous Huxley

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

--Marcelene Cox

“You’re thinking too much. Just let it flow.”

--E. Paluszak

“If you’re twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel— as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them—wherever you go.”

--Anthony Bourdain

“You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover is yourself.”

--Alan Alda

“When you are here and now, sitting totally, not jumping ahead, the miracle has happened. To be in the moment is the miracle.”

--Osho

“In my soul, I am still that small child who did not care about anything else but the beautiful colors of a rainbow.”

--Papiha Ghosh

“I promise myself that I will enjoy every minute of the day that is given me to live.”

--Thich Nhat Hanh

“All day I think about it, then at night I say it. Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing? I have no idea. My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that, and I intend to end up there. You are so weak. Give up to grace. The ocean takes care of each wave until it gets to shore.”

--Rumi

“If I had to live my life again, I’d make the same mistakes, only sooner.”

--Tallulah Bankhead

“The sign of intelligence is that you are constantly wondering. Idiots are always dead sure about every damn thing.”

--Jaggi Vasudev

“That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”

--Willa Cather

“Everyone has ocean’s to fly, if they have the heart to do it. Is it reckless? Maybe. But what do dreams know of boundaries?”

--Amelia Earhart

“The only people who ever get anyplace interesting are the people who get lost.”

--Henry David Thoreau

“Gastronomical perfection can be reached in these combinations: one person dining alone, usually upon a couch or a hill side; two people, of no matter what sex or age, dining in a good restaurant; six people, of no matter what sex or age, dining in a good home.”

--M.F.K. Fisher, 'An Alphabet for Gourmets'

“..But the moment I got back in my car I knew I would never see him again, ever. It suddenly seemed obvious to me that the whole world, especially Los Angeles, was designed to protect me from these people I was meeting. There was no law against knowing them, but it wouldn’t happen. LA isn’t a walking city, or a subway city, so if someone isn’t in my house or my car we’ll never be together, not even for a moment. And just to be absolutely sure of that, when I leave my car my iPhone escorts me, letting everyone else in the post office know that I’m not really with them, I’m with my own people, who are so hilarious that I can’t help smiling to myself as I text them back.”

--Miranda July, 'It Chooses You'

There isn't enough of anything as long as we live.

All quotes by author Raymond Carver

“Cool summer nights. Windows open. Lamps burning.

Fruit in the bowl. And your head on my shoulder.

These the happiest moments in the day.

Next to the early morning hours, of course.

And the time just before lunch. And the afternoon,

and early evening hours. But I do love these

summer nights. Even more, I think, than those other

times. The work finished for the day.

And no one who can reach us now. Or ever.”

"It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love."

"That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones."

"And did you get what

you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth."

"Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read."

"Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from."

"There isn't enough of anything

as long as we live. But at intervals

a sweetness appears and, given a chance

prevails."

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

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

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