Everything in its perfect time. Everything is unfolding.

“Fear is the cheapest room in the house

I would like to see you living

in better conditions.”

--Hafiz

“Why did he write to her,

“I can’t live without you”?

And why did she write to him,

“I can’t live without you”?

For he went west, she went east,

And they both lived.”

--Carl Sandburg

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

--Edward Thomas

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

--Adele in the March Issue of Vogue

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

--R.D. Larson

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

--Ernest Hemingway

“Creativity is just connecting things.”

--Steve Jobs

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

--Nick Wooster

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

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

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

--Phyllis Nefler, 'Troop Beverly Hills'

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

--Dalai Lama

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

--Hunter S. Thompson

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

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

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

--Jeanette Winterson, Why I adore the night

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

--Stephen Hawking

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

--Henry David Thoreau

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

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

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

--Pearl Cleage

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

--Norman Vincent Peale

“Be empty of worrying.

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

When the door is so wide open?”

--Rumi

“Nothing good gets away.”

--John Steinbeck

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

--Abraham Hicks

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

--Kyoko Escamilla

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

--Ray Bradbury

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

--Richard P. Feynman

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

--Lillian Hellman

"it has been a beautiful

fight

still is."

--Charles Bukowski

some things i wanted to say to you

if the horse that you ride
is blind it’s good
that it also be slow,
and please stroke it
a hundred more times than you would
the powerful dazzling one.
to be generous is one thing,
but there’s a clerk in some of us,
quick to say yes.
worry about the command
in the suggestion.
worry about smiles, and those men
whose business is business.
there are joys and enigmas
of an evening alone
to appreciate.
there are always the simple events
of your life
that you might try to convert
into legend.
did you know
a good dog in your house
can make you more thoughtful,
even more moral?
and sex without conversation,
sex that’s erotic or sleepy…
oh don’t let anybody tell you
there’s a wrong way to have it.
tell your lovers the world
robs us in so many ways
that a caress is your way
of taking something back.
tell the dogs and the horses
you love them more than cars.
speak to everything
would be my advice.
--Stephen Dunn

A Note

Life is the only way
to get covered in leaves,
catch your breath on the sand,
rise on wings;
to be a dog,
or stroke its warm fur;
to tell pain
from everything it’s not;
to squeeze inside events,
dawdle in views,
to seek the least of all possible mistakes.
An extraordinary chance
to remember for a moment
a conversation held
with the lamp switched off;
and if only once
to stumble upon a stone,
end up soaked in one downpour or another,
mislay your keys in the grass;
and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes;
and to keep on not knowing
something important.

--Wislawa Szymborska

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

“To make the right choices in life, you have to get in touch with your soul. To do this, you need to experience solitude, which most people are afraid of, because in the silence you hear the truth and know the solutions.”

--Deepak Chopra

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

--Rumi

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

--Ernest Hemingway, 'A Farewell to Arms'

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

--Albert Pine

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

--Jane Roberts

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

--Jane Austen

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

--Miranda July

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

--Opening credits narration of 'Promised Land'

“So I wait for you like a lonely house

till you will see me again and live in me.

Till then my windows ache.”

--Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

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

--Gail Jones, 'Sixty Lights'

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

--Charles Hunter

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

---Laura Dern, 'Enlightened'

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

--Thomas Merton

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

--E.E. Cummings

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

--Giorgio Armani

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

--A. Saint-Exupery

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

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

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

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

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

--Patrick Mimran

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

--Sylvia Plath

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

--Unknown

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

--Stephen Fry

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

--Unknown

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

--John Steinbeck

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

--Heath Ledger

You can have anything that you want.

"What is the goal? A house that is like the life that goes with it, a house that gives us beauty as we understand it--and beauty of a nobler kind that we may grow to understand."

--Elsie de Wolfe

“The trouble with living alone is that it’s always your turn to do the dishes.”

--Unknown

“Hospitality is making your guests feel at home, even if you wish they were.”

--Unknown

“A man builds a fine house; and now he has a master, and a task for life: he is to furnish, watch, show it, and keep it in repair, the rest of his days.”

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The fellow that owns his own home is always just coming out of a hardware store.”

--Kin Hubbard

“You know what I tell people who ask me what’s a fashion faux pas? It’s when you look in the mirror and see a stranger looking back.”

--Iris Apfel

“One of my favorite clothing patterns is camouflage. Because when you’re in the woods it makes you blend in. But when you’re not it does just the opposite. It’s like, ‘Hey, there’s an asshole.’”

--Demetri Martin

“I never go outside unless I look like Joan Crawford the movie star. If you want to see the girl next door, go next door.”

--Joan Crawford

“You try, you fail. You try again, you fail again. But the only true failure is when you stop trying.”

--Leota, 'The Haunted Mansion'

“I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else’s whim or to someone else’s ignorance.”

--Bell Hooks

“Do yourself a favor. Before it’s too late, without thinking too much about it first, pack a pillow and a blanket and see as much of the world as you can. You will not regret it. One day it will be too late.”

--Jhumpa Lahiri, 'The Namesake'

“Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.”

--Rumi

“To make the right choices in life, you have to get in touch with your soul. To do this, you need to experience solitude, which most people are afraid of, because in the silence you hear the truth and know the solutions.”

--Deepak Chopra

“Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible. As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know.”

--Carl Jung

“Oftentimes I’ll just overflow, and then I’ll need to spend a week alone and not talk to anybody or call anybody.”

--Justin Vernon

“Not only have I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, I remain unconvinced that the distinction matters."

--Joan Didion

"You need to let the little things that would ordinarily bore you suddenly thrill you."

--Andy Warhol

"It's the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting."

--Paulo Coelho

“For most of life, nothing wonderful happens. If you don’t enjoy getting up and working and finishing your work and sitting down to a meal with family or friends, then the chances are that you’re not going to be very happy. If someone bases his happiness or unhappiness on major events like a great new job, huge amounts of money, a flawlessly happy marriage or a trip to Paris, that person isn’t going to be happy much of the time. If, on the other hand, happiness depends on a good breakfast, flowers in the yard, a drink or a nap, then we are more likely to live with quite a bit of happiness.”

--Andy Rooney

"Work for a cause, not for applause. Live life to express, not to impress. Don't strive to make your presence noticed, just make your absence felt."

--Unknown

“I think you can have anything that you want. Find someone who has a life that you want and figure out how they got it. Read books. Figure out what you’re passionate about. Pick your role models wisely. Find out what they did and do it.”

--Lana Del Rey

“It is obvious that we can no more explain a passion to a person who has never experienced it than we can explain light to the blind.”

--T.S. Elliot

“To say “I love you” one must know first how to say the “I”.”

--Ayn Rand, 'The Fountainhead'

Delicious Ambiquity.

"What's for you won't pass you by."

--Lillian Breed

“You are worried about seeing him spend his early years in doing nothing. What! Is it nothing to be happy? Nothing to skip, play, and run around all day long? Never in his life will he be so busy again.”

--Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 'Emile', 1762

“A new dress doesn’t get you anywhere; it’s the life you’re living in the dress and the sort of life you had lived before, and what you will do in it later.”

--Diana Vreeland

"My research this season is about finding what romantic means today."

--Miuccia Prada, September 1996

“I came to the conclusion that ‘God’ is just the word ‘good’ with the ‘o’ taken out, and ‘Devil’ is the world ‘evil’ with a ‘D’ added. Really, all that people have done throughout history is to personify the two forces of Good and Evil.”

--Paul McCartney

“Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I’d have the facts.”

--'To Kill a Mockingbird'

“I didn’t know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I’d cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.”

--Sylvia Plath

“In one moment your entire life can change course. The moment you decide where you’re going because you refuse to go back to where you’ve been.”

--Unknown

“Your soul doesn’t care what you do for a living - and when your life is over, neither will you. Your soul cares only about what you are being while you are doing whatever you are doing.”

--Neale Donald Walsch

“Rest satisfied with doing well, and leave others to talk of you as they please.”

--Pythagoras

“Run like hell my dear

From anyone likely

To put a sharp knife

Into the sacred, tender vision

Of your beautiful heart.”

--Hafiz

“If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things that others don’t know. It’s what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.”

--Don DeLillo, 'Point Omega'

“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity.”

--Gilda Radner

“The morning breezes have secrets to tell; don’t go back to sleep.”

--Rumi

“Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.”

--Carl Sagan

“Take chances, take a lot of them. Because honestly, no matter where you end up and with whom, it always ends up just the way it should be. Your mistakes make you who you are. You learn and grow with each choice you make. Everything is worth it. Say how you feel, always. Be you, and be okay with it.”

--Unknown

I am running into a new year

and the old years blow back

like a wind

that I catch in my hair

like strong fingers like

all my old promises and

it will be hard to let go

of what I said to myself

about myself

when I was sixteen and

twenty-six and thirty-six

even thirty-six but

I am running into a new year

and I beg what I love and

I leave to forgive me

--Lucille Clifton