• I’m in love with people’s hands and the way they clench their fists and the way their fingertips lightly press down onto piano keys or thighs. Calloused fingers or dainty fingers. Hands writing poems or memos or parking tickets. Hands writing futures. To me, every crease on the palm is a love line.— Mesogeios
• But better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.— Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
• The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.— Pablo Picasso
• ‘What’s the world’s greatest lie?’ The boy asked, completely surprised.

‘It’s this: that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That is the world’s greatest lie.’— Paulo Coelho

• expect sadness

like

you expect rain.

both,

cleanse you.— Nayyirah Waheed

• The thing I’m most afraid of is me. Of not knowing what I’m going to do. Of not knowing what I’m doing right now.— Haruki Murakami
• Raise your words, not your voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.— Rumi
• I was overwhelmed with sadness when I realized that I was going to change, and that it was all most likely going to get worse, like a nostalgia for the present.— The art of getting by
• To come home from another home is a weird feeling, because people expect you to be the person you were when you left, and that’s impossible. You expect things to be exactly the same as when you left, and that’s impossible. Maybe it’s impossible to even truly come home once you’ve gone away because of those changes. Coming home is strange, because now that place is just a tiny bit less of a home.— Alex Brueckner, How To Come Home
• I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.— Douglas Adams
• Oh, how desperately I want nothing to do with this world.

Oh, how desperately I want everything this world has to offer. Oh, how little sense I make.— Nicholas Browne

• Tenderness and kindness are not signs of weakness and despair, but manifestations of strength and resolution.— Khalil Gibran
• It’s like you take a war movie from the 1950’s, throw in some LSD, a shotgun full of glitter and set it in 2030… with a splash of epilepsy.— Mike on Kpop
• In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion;— Albert Camus, The Minotaur
• You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place. Like you’ll not only miss the people you love but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you’ll never be this way ever again.— Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran
• I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.— Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
• I’m not very good at putting my feelings into words. That’s why people misunderstand me.— Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
• I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
• Is it better to out-monster the monster or to be quietly devoured?— Friedrich Nietzsche, Good and Evil
• The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
• I can’t abandon

the person I used to be

so I carry her— 365 Days of Haiku

• I can’t exactly describe how I feel, but it’s not quite right. And it leaves me cold.— F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Just as a snake sheds its skin, we must shed our past over and over again.— Gautama Buddha
• Close some doors. Not because of pride, incapacity or arrogance, but simply because they no longer lead somewhere.— Paulo Coehlo
• She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into.— Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose
• To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.— Oscar Wilde
• Never, never tell them. Try and remember that. Never tell anyone anything ever. Never tell anyone anything again.— Ernest Hemingway, from The Garden Of Eden
• You should be angry. You must not be bitter. Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. It doesn’t do anything to the object of its displeasure. So use that anger. You write it. You paint it. You dance it. You march it. You vote it. You do everything about it. You talk it. Never stop talking it.— Maya Angelou
• Growth is painful. Change is painful.But nothing is as painful as staying stuck somewhere you don’t belong.— Mandy Hale
• Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people.— Andre Dubus
• Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness, dear, my happiness will remain, in the moist reflection of a streetlamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the canal’s black waters, in the smiles of a dancing couple, in everything with which God so generously surrounds human lonliness.— Vladimir Nabokov, A Letter That Never Reached Russia
• It’s amazing how words can do that, just shred your insides apart.— Lauren Oliver, Delirium #1
• The delight that I felt came precisely from being too acutely aware of my own degradation, from the feeling that you’ve come up against a brick wall, that it’s bad but at the same time cannot

be otherwise, that there is no way out, that you’ll never become a different person, that even if you still had sufficient time or belief to change into something else, you probably wouldn’t want to change. And if you did want to, you probably wouldn’t do anything about it because, in fact, there’s simply nothing to change into.— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From the Underground

• I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.— E.M. Cioran, “Strangled Thoughts,” from The New Gods
• There is no escape. You can’t be a vagabond and an artist and still be a solid citizen, a wholesome, upstanding man. You want to get drunk, so you have to accept the hangover. You say yes to the sunlight and pure fantasies, so you have to say yes to the filth and the nausea. Everything is within you, gold and mud, happiness and pain, the laughter of childhood and the apprehension of death.— Hermann Hesse
• I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
• I hate purity, I hate goodness. I don’t want any virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.— George Orwell, 1984
• Some women are

lost in the fire. Some women are built from it. — Michelle K., Some.

• ‎People speak sometimes about the ‘bestial’ cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.— Franz Kafka
• I’m just bones and questions.— Clementine von Radics
• The only way to atone for being occasionally a little overdressed is by being always absolutely overeducated.— Oscar Wilde
• That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.— F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Silence, I discover, is something you can actually hear.— Haruki Murakami
• How do you go on when in your heart you begin to understand there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend some hurts that go too deep that have taken hold.— Frodo Bagins (Return of the King)
• Normality is a paved road. It is comfortable to walk but no flowers grow on it.— Vincent van Gogh
• If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.— Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Hoss Gifford
• Imagination is a quality given a man to compensate him for what he is not, and a sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is.— Oscar Wilde
• Don’t let your happiness depend on something you may lose.— C.S. Lewis
• Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams. You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play… I tell you, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
• One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul and yet no one ever came to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way.— Vincent Van Gogh