• “I often think that the night is more alive and more richly coloured than the day.” — Vincent van Gogh
• “It is an odd thing, but every one who disappears is said to be seen at San Francisco. It must be a delightful city, and possess all the attractions of the next world.” — Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
• “And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” — Sylvia Plath
• “Believe me, nothing is more beautiful than to carry out crazy ideas. I’d like my whole life to be one single crazy idea.” — Milan Kundera, farewell waltz
• “The first step towards getting somewhere is to decide that you are not going to stay where you are.” — John Pierpont
• "Here’s what I think. I think that a lot of days, for me recently, it’s like every split second the whole universe is created and destroyed. It’s like constantly collapsing and reforming. And I think a lot of people feel that. I think that love is the answer and that’s the only thing that matters.” — Andrew Vanwyngarden
• “If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.” — Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
• “Yes, I guess you could say I am a loner, but I feel more lonely in a crowded room with boring people than I feel on my own.” — Henry Rollins
• “Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and fans the bonfire.” — Francois de La Rouchefoucauld
• "Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.” — JD Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
• "Here is the test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: if you’re alive, it isn’t.” — Richard Bach
• “General opinion’s starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don’t see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often it’s not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it’s always there - fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge - they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I’ve got a sneaky feeling that love actually is all around.” — David, Love Actually
• "I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way--things I had no words for." - Georgia O'Keeffe
• "Sometimes I’m terrified of my heart; of its constant hunger for whatever it is it wants. The way it stops and starts.” — Edgar Allan Poe
• "I have an affection for a great city. I feel safe in the neighborhood of man, and enjoy the sweet security of the streets.” - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• ‎”The best thing one can do when it’s raining is to let it rain.” — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• “Thy fate is the common fate of all; Into each life some rain must fall.” — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• "What is important is to keep our mind high in the world of true understanding, and returning to the world of our daily experience to seek therein the truth of beauty. No matter what we may be doing at a given moment, we must not forget that is has a bearing upon our everlasting self which is poetry.” — Basho
• “Socializing is as exhausting as giving blood: After three hours I’m drained, even if I love the person I’m with. 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
• “When all by myself, I can think of all kinds of clever remarks, quick comebacks to what no one said, and flashes of witty sociability with nobody. But all of this vanishes when I face someone in the flesh: I lose my intelligence, I can no longer speak, and after half an hour I just feel tired. Talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly and imaginary friends, only the conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real and substantial.” — Fernando Pessoa
• “I don’t want to have to do this living. I just walk around. I want to be swept off my feet, you know? I want my children to have magical powers. I am prepared for amazing things to happen. I can handle it.” — Richard, Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005)
• “Everything is holding its breath inside me. Everything is waiting to explode like Christmas. I want to be all new and shiny. I want to sit out bad at night, a boy around my neck and the wind under my skirt. Not this way, every evening talking to the trees, leaning out my window, imagining what I can’t see.” — Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street
• “I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.” - Bilbo Baggins, The Lord of the Rings
• "You want a happy relationship? Outdo each other in love. Be with someone who won’t just want to match what you give but will want to top it. Always. And if you’re both trying to love each other a little extra (the best kind of competition I can think of) then nobody walks away with nothing." - Isabel Garcia
• "In any case, suffice it to say I enjoyed hearing about faraway places. I had stocked up a whole store of these places, like a bear getting ready for hibernation. I’d close my eyes, and streets would materialize, rows of houses take shape. I could hear people’s voices, feel the gentle, steady rhythm of their lives, those people so distant, whom I’d probably never know." — Haruki Murakami, Pinball, 1973
• “Come autumn, the fog clears, and this picturesque metropolis by the bay truly comes into its own, with alterna-dudes strutting up and down Valencia Street, skateboards in hand, and venture capitalists making deals from surfboards and road bikes. It’s all good, they say, and it really is. Casual Fridays are daily. In the evening, temperatures drop to sweater-level and an even homier vibe spreads across the starry scape.” — WSJ
• "There are times to stay put, and what you want will come to you, and there are times to go out into the world and find such a thing for yourself." – Lemony Snicket
• “Everyone, at some point in their lives, wakes up in the middle of the night with the feeling that they are all alone in the world, and that nobody loves them now and that nobody will ever love them, and that they will never have a decent night’s sleep again and will spend their lives wandering blearily around a loveless landscape, hoping desperately that their circumstances will improve, but suspecting, in their heart of hearts, that they will remain unloved forever. The best thing to do in these circumstances is to wake somebody else up, so that they can feel this way, too." — Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can’t Avoid)
• “I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this, but first impressions are often entirely wrong.” — Lemony Snicket
• “The book was long, and difficult to read, and Klaus became more and more tired as the night wore on. Occasionally his eyes would close. He found himself reading the same sentence over and over. He found himself reading the same sentence over and over. He found himself reading the same sentence over and over.” — Lemony Snicket
• “One of the remarkable things about love is that, despite very irritating people writing poems and songs about how pleasant it is, it really is quite pleasant.” — Horseradish by Lemony Snicket
• “Shyness is a curious thing, like quicksand, it can strike people at any time, and also, like quicksand, it usually makes its victims look down.” — Horseradish by Lemony Snicket
• “A good library will never be too neat, or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them.” — Horseradish by Lemony Snicket
• “What happens in a certain place can stain your feelings for that location, just as ink can stain a white sheet. You can wash it, and wash it, and still never forget what has transpired, a word which here means “happened and made everybody sad.” — Lemony Snicket
• “It is always sad when someone leaves home, unless they are simply going around the corner and will return in a few minutes with ice-cream sandwiches.” — Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can’t Avoid)
• “If you are a student you should always get a good nights sleep unless you have come to the good part of your book, and then you should stay up all night and let your schoolwork fall by the wayside, a phrase which means ‘flunk’.” — Lemony Snicket
• “Assumptions are dangerous things to make, and like all dangerous things to make — bombs, for instance, or strawberry shortcake — if you make even the tiniest mistake you can find yourself in terrible trouble. Making assumptions simply means believing things are a certain way with little or no evidence that shows you are correct, and you can see at once how this can lead to terrible trouble. For instance, one morning you might wake up and make the assumption that your bed was in the same place that it always was, even though you would have no real evidence that this was so. But when you got out of your bed, you might discover that it had floated out to sea, and now you would be in terrible trouble all because of the incorrect assumption that you’d made. You can see that it is better not to make too many assumptions, particularly in the morning.” — Lemony Snicket
• “Strange as it may seem, I still hope for the best, even though the best, like an interesting piece of mail, so rarely arrives, and even when it does it can be lost so easily.” - Lemony Snicket
• “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.” — Haruki Murakami (Kafka on The Shore)
• “‘Do you know where the idea of a labyrinth came from?’

I shake my head. ‘It was the ancient Mesopotamians. They pulled out animal intestines - sometimes human intestines, I expect - and used the shape to predict the future. They admired the complex shape of intestines. So the prototype for labyrinths is, in a word, guts. Which means that the principle for the labyrinth is inside you. And that correlates to the labyrinth outside.’ ‘Another metaphor,’ I comment. ‘That’s right. A reciprocal metaphor. Things outside you are projections of what’s inside you, and what’s inside you is a projection of what’s outside. So when you step into the labyrinth outside you, at the same time you’re stepping into the labyrinth inside. Most definitely a risky business.’” — Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

• "Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things." - Ray Bradbury
• "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately [...] and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life." - Walden, Henry David Thoreau
• "The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the centre of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light." - The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
• "They looked for it outside themselves, but it was only to be found within." -Charles Baudelaire
• "The appearance of things change according to the emotions, and thus we see magic and beauty in them, while the magic and beauty are really in ourselves." Kahlil Gibran
• "All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together." Jack Kerouac
• "I don't understand how a woman can leave the house without fixing herself up a little—if only out of politeness. And then, you never know, maybe that's the day she has a date with destiny. And it's best to be as pretty as possible for destiny." – Coco Chanel
• "Own only what you can carry with you; know language, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag." - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
• "Nostalgia for me is romantic, not the kind of romance that exists between lovers, but the kind of feeling that you get when you revisit a place that you’ve forgotten, and then see meaning and stories within the most mundane objects or locations; the sensation is fleeting as it rocks your heart slightly, but I love it all the same." — Marcos Chin
• "It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works — that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it." - Carl Sagan
• "I ought to be rich enough to have a secretary to whom I could dictate as I walk, because my best thoughts always come when I am away from the machine." - Henry Miller
• "The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It’s not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work." - Augusten Burroughs
• "To kill our dream life would be to kill ourselves, to mutilate our soul. Dreaming is the one thing we have that’s really ours, invulnerably and inalterably ours." - Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
• "If you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while waiting for you, and the life you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be. If you follow your bliss, doors will open for you that wouldn’t have opened for anyone else." - Joseph Campbell
• "It’s the Longing that ultimately undoes you. When it finds you, it gnaws at your bones and tugs at your chest. It fills you up inside like rot and makes you dream dreams and it drowns you. The Longing keeps you in bed, clutching at your sheets while the world goes on outside. It smells like old leaves and cigarette smoke, mixed with the scents of far-off places you will hear of, but never see. It’s the gloss on a lover’s lips the moment you realize you will never kiss those lips again. It is the bittersweet, unrequited love of creation and it will break your heart again and again and again. / If you know the Longing the way I do, then these words are redundant. We understand each other perfectly, you and I. And if you’ve never felt it - well, there’s no point explaining. You can count yourself lucky - sweetly, stupidly lucky - and get on with your life." - House of Mystery: Room & Boredom by Matthew Sturges, Bill Willingham, and Luca Rossi
• "You’ll have to face it, the endings are the same however you slice it. Don’t be deluded by any other endings, they’re all fake, either deliberately fake, with malicious intent to deceive, or just motivated by excessive optimism if not by downright sentimentality. / So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favour the stretch in between, since it’s the hardest to do anything with. / That’s about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what. / Now try How and Why." - Margaret Atwood, ”Happy Endings”
• “It must be those brief moments, tiny moments, like islands in the ocean beyond the grey continent of our ordinary days… there, sometimes, you meet your own heart, like someone you’ve never known.” — Hans Børli
• “And ever has it been known that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.” — Khalil Gibran
• “So avoid using the word ‘very’ because it’s lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don’t use very sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason, boys - to woo women - and, in that endeavor, laziness will not do. It also won’t do in your essays.” — John Keating, Dead Poet’s Society
• "What is important is to keep our mind high in the world of true understanding, and returning to the world of our daily experience to seek therein the truth of beauty. No matter what we may be doing at a given moment, we must not forget that is has a bearing upon our everlasting self which is poetry." - Basho
• "I have an affection for a great city. I feel safe in the neighborhood of man, and enjoy the sweet security of the streets." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• "What you do with your life is just one-half of the equation. More importantly, it’s who you’re with when you’re doing it." - Post Grad
• "And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer." - F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
• “Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky. ” — Rainer Maria Rilke
• “And one by one the nights between our separated cities are joined to the night that unites us.”— Pablo Neruda
• “When words become unclear, I shall focus on photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.”

— Ansel Adams

• "Do not tell me how well educated you are or how old you are. Tell me how much you have traveled and I will tell you how much you know." - Mohammed
• "Don't tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you have traveled." — Mohammed
• "We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph." - Elie Wiesel
• "I discovered I always have choices and sometimes it's only a choice of attitudes." - Judith M. Knowlton
• “Distance between two hearts is not an obstacle, rather a great reminder of just how strong true love can be.”
• “Distance is not for the fearful, it is for the bold. It’s for those who are willing to spend a lot of time alone in exchange for a little time with the one they love. It’s for those knowing a good thing when they see it, even if they don’t see it nearly enough…”
• "The future is not some place we are going to, but one we are creating." - John Schaar