There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

All quotes by Rumi

"My wish for you is that you fall into love like a burning coal that falls into water and keeps burning."

"Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it."

"When I am with you, we stay up all night.

When you're not here, I can't go to sleep.

Praise God for those two insomnias!

And the difference between them."

"Dance, when you're broken open. Dance, if you've torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you're perfectly free."

"Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form."

"Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground."

"In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art."

"My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that, and I intend to end up there."

"This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment. First to let go of life. Finally, to take a step without feet."

"A thousand half-loves must be forsaken to take one whole heart home."

"Let yourself be drawn by the stronger pull of what you truly love."

"Give up to grace. The ocean takes care of each wave 'til it gets to shore. You need more help than you know."

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

What better way to surface strength than to find yourself in someone else, so we peel back layers of one another's skin to see what's beyond the smoother texture, so we pick through parts of each other's brains to learn where the storm is coming from. Because I learn how I seem through the reflection in your eyes, because you learn how you speak through echoes in my ears. I am a soft atmosphere with a red hot core and it may burn your fingertips or singe your tongue, but it isn't about the destination, and you are an endless list of legends and biographies with a sharp edge and I may cut my corners or bleed myself dry, but it isn't about the rivers and streams, but the ocean.

You see, I am pulling out your hair to find the skin underneath it and I am testing the waters to see what breaks you, and you are softening the conversation to see what sends me to sleep and you are brewing up questions to see what makes me boil over

and it's quest fiction, and this is the call to adventure and I am tired but I am willing, so I am plunging. Do not catch me, do not cradle me, for I desire to see how far I must fall.

--Alexis Mire

Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.

All quotes by author Haruki Murakami

“‘You’re here,’ I continued. ‘At least you look as if you’re here. But maybe you aren’t. Maybe it’s just your shadow. The real you may be someplace else. Or maybe you already disappeared, a long, long time ago. I reach out my hand to see, but you’ve hidden yourself behind a cloud of probablys. Do you think we can go on like this forever?’”

--'South of the Border, West of the Sun'

"If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking."

--'Norwegian Wood'

"But who can say what's best? That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives."

--'Norwegian Wood'

"Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?"

--'Sputnik Sweetheart'

"I dream. Sometimes I think that's the only right thing to do."

--'Sputnik Sweetheart'

"Here's what I think, Mr. Wind-Up Bird," said May Kasahara. "Everybody's born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I'd really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person. But I can't seem to do it. They just don't get it. Of course, the problem could be that I'm not explaining it very well, but I think it's because they're not listening very well. They pretend to be listening, but they're not, really. So I get worked up sometimes, and I do some crazy things."

--'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle'

"I have this strange feeling that I'm not myself anymore. It's hard to put into words, but I guess it's like I was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. That sort of feeling."

--'Sputnik Sweetheart'

"Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That's part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads - at least that's where I imagine it - there's a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in awhile, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you'll live forever in your own private library."

--'Kafka on the Shore'

"Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting."

"For both of us, it had simply been too enormous an experience. We shared it by not talking about it. Does this make any sense?"

--'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle'

M: So I made up my mind I was going to find someone who would love me unconditionally three hundred and sixty-five days a year.

W: Wow, and did your search pay off?

M: That's the hard part. I guess I've been waiting so long I'm looking for perfection. That makes it tough.

--'Norwegian Wood'

"Nobody likes being alone that much. I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all. It just leads to disappointment. "

--'Norwegian Wood'

"These days I just can't seem to say what I mean. I just can't. Every time I try to say something, it misses the point. Either that or I end up saying the opposite of what I mean. The more I try to get it right the more mixed up it gets. Sometimes I can't even remember what I was trying to say in the first place. It's like my body's split in two and one of me is chasing the other me around a big pillar. We're running circles around it. The other me has the right words, but I can never catch her."

--'Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories'

"I want you always to remember me. Will you remember that I existed, and that I stood next to you here like this?"

--'Norwegian Wood'

I don't want to be fated, I want to choose.

All quotes by author Jeanette Winterson -- part two

"Do you wake up as I do, having forgotten what it is that hurts or where, until you move? There is a second of consciousness that is clean again. A second that is you, without memory or experience, the animal warm and waking into a brand new world. There is the sun dissolving the dark, and light as clear as music, filling the room where you sleep and the other rooms behind your eyes."

"While I can’t have you, I long for you. I am the kind of person who would miss a train or a plane to meet you for coffee. I’d take a taxi across town to see you for ten minutes. I’d wait outside all night if I thought you would open the door in the morning. If you call me and say ‘Will you…’ my answer is ‘Yes’, before your sentence is out. I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close."

"On more than one occasion I have been ready to abandon my whole life for love. To alter everything that makes sense to me and to move into a different world where the only known will be the beloved. Such a sacrifice must be the result of love... or is it that the life itself was already worn out? I had finished with that life, perhaps, and could not admit it, being stubborn or afraid, or perhaps did not known it, habit being a great binder. I think it is often so that those most in need of change choose to fall in love and then throw up their hands and blame it all on fate. But it is not fate, at least, not if fate is something outside of us; it is a choice made in secret after nights of longing. ... I may be cynical when I say that very rarely is the beloved more than a shaping spirit for the lover's dreams... To be a muse may be enough. The pain is when the dreams change, as they do, as they must. Suddenly the enchanted city fades and you are left alone again in the windy desert. As for your beloved, she didn't understand you. The truth is, you never understood yourself."

--'Sexing the Cherry'

"Hopeless heart that thrives on paradox; that longs for the beloved and is secretly relieved when the beloved is not there."

--'The Passion'

"She must find a boat and sail in it. No guarantee of shore. Only a conviction that what she wanted could exist, if she dared to find it."

--'Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit'

"The truth is that I’ve spent all my life with my binoculars trained on the Maybe Islands, a pristine place of fantasy that is really no better than the razor-rocks of misery. Maybe if I had stayed on the farm… maybe if I hadn’t gone with Spike… maybe if I could have lived more peaceably… maybe if I’d met the right person years ago, maybe if I hadn’t done this, or that or, its cousin, the other. Maybe, baby, the promised land was there and I missed it. Look at it glittering in the light. But the truth is I am inventing the maybe. I can only make the choices I make, so why torture myself with what I might have done, when all I can handle is what I have done. The Maybe Islands are hostile to human life."

--'The Stone Gods'

"But not all dark places need light, I have to remember that."

--'Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit'

"The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home."

"There it is; the light across the water. Your story. Mine. His. It has to be seen to be believed. And it has to be heard. In the endless babble of narrative, in spite of the daily noise, the story waits to be heard. Some people say that the best stories have no words. They weren't brought up to Lighthousekeeping. It is true that words drop away, and that the important things are often left unsaid. The important things are learned in faces, in gestures, not in our locked tongues. The true things are too big or too small, or in any case is always the wrong size to fit in the template called language."

--'Lighthousekeeping'

"I can't catch her by copying her, I can't draw her with a borrowed stencil. She is all the things a lover should be and quite a few a lover should not. Pin her down? She's not a butterfly. I'm not a wrestler. She's not a target. I'm not a gun. Tell you what she is? She's not Lot no. 27 and I'm not one to brag."

--'The World and Other Places: Stories'

"Walk with me, hand in hand through the neon and styrofoam. Walk the razor blades and the broken hearts. Walk the fortune and the fortune hunted. Walk the chop suey bars and the tract of stars. I know I am a fool, hoping dirt and glory are both a kind of luminous paint; the humiliations and exaltations that light us up. I see like a bug, everything too large, the pressure of infinity hammering at my head. But how else to live, vertical that I am, pressed down and pressing up simultaneously? I cannot assume you will understand me. It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear. Some story we must have. Stray words on crumpled paper. A weak signal into the outer space of each other. The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love."

--'Gut Symmetries'

"I don't know why it is that one kind of dark can be so different from another. Real dark is thicker and quieter, it fills up the space between your jacket and your heart. It gets in your eyes. When I have to be out late at night, it's not knives and kicks I'm afraid of, though there are plenty of those behind walls and hedges. I'm afraid of the Dark. You, who walk so cheerfully, whistling your way, stand still for five minutes. Stand still in the Dark in a field or down a track. It's then you know you're there on sufferance. The Dark only lets you take one step at a time. Step and the Dark closes round your back. In front, there is no space for you until you take it. Darkness is absolute. Walking in the Dark is like swimming underwater except you can't come up for air."

"Destiny is a worrying concept. I don't want to be fated, I want to choose."

--'Written on the Body'

"In the heat of her hands I thought, This is the campfire that mocks the sun. This place will warm me, feed me and care for me. I will hold on to this pulse against other rhythms. The world will come and go in the tide of a day but here is her hand with my future in its palm."

--'Written on the Body'

"Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough."

Do it from the heart or not at all.

All quotes by author Jeanette Winterson -- part one

"What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home. I want to be held. I don't want you to come too close. I want you to scoop me up and bring me home at nights. I don't want to tell you where I am. I want to keep a place among the rocks where no one can find me. I want to be with you."

"There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other's names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name."

--'Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit'

"The Buddhists say there are 149 ways to God. I'm not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has had a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me. God is bigger, like my mother, easier to find, even in the dark. I could be anywhere, and since I can't describe myself I can't ask for help."

--'Sexing the Cherry'

"I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line."

--'Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit'

"Happy Valentines Day to those who have found love, in whatever shape or form, and to those who are still hunting, don’t give up. If you feel bad, send yourself a card. You must be worth it..."

"They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?"

"The body shuts down when it has too much to bear; goes its own way quietly inside, waiting for a better time, leaving you numb and half alive."

--'The Passion'

"It's hard to remember that this day will never come again. That the time is now and the place is here and that there are no second chances at a single moment."

"Love, they say, enslaves and passion is a demon and many have been lost for love. I know this is true, but I know too that without love we grope the tunnels of our lives and never see the sun. When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself. I lifted my hand in bewilderment and felt my cheeks, my neck. This was me. And when I had looked at myself and grown accustomed to who I was, I was not afraid to hate parts of me because I wanted to be worthy of the mirror bearer."

"Perhaps all romance is like that; not a contract between equal parties but an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life. Only a drama will do and while the fireworks last the sky is a different colour."

--'The Passion'

"Yes, we are [friends] and I do like to pass the day with you in serious and inconsequential chatter. I wouldn't mind washing up beside you, dusting beside you, reading the back half of the paper while you read the front. We are friends and I would miss you, do miss you and think of you very often. I don't want to lose this happy space where I have found someone who is smart and easy and doesn't bother to check their diary when we arrange to meet."

"Do it from the heart or not at all."

--'The Passion'

"She looked at me like I was crazy. Most of my lovers do, and that's partly why they love me, and partly why they leave."

"I don't know how to answer. I know what I think, but words in the head are like voices underwater. They are distorted."

--'Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit'

"Don’t lie. You know you like to view but not to buy. I have found that I am not a space where people want to live, at least not without decorating first. And that is the stubbornness in me: I do not want to be someone’s little home."

--'Gut Symmetries'

"Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights: the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like Braille. I like to keep my body rolled up away from prying eyes, never unfold too much, or tell the whole story."

I'm still here

That’s you, drops of water and you’re on top of the mountain of success. But one day you start sliding down the mountain and you think wait a minute; I’m a mountain top water drop. I don’t belong in this valley, this river, this low dark ocean with all these drops of water. Then one day it gets hot and you slowly evaporate into air, way up, higher than any mountain top, all the way to the heavens. Then you understand that it was at your lowest that you were closest to God. Life’s a journey that goes round and round and the end is closest to the beginning. So if it’s change you need, relish the journey.

--charlotting