March

• "I collect hobbies. I see someone doing something I like, and I get books and I learn how to do it." (The Brothers Bloom)
• "I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited." (Sylvia Plath)
• "Wherever the crowd goes, run in the other direction. They're always wrong." (Charles Bukowski) ★
• "Read books. Care about things. Get excited. Try not to be too down on yourself. Enjoy the ever present game of knowing." (Hank Green)
• "And I am bored to death with it. Bored to death with this place, bored to death with my life, bored to death with myself." (Charles Dickens)
• "The world is full of boring, identical and mindless people." (Charles Bukowski)
• "Respect yourself enough to walk away from anything that no longer serves you, grows you, or makes you happy." (Robert Tew)
• "I’m going to read what I want, and listen to what I want, and I’m going to look at paintings and watch French films, and I’m gonna talk to people who know lots about lots." (Jenny Mellor, An Education)
• "Just like me – always wanting to be different from other people." (Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight)
• "Human beings are struggling, and so they are egoists. But it's wrong to say that they are wholy cruel - it's a deformed view." (Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight) ★
• "I look at life like this: If someone had come to me and asked me if I wished to be born I think I should answered No. I’m sure I should answered No. But no one asked me. I am here not through my will. Most things that happen to me – they are not my will either. And so that’s what I say to myself all the time: ‘You didn’t ask to be born, you didn’t make the world as it is, you didn’t make yourself as you are. Why torment myself? Why not take life just as it comes? You have the right to; you are not one of the guilty ones.’ When you aren’t rich or strong or powerful, you are not a guilty one. And you have the right to take life just as it comes and to be happy as you can." (Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight) ★
• "There's nothing worse in life than being ordinary." (American Beauty)
• "Reading a good book helps us to feel unalone." (John Green)
• "There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning." (Louis L'Amour) ★
• "There I went again, building up a glamorous picture of a man who would love me passionately the minute he met me, and all out of a few prosy nothings.” (Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar)
• "The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrfice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed." (Ernest Hemingway) ★
• "That suggests that what you fear most of all is - fear. Very wise." (Remus Lupin, Harry Potter)
• "Millions of people never analyze themselves. Mentally they are mechanical products of the factory of their environment, preoccupied with breakfast, lunch, and dinner, working and sleeping, and going here and there to be entertained. They don't know what or why they are seeking, nor why they never realize complete happiness and lasting satisfaction. By evading self-analysis, people go on being robots, conditioned by their environment. True self-analysis is the greatest art of progress." (Paramahansa Yogananda)
• "The best way to think about reality, I had decided, was to get as far away from it as possible." (Haruki Murakami, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle)

April

• "Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up." (Neil Gaiman)
• "Do you ever think about all the people who you might have fallen in love with if only you'd taken a different way home or stood a little longer in the bread aisle at the supermarket? All the people who might have been an integral part of your life but instead you’ll never know them. The unimaginable impact that our mundane choices have on our lives really gets to me. Think of how many times I might have died if I'd made different choices. Maybe I'd be homeless. Maybe I'd be famous. Maybe I'd be rich. Sometimes I'm so overwhelmed by the impact of my choices that I can't choose anything at all because I'm afraid today will be the day that I make the choice that changes everything." ★
• "Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand." (Albert Einstein)
• "Fuck work. Fuck school. Fuck everything that’s an annoyance to your life." (Billie Joe Armstrong)
• "I can’t get rid of books. It’s almost like having your thoughts (around you). I want to be able to hold it. I want to be able to see where the pages have been turned down. I grew up in a house full of books. Wall to wall. I remember when I moved out of home, that was the big thing I couldn't handle: there weren’t any books. Every inch of my mum’s house is covered in them and not having any was like, “This is really weird. This is such a sterile space without any stories in it." (Keira Knightley)
• "La solitude est une condition necessaire de la liberté" (Robert Wilson) ★
• "People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but that's bullshit. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. How can they deal with love if they're afraid to feel? Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they’re wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It's all in how you carry it. That's what matters. Pain is a feeling. Your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, you're letting society destroy your reality. You should stand up for your right to feel your pain." (Jim Morrison) ★
• "He was pointing at the moon, but I was looking at his hand." (Richard Siken, Anyway)
• "Harry Potter isn’t real? Oh no! Wait, wait, what do you mean by real? Is this video blog real? Am I real if you can see me and hear me, but only through the internet? Are you real if I can read your comment but I don’t know who you are or what your name is or where you’re from or what you look like or how old you are? I know all of those things about Harry Potter. Maybe Harry Potter’s real and you’re not." (John Green)
• "We don't believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred of our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit." (E. E. Cummings)
• "I would never be part of anything. I would never really belong anywhere, and I knew it, and all my life would be the same, trying to belong, and failing. Always something would go wrong. I am a stranger and I always will be, and after all I didn’t really care." (Jean Rhys, Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography)
• "Be yourself. No one else can." (Helena Bonham Carter)
• "Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I’m not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you’ve felt that way." (Charles Bukowski)
• "The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it." (Terry Pratchett)
• "People fear death even more than pain. It’s strange that they fear death. Life hurts a lot more than death. At the point of death, the pain is over. I guess it is a friend…" (Jim Morrison)
• “Wear what you feel comfortable with. People say nasty things about what I wear in the street. I’m always in worst dressed lists, but you just have to dress for yourself and ­nobody else." (Helena Bonham Carter)
• "Art is to console those who are broken by life." (Vincent Van Gogh) ★
• "I walk around the world like a ghost, and sometimes I question whether I even exist. Whether I’ve ever existed at all." (Paul Auster)
• "I opened my mouth, almost said something. Almost. The rest of my life might have turned out differently if I had. But I didn’t." (The Kite Runner)
• "She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris." (Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary)
• "I never wish to be easily defined. I’d rather float over other people’s minds as something strictly fluid and non-perceivable; more like a transparent, paradoxically iridescent creature rather than an actual person." (Franz Kafka, diary entry from 23 March 1914)
• "Being alone is generally represented as quite dark, fragile. But I find it to be the most uplifting feeling ever." (Kevin Parker from Tame Impala) ★
• "I don’t want to have kids and so I am not going to have kids. People who want kids are going to have kids. I’m doing what I want to do and people who want kids are doing what they want to do. What about this scenario makes me selfish?" (Jen Kirkman, I Can Barely Take Care of Myself) ★
• "Rest, nature, books, music… such is my idea of happiness." (Lev Tolstoi)
• "The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther." (Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar)
• "I would rather die of passion than of boredom." (Vincent Van Gogh)
• "If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine. It is lethal." (Paulo Coelho) ★
• What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?" (Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man)
• "It is so much safer not to feel, not to let the world touch me." (Sylvia Plath)
• "That’s who you really like. The people you can think out loud in front of." (John Green)
• "When you do something noble and beautiful and nobody noticed, do not be sad. For the sun every morning is a beautiful spectacle and yet most of the audience still sleeps." (John Lennon)
• "I’m definitely a bit of a Peter Pan, reluctant to grow up. It all seemed really nice at home, why change it? Part of me would prefer not to have any responsibility whatsoever." (Helena Bonham Carter)
• "I’m not fine as in fine, but fine as in you don’t have to worry about me." (Dr. Gregory House)
• "I don't want to live in real life. It's too harsh, too brutal." (Marina and the Diamonds) ★
• "Death ends a life, not a relationship." (Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morri)
• "I'm both happy and sad. And I'm still trying to figure out how that could be." (Stephen Chbosky)
• "You are the universe, expressing itself as a human for a little while." (Eckhart Tolle)
• "Because there was a hunger in me to see everything and do everything. I wanted to be everyone I saw. I wasn't enough for me. Can you understand that?" (Sidney Sheldon)
• "I never change, I simply become more myself." (Joyce Carol Oates) ★
• "I don't want to earn my living; I want to live." (Oscar Wilde) ★
• "I came to a point where I needed solitude and just stop the machine of ‘thinking’ and ‘enjoying’ what they call ‘living’, I just wanted to lie in the grass and look at the clouds." (Jack Kerouac)
• "High school, it seems, has changed. It has become competitive. Young men and women — 13 to 18 years old — must work more or less tirelessly to ensure their spot at a college deemed worthy to them and their families. So rather than living their adolescent lives — lives brimming with desires and vitality, with vim, vigor, and brewing lust — these kids are working at old age homes, cramming for tests, popping Adderall just to make the literal and proverbial grade. And for what? So they can go to a school that puts them in debt for the rest of their lives. School has become a great vehicle of capitalism: it quashes the revolution implicit in adolescence while simultaneously fomenting perpetual indebtedness." (Daniel Coffeen) ★
• "To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment." (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
• "Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place." (Kurt Vonnegut)
• "…the thing about literature and music. You use it as a way of defining yourself. You use it as an extension of your character. Somebody else’s words writing your thoughts. And I think everybody who relates to music is kind of isolated. It’s lonely. Everyone who uses the creative side of their brain is that much removed from reality. They are looking for answers wherever they can find them." (Laura Marling)
• "The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - that you’d thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you’ve never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out, and taken yours." (The History Boys) ★
• "A single dream is more powerful than a thousand realities." (J.R.R. Tolkien)
• "I think, especially when you’re in college, each book that you’re reading tends to tell you who you are." (Jeffrey Eugenides)
• "If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library." (Frank Zappa)
• "This is our decision to live fast and die young. We’ve got the vision, now let’s have some fun. Yeah it’s overwhelming, but what else can we do? Get jobs in offices and wake up for the morning commute?" (MGMT)
• "I’m going to college. I don’t care if it ruins my career. I’d rather be smart than a movie star." (Natalie Portman)
• "Usually when you ask somebody in college why they are there, they’ll tell you it’s to get an education. The truth of it is, they are there to get the degree so that they can get ahead in the rat race. Too many college radicals are two-timing punks. The only reason you should be in college is to destroy it." (Abbie Hoffman)
• "[In school] I encountered authority of a different kind than I had ever encountered before, and I did not like it. And they really almost got me. They came close to really beating any curiosity out of me." (Steve Jobs)
• "Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men." (Joseph Conrad)
• "I do not wish women to have power over men; but over themselves." (Mary Wollstonecraft)
• "If women ran the world we wouldn’t have wars, just intense negotiations every 28 days." (Robin Williams)

May

• "Where does a thought go when it's forgotten?" (Sigmund Freud)
• "I wanted the whole world or nothing." (Charles Bukowski)
• "Leer buenos libros es como conversar con las mejores mentes del pasado." (René Descartes)
• "We've all got both dark and light inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That's who we really are." (Sirius Black)
• "I have a problem with religion or anything that says, 'we have all the answers', because there's no such thing as 'the answers'. We're complex. we change our minds on issues all the time. Religion leaves no room for human complexity." (Daniel Radcliffe)
• "I find that the only way to get through life is to picture myself in an entirely disconnected reality." (Joe Dunthorne, Submarine) ★
• The more I read, the more I meditate; and the more I acquire, the more am I enabled to affirm that I know nothing." (Voltaire)
• "I think it's very healthy to spend time alone. You need to know how to be alone and not be defined by another person." (Oscar Wilde) ★
• "I think the experience of feeling isolated, of not fitting in, creates the urge to explore." (Hussein Chalayan)
• I always find beauty in things that are odd and imperfect - they are much more interesting." (Marc Jacobs)
• "It’s unfortunate, and I really wish I wouldn’t have to say this, but I really like human beings who have suffered. They’re kinder." (Emma Thompson)
• "The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly." (F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby)
• "What's more delightful than an evening beside the fire with a nice bright lamp and a book, listening to the wind beating against the windows? I'm absolutely removed from the world at such times. The hours go by without my knowing it. Sitting there I'm wandering in countries I can see every detail of — I'm playing a role in the story I’m reading. I actually feel I’m the characters — I live and breathe with them." (Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary)
• "Nobody around here really appreciates my taste in weird stuff." (Jean Prouvaire, Book II)
• "The sadness will last forever." (Suicide note of Vincent van Gogh, 1853-1890)
• "I wasn’t meant for reality, but life came and found me." (Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet)
• "And then my soul saw you and it kind of went, ‘Oh, there you are. I’ve been looking for you." (Iain Thomas, I Wrote This For You)
• "Real life is absurd, so we write fiction to make sense of it." (Terri Edda Miller) ★
• "Thoughts could leave deeper scarring than almost anything else." (J. K. Rowling)
• "It wasn’t until I started reading and found books they wouldn’t let us read in school that I discovered you could be insane and happy and have a good life without being like everybody else." (John Waters)
• "There are moments when one has to choose between living one’s own life, fully, entirely, completely— or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands." (Oscar Wilde) ★
• "Nothing haunts us like the things we don't say." (Mitch Albom)
• "I am going to tell you a secret. Every year many, many stupid people graduate from college. And if they can do it, so can you." (John Green) ★
• "I do not read for I have renounced life, I read because one life is just not enough for me." (Abbas Al-Akkad) ★
• "It is easier not to say anything. Shut your trap, button your lip, can it. All that crap you hear on TV about communication and expressing feelings is a lie. Nobody really wants to hear what you have to say." (Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak)
• "The artist's job is not to succumb to despair but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence." (Woody Allen, Midnight In Paris) ★
• "Las personas grandes nunca comprenden nada por sí solas, y es agotador para los niños tener que darles siempre y siempre explicaciones." (Antoine de Sant-Exupéry, Le petit prince)
• "no sabía bien qué decir. Me sentía muy torpe. No sabía cómo llegar a él, dónde encontrarlo... ¡Es tan misterioso el país de las lágrimas!..." (Antoine de Sant-Exupéry, Le petit prince)
• "No soy para ti más que un zorro semejante a cien mil zorros. Pero, si me domesticas, tendremos necesidad el uno del otro. Serás para mí único en el mundo. Seré para ti único en el mundo..." (Antoine de Sant-Exupéry, Le petit prince)
• "Aparentemente, de vez en cuando los adultos se toman el tiempo de sentarse a contemplar el desastre de sus vidas. Entonces se lamentan sin comprender, y como moscas que chocan una y otra vez contra el mismo cristal, se inquietan, sufren, se consumen, se afligen y se interrogan sobre el engranaje que los ha conducido allí donde no querían ir." (Muriel Barbery, L'elégance du hérisson)
• "Me pregunto si no sería más sencillo enseñarles a los niños desde el principio que la vida es absurda." (Muriel Barbery, L'elégance du hérisson) ★
• "Nadie parece haber caído en la cuenta de que si la existencia es absurda, lograr en ella un éxito brillante no tiene más valor que fracasar por completo." (Muriel Barbery, L'elégance du hérisson) ★
• "Tales días, en los que naufragan en el altar de nuestra naturaleza profunda todas las creencias románticas, políticas, intelectuales, metafísicas y morales que años de educación y de cultura han tratado de imprimir en nosotros, la sociedad, campo territorial agitado por grandes ondas jerárquicas, se sume en la nada del Sentido. Adiós a los pobres y a los ricos, a los pensadores, a los investigadores, a los dirigentes, a los esclavos, a los progresistas y a los conservadores; ya no son sino homínidos primitivos cuyas muecas y sonrisas, gestos y adornos, lenguaje y códigos, inscritos en el mapa genético del primate medio, sólo significan esto: representar su papel o morir. Esos días, uno necesita desesperadamente el Arte." (Muriel Barbery, L'elégance du hérisson)
• "Pero si se teme el mañana es porque no se sabe construir el presente, y cuando no se sabe construir el presente, uno se dice a sí mismo que podría hacerlo mañana y entonces ya está perdido porque el mañana siempre termina por convertirse en hoy." (Muriel Barbery, L'elégance du hérisson) ★
• "Todas las familias felices se parecen; las familias desdichadas lo son cada una a su manera." (Lev Tolstoi, Anna Karenina) ★
• "Siempre está la vía de la facilidad, aunque me repugna seguirla. No tengo hijos, no veo la televisión y no creo en Dios, todas estas sendas que recorren los hombres para que la vida les sea más fácil. Los hijos ayudan a diferir la dolorosa tarea de hacerse frente a uno mismo, y los nietos toman después el relevo. La televisión distrae de la extenuante necesidad de construir proyectos a partir de la nada de nuestras existencias frívolas; al embaucar a los ojos, libera al espíritu de la gran obra del sentido. Dios, por último, aplaca nuestros temores de mamíferos y la perspectiva intolerable de que nuestros placeres un buen día se terminan. Por ello sin porvenir ni descendencia, sin píxeles para embrutecer la cósmica conciencia del absurdo, en la certeza del final y la anticipación del vacío, creo poder decir que no he elegido la vía de la facilidad." (Muriel Barbery, L'elégance du hérisson)
• "Vivir, alimentarse, reproducirse, llevar a cabo la tarea para la cual uno ha nacido y morir: no tiene ningún sentido, es cierto, pero así son las cosas." (Muriel Barbery, L'elégance du hérisson)
• "Ya que, en una disciplina como ésta, sólo importa la intención: elevar el pensamiento, contribuir al interés común o bien unirse a una escolástica que no tiene más objeto que su propia perpetuación ni más función que la auto reproducción de élites estériles -lo que convierte a la Universidad en una secta." (Muriel Barbery, L'elégance du hérisson)
• "Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don't." (Kurt Vonnegut)
• "Shyness is a curious thing, because, like quicksand, it can strike people at any time, and also, like quicksand, it usually makes its victims look down." (Lemony Snicket)
• "Do something instead of killing time, because time is killing you." (Paulo Coelho)
• "Sometimes people have nothing to say because they’re too empty and sometimes people have nothing to say because they’re too full." (Yasmin Mogahe)
• "Make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservation, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. If you want to get more out of life, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty." (Into the Wild)
• "Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear." (Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson)
• "People empty me. I have to get away to refill." (Charles Bukowski)
• "One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time." (Carl Sagan)
• "Don’t settle. Don’t finish crappy books. If you don’t like the menu, leave the restaurant. If you’re not on the right path, get off it." (Chris Brogan)
• "Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody." (J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye)
• "I don’t think that people accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense. I think it makes people terribly uncomfortable." (David Lynch)
• "Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but “steal” some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be." (Albert Camus, from Notebooks, 1951-1959)
• "Normality is a paved road: It’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it." (Vincent Van Gogh)
• "Colour my life with the chaos of trouble." (Belle & Sebastian)
• "I've always felt that if you're not on your side, why should anyone else be. So I always encourage people to be confident, and sometime even a little falsely so, just so you can give yourself an opportunity." (Robert Downey Jr.) ★
• "The fact that I’m silent doesn’t mean I have nothing to say." (Jonathan Carroll) ★
• "There is a terrible emptiness in me, an indifference that hurts." (Albert Camus)
• "I exist in two places, here and where you are." (Margaret Atwood)
• "Why are we embarrassed by silence? What comfort do we find in all the noise?" (Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie)
• "I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself." (Franz Kafka)
• "I drink to make other people more interesting." (Ernest Hemingway)
• "The student looked up from the grass, and listened, but he could not understand what the Nightingale was saying to him, for he only knew the things that are written down in books." (Oscar Wilde, The Nightingale and the Rose)
• "Look, other bands, they want to make it about sex or pain, but you know, The Beatles, they had it all figured out, okay? “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” The first single. It’s effing brilliant, right?… That’s what everybody wants, Nicky. They don’t want a twenty-four-hour hump sesh, they don’t want to be married to you for a hundred years. They just want to hold your hand." (Thom, Nick and Norah’s Infinate Playlist)
• "Anxiety is practising failure in advance. Anxiety is needless and imaginary. It’s fear about fear, fear that means nothing." (Seth Godin)
• "I don’t care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual." (Sylvia Plath)
• "Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you’ve never been, perhaps more homesick than for familiar ground." (Judith Thurman)
• "And that’s the beauty of books. In so many ways, they never really end." (Markus Zusak)
• "I’m not brave any more darling. I’m all broken. They’ve broken me." (Ernest Hemingway)
• "The best day of your life is the one on which you decide your life is your own. No apologies or excuses. No one to lean on, rely on, or blame. The gift is yours. It is an amazing journey, and you alone are responsible for the quality of it. This is the day your life really begins." (Bob Moawad)
• "I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful." (Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out)
• "All that mankind has done, thought, gained, or been; it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books." (Thomas Carlyle)
• "Life imitates art far more than art imitates life" (Oscar Wilde)
• "And even if somebody else has it much worse, that doesn't really change the fact that you have what you have. Good and bad." (Stephen Chbosky)

June

• "I was within and without. Simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life." (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
• "We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die" (Albert Camus)
• "Society does not want individuals who are alert, keen, revolutionary, because such individuals will not fit into the established social pattern and they may break it up. That is why society seeks to hold your mind in it’s pattern, and why your so-called education encourages you to imitate, to follow, to conform." (J. Krishnamurti)
• "If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals." (Sirius Black)
• "Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us." (Paul Theroux)
• "I think everybody's weird. We should all celebrate our individuality and not be embarrassed or ashamed of it." (Johnny Depp)
• "If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine. It is lethal." (Paulo Coelho)
• "Existentialists are nihilists because they recognize that life is ultimately absurd and full of terrible, inescapable truths. They are anti-nihilists because they recognize that life does in fact have a meaning: the meaning each person chooses to give his or her own existence. They recognize that each person is free to create themselves and make something worthwhile of themselves by striving against life’s difficulties." (Gary Cox, How to Be an Existentialist)
• "You’re always haunted by the idea you’re wasting your life." (Chuck Palahniuk, Diary)
• "Life imitates art far more than art imitates life" (Oscar Wilde)
• "Always be a first rate version of yourself instead of a second rate version of someone else." (Judy Garland)
• "How embarrassing to be human." (Kurt Vonnegut)
• "Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know." (Ernest hemingway)
• "Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I’m one of them." (Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Win)
• "Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you." (Carl Jung)
• "How many days have again gone silently by?" (Franz Kafka, Diaries)
• "Tomorrow, you promise yourself, will be different, yet, tomorrow is too often a repetition of today. And you disappoint yourself again and again." (James T. Mcka)
• "I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it." (Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises)
• "Youth can not know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young." (J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix)
• "It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for." (Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time)
• "don't feel stupid if you don't like what everyone else pretends to love." (Emma watson)
• "More and more I found myself at a loss for words and didn’t want to hear other people talking either. Their conversations seemed false and empty." (Paula McLain)
• "Care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner." (Lao Tzu)
• "People empty me. I have to get away to refill." (Charles Bukowski)
• "You’re still going to get criticized, so you might as well do whatever the fuck you want." (Kathleen Hanna)
• "I think your 20s are the hardest part of life. I mean, everyone goes on about how hard it is to be a teenager, but actually I think it’s tougher to be in your 20s because you’re expected to be a grownup and expected to earn your own living and be successful and I think you feel like a kid still." (Nigel Cole)
• "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)
• "Just as you grieve if a friend is killed, you should grieve if a fictional character is killed. You should care. If somebody dies and you just go get more popcorn, it’s a superficial experience isn’t it?" (George R.R. Martin)
• "I didn’t know what to say. I felt like crying, Goddamit everybody in the world wants an explanation for your acts and for your very being." (Jack Kerouac, On the Road)
• "Write hard and clear about what hurts." (Ernest Hemingway)
• "I was very limited by caring about what people thought of me. There comes a point where you just go - Ultimately, I don’t really give a fuck any more." (Helena Bonham Carter)
• "Life is happier and also easier when you raise the expectations you set for yourself and dramatically lower the ones you have for everyone else."
• "Why are we embarrassed by silence? What comfort do we find in all the noise?" (Mitch Albom)
• "I just think life is meaningless altogether, most of the time. Yes, there is beauty in the moment, but beyond that? People come and go and you can never count on anyone, and life is just life; a mystery, and ultimately meaningless. The meaning is in the creation, and the creation is a human construct; and people just make up stuff in order to get through life." (René Vernor)
• "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, 1905 - 1984)
• "When you compare the sorrows of real life to the pleasures of the imaginary one, you will never want to live again, only to dream for ever." (Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo)
• "There's power in looking silly and not caring that you do." (Amy Poehler)
• "Don't let someone steal you tenderness. Don't allow the coldness and fear of others to tarnish your perfectly vulnerable beating heart. Nothing is more powerful than allowing yourself to truly be affected by things." (Zooey Deschanel)
• "The bravest people are the ones who don't mind looking like cowards." (T. H. White)
• "Here's all you have to know about men and women women are crazy. Men are stupid. And the main reason women are crazy is because men are stupid." (George Carlin)
• "It is practically always so painful for me to speak to other people." (Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, August 1883)
• "When I was young I had so many inferiority complexes. I had an inferiority complex because I didn’t go to university. I had an inferiority complex because I didn’t train. Then it gets tiring. And you do get bored of it." (Helena Bonham Carter)
• "Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from." (Seth Godin)
• "Depression is the most unpleasant thing I have ever experienced. It is that absence of being able to envisage that you will ever be cheerful again. The absence of hope. That very deadened feeling, which is so very different from feeling sad. Sad hurts but it’s a healthy feeling. It’s a necessary thing to feel. Depression is very different." (J. K. Rowling)
• "Yeah, but the truth is we never really grow up. We just masquerade as adults because that’s what we’re expected to do." ★
• "Where I am, if I've got a book with me, I have a place I can go and be happy." (J. K. Rowling)
• "The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." (George F. Will)
• "People are strange: They are constantly angered by trivial things, but on a major matter like totally wasting their lives, they hardly seem to notice." (Charles Bukowski)
• "I’m going to make everything around me beautiful - that will be my life." (Elsie de Wolfe)
• "You really get tired in one area of your life, and then you start questioning your whole existence." (Seth Avett)
• "Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain." (Jack Kerouac)
• "The flower that blooms in adversity is the most rare and beautiful of all." (Mulan)
• "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)
• "When you grow up as a girl, the world tells you the things that you are supposed to be: emotional, loving, beautiful, wanted. And when you are those things, the world tells you they are inferior: illogical, weak, vain, empty." (Stevie Nicks)
• "As far as I could see, life demanded skills I didn't have." (Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted)
• "Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time." (Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island)
• "If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment." (Marcus Aurelius)

July

• "I’m going to make everything around me beautiful - that will be my life." (Elsie de Wolfe)
• "You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken." (Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin)
• "[...] they're entitled to full respect for their opinions, but before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience." (Harper Lee, To Kill a Mochingbird)
• "Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that’s ok with them." (Alain de Botton)
• "In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies." (Lauren Groff)
• "Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time, who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done, if we are always doing." (Thomas Jefferson)
• "She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn’t supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something." (Eleanor & Park)
• "People think dreams aren’t real just because they aren’t made of matter, of particles. Dreams are real. But they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and puns and lost hopes." (Neil Gaiman)
• "When we hate our enemies, we are giving them power over us: power over our sleep, our appetites, our blood pressure, our health, and our happiness." (Dale Carnegie)
• "Get rid of those friends of yours who make fun of you and don’t believe in you. And when you leave here tonight, go home, make a phone call and fire them. Anyone that doesn’t believe in you and your future, to hell with them." (Ray Bradbury)
• "Perhaps the greatest faculty our minds possess is the ability to cope with pain. Classic thinking teaches us of the four doors of the mind, which everyone moves through according to their need. First is the door of sleep. Sleep offers us a retreat from the world and all its pain. Sleep marks passing time, giving us distance from the things that have hurt us. When a person is wounded they will often fall unconscious. Similarly, someone who hears traumatic news will often swoon or faint. This is the mind’s way of protecting itself from pain by stepping through the first door. Second is the door of forgetting. Some wounds are too deep to heal, or too deep to heal quickly. In addition, many memories are simply painful, and there is no healing to be done. The saying ‘time heals all wounds’ is false. Time heals most wounds. The rest are hidden behind this door. Third is the door of madness. There are times when the mind is dealt such a blow it hides itself in insanity. While this may not seem beneficial, it is. There are times when reality is nothing but pain, and to escape that pain the mind must leave reality behind. Last is the door of death. The final resort. Nothing can hurt us after we are dead, or so we have been told." (Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind)
• "I know you despise me; allow me to say, it is because you don’t understand me." (Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South)
• "Sometimes you have to be your own best friend." (Hero by Perry Moore)
• "Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed." (Friedrich Nietzsche)
• "It’s a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until you’re ready. I have this feeling now that actually no one is ever ready to do anything. There is almost no such thing as ready. There is only now. And you may as well do it now. Generally speaking, now is as good a time as any." (Hugh Laurie)
• "People will kill you over time, and how they’ll kill you is with tiny, harmless phrases, like: ‘be realistic.’" (Dylan Moran)
• "Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray." (Rumi)
• "Before you speak, ask yourself: Is it kind, is it true, is it necessary, does it improve upon the silence?" (Shirdi Sai Baba)
• "You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too." (James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
• "Rowling wrote Hermione to eschew stereotypes. She doesn’t end up with the hero; she is never there to function as Harry’s love interest. She prefers Arithmancy to Divination in school. Hermione is also a total badass, despite her prim and proper reputation. (…) So often, female characters are allowed to be aggressive or rebellious, but in exchange are stripped of any traditionally feminine qualities and instead are forced to pick up traditionally masculine traits. However, Hermione is never made to do that. Most notably, she is written to be highly logical AND emotionally expressive, a combination not commonly afforded to most of today’s leading ladies." (Liz Feuerbach, The Women of The Harry Potter Universe)
• "You are still young, free.. 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)
• "Comfort can be a dangerous thing. You stick around home all the time where it’s safe and nothing ever changes, and before you know it, you get set in your ways and you quit learning, you quit changing, you don’t grow anymore." (Monster, Frank Peretti)
• "Sometimes I wonder if my whole life will pass by this way: me waiting in the shadows, waiting for something to happen. Waiting for someone else to make it happen. Something new or different or crazy and amazing. I‘ve been there for so long, letting everyone else figure it out for me, floating along without much direction or conscious thought. Reacting." (Sarah Ockler, Fixing Delilah)
• "Crying does not indicate that you are weak. Since birth, it has always been a sign that you are alive." (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre)
• "Normality is a paved road: It’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it." (Vincent van Gogh)
• "I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful." (Virginia Woolf)
• "Cowardice is nothing to do with it - suicide takes considerable courage [...] No, what's selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends and enemies a bit of sould-searching." (David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas)

August

• "I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet." Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar)
• "Don't forget to fall in love with yourself first." (Carrie Bradshaw)
• "When people don't express themselves, they die one piece at a time. You'd be shocked at how many adults are really dead inside—walking through their days with no idea who they are, just waiting for a heart attack or cancer or a Mack truck to come along and finish the job. It's the saddest thing I know." (Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak)
• "I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room." (Ray Bradbury)
• "I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center." (Kurt Vonnegut)
• "One day I decided that I was beautiful, and so I carried out my life as if I was a beautiful girl. I wear colors that I really like, I wear makeup that makes me feel pretty, and it really helps. It doesn’t have anything to do with how the world perceives you. What matters is what you see. Your body is your temple, it’s your home, and you must decorate it." (Gabourey Sidibe)
• "As an atheist, I see nothing “wrong” in believing in a God. I don’t think there is a God, but belief in him does no harm. If it helps you in any way, then that’s fine with me. It’s when belief starts infringing on other people’s rights when it worries me. I would never deny your right to believe in a God. I would just rather you didn’t kill people who believe in a different God, say. Or stone someone to death because your rulebook says their sexuality is immoral. It’s strange that anyone who believes that an all-powerful all-knowing, omniscient power responsible for everything that happens, would also want to judge and punish people for what they are." (Ricky Gervais: “Why I'm an Atheist)
• "Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life." (Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet)
• "Reality continues to ruin my life." (Bill Watterson)
• "My father used to say, “Don’t raise your voice. Improve your argument." (Archbishop Desmond Tutu)
• "There is nothing more beautiful than someone who goes out of their way to make life beautiful for others." (Mandy Hale, The Single Woman: Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass)
• "Part of falling in love with someone is actually falling in love with yourself. Realizing that you’re gorgeous, you’re fearless and unpredictable, you’re a firecracker spitting light, entrancing a hundred faces that stare up at you with starry eyes." (Leah Raeder, Unteachable)
• "Oscar Wilde said that if you know what you want to be, then you inevitably become it - that is your punishment, but if you never know, then you can be anything. There is a truth to that. We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing - an actor, a writer - I am a person who does things - I write, I act - and I never know what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun." (Stephen Fry)
• "How can you say you love one person when there are ten thousand people in the world that you would love more if you ever met them? But you’ll never meet them. All right, so we do the best we can. Granted. But we must still realize that love is just the result of a chance encounter." (Charles Bukowski)
• "There is a kind of crying I hope you have not experienced, and it is not just crying about something terrible that has happened, but a crying for all of the terrible things that have happened, not just to you but to everyone you know and to everyone you don’t know and even the people you don’t want to know, a crying that cannot be diluted by a brave deed or a kind word, but only by someone holding you as your shoulders shake and your tears run down your face." (Lemony Snicket, The End)
• "Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense." (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
• "Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not. Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness. Armour yourself in it, and it will never be used to hurt you." (George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones)
• "You don’t need to be perfect to inspire others. Let people get inspired by how you deal with your imperfection." (Wilson Kanadi)
• "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)
• "People never looked up. That was another thing he liked about climbing; it was almost like being". (George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones)
• "Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you’ll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way." (Janet Fitch)
• "People think dreams aren’t real just because they aren’t made of matter, of particles. Dreams are real. But they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and puns and lost hopes." (Neil Gaiman)
• "I lie to myself all the time. But I never believe me." (S.E. Hinton)
• "The secret to being alone is to organize your time; to develop habits and routines and gradually elevate their importance to where they seem almost like normal, healthy activities." (Daniel Clowes, Caricature)
• "…I’m someone who’s mostly dead inside but still has a little hope for something extraordinary, which, as I said, is the worst breed of human, because it means I know everything is bullshit, but that I secretly hope for the day when it might not be." (Nick Miller)
• "I never wish to offend, but I am so foolishly shy, that I often seem negligent, when I am only kept back by my natural awkwardness." (Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility)
• "When you don’t have many friends and you don’t have a social life you’re kind of left looking at things, not doing things. There’s a weird freedom in not having people treat you like you’re part of society or where you have to fulfill social relationships." (Tim Burton)
• "I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day." (Vincent van Gogh)
• "And in the end, we were all just humans.. drunk on the idea that love, only love, could heal our brokenness." (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
• "The confidence that comes from being well-dressed is immeasurable." (Brooks Brothers, 1932)
• "I am not happy. I am not unhappy. I am frozen somewhere in the middle that is so much worse. I am nowhere. Nothing is happening and I am getting more and more sad." (Samantha Schutz)
• "Have you ever had that feeling- that you’d like to go to a whole different place and become a whole different self?" (Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicl)
• "You are the books you read the films you watch, the music you listen to, the people you meet, the dreams you have, the conversations you engage in. You are what you take from these. You are the sound of the ocean, the breath of fresh air, the brightest light and the darkest corner. You are a collective of every experience you have had in your life. You are every single second of every single day. So drown yourself in a sea of knowledge and existence. Let the words run through your veins and let the colours fill your mind." (Jac Vanek)
• "Voting is not an act of political freedom. It is an act of political conformity. Those who refuse to vote are not expressing silence. They are screaming in the politician’s ear: ‘You do not represent me. This is not a process in which my voice matters. I do not believe you.’" (Wendy McElroy)
• Ideally, we lose ourselves in what we read, only to return to ourselves, transformed and part of a more expansive world — in short, we become more critical and more capacious in our thinking and our acting." (Judith Butler)
• "Never give up on a dream just because of the time it will take to accomplish it. The time will pass anyway." (Earl Nightingale)
• "Life is about doing things that don’t suck with people who don’t suck." (John Green)
• "If I’m not with somebody who really excites or inspires me, then I’d rather be by myself."
• "Once you’ve accepted your flaws, no one can use them against you." (Tyrion Lannister, Game of Thrones)
• "The planet does not need more successful people. The planet desperately needs more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers and lovers of all kind." (Dalai Lama)
• "Have you ever noticed that humans have made it so difficult and complicated to “survive” in this world? It’s a vicious cycle. You go to school, and try really hard, so that you can get into a good college, and then you try really hard at college to get a good job, and then you try really hard at your job, so you can make money. And then your kids do the same thing. And everyone just keeps on doing this and no one even stops to think WHY they’re doing it anymore. Everyone just does it because it’s what you’re supposed to do. And like, before, when the human race had just started, the goal was to just SURVIVE. People just lived. I mean, that’s what really matters, right? Survival. Because after you die, it doesn’t matter what college you went to."
• "Eat like you love yourself/Move like you love yourself/Speak like you love yourself/Act like you love yourself." (Tara Stiles)
• "Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually. Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken." (Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen)
• "If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something." (Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country)
• "If each man or woman could understand that every other human life is as full of sorrows, or joys, of heartaches and of remorse as his own… how much kinder, how much gentler he would be." (William Allen White)
• "The hardest period in life is one’s twenties. 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)
• "Suddenly you’re ripped into being alive. And life is pain, and life is suffering, and life is horror, but my god you’re alive and its spectacular." (Joseph Campbell)
• "You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone's soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows that they might do because of it, because of your words." (Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus)
• "She believed a great happiness awaited her somewhere, and for this reason she remained calm as the days flew by." (Gyula Krúdy, Sunflower)
• "Love me when I least deserve it, because that's when I really need it. (Swedish proverb)
• "I see people getting married to people they've known for, like, a year and a half. A year and a half? Is that really enough time to get to know someone to know you want to spend the REST of your life with them? I mean, I've had sweaters for a year and a half and I was like, 'What the fuck was I doing with this sweater?'" (Aziz Ansari)
• "Travel. As much as you can. As far as you can. As long as you can. Life’s not meant to be lived in one place." (Gentlemen’s Wisdom)
• "I have no memory for things I have learned, nor things I have read, nor things experienced or heard, neither for people nor events; I feel that I have experienced nothing, learned nothing, that I actually know less than the average schoolboy, and that what I do know is superficial, and that every second question is beyond me. I am incapable of thinking deliberately; my thoughts run into a wall. I can grasp the essence of things in isolation, but I am quite incapable of coherent, unbroken thinking. I can’t even tell a story properly; in fact, I can scarcely talk…" (Franz Kafka)
• "I constantly wonder how my life looks in other people’s eyes. Do they think I have it easy? Do they think I have nothing going on for myself? Or are they fascinated with who I am? The thing is that no one will ever know my whole story. No one will ever know the things I’ve had to overcome. Not even my closest friends, not even my own family. The thing is that people are so quick to judge now a days. You only see a person from what they want and allow you to see. I always try to look as put together as I can and I guess that’s my way of hiding from the truth. It’s just that way, everyone will assume that everything in my life is okay, that I never go through anything. If only everyone knew how broken I am, and how I’m holding on for dear life on this one last strand that’s recently become very delicate. The truth is that no one really knows me. No one will ever know me and sometimes that scares me, because no one will ever know why I am the way I am."
• "Grab your coat, leave a note, and run away with me." (William Chapman)
• "I’ve been quite fascinated by the relative insignificance of human existence, the shortness of life. We might as well be a letter in a word in a sentence on a page in a book in a library in a city in one country in this enormous universe! And that kind of fear and insignificance has kept me awake at night. I feel like it must be universal. Everybody must know that somewhere." (Laura Marling)
• "Solitude is a release to the soul that was imprisoned in company." (George Swinnock)
• "There is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in the proportion." (Edgar Allan Poe)
• "A bouquet of clumsy words: you know that place between sleep and awake where you’re still dreaming but it’s slowly slipping? I wish we could feel like that more often. I also wish I could click my fingers three times and be transported to anywhere I like. I wish that people didn’t always say ‘just wondering’ when you both know there was a real reason behind them asking. And I wish I could get lost in the stars.

Listen, there’s a hell of a good universe next door, let’s go. (E.E. Cummings)

• "We live in an age where we feel guilt whenever we have to cut someone off but the reality is that some relationships do need to die, some people do need to be un-followed and de-friended. We aren’t meant to be this tethered to the people in our past. The Internet mandates that we don’t burn bridges and keep everyone around like relics but those expectations are unrealistic and unhealthy. Simply put, we don’t need to know what everyone else is up to. We’re allowed to be choosy about who we surround ourselves with online and in real life, even if it might hurt people’s feelings."
• "If they don’t like you who the fuck cares." (Sara Quin)
• "Flowers? No. Jewelry? Fuck no. If you want to take me for a night out, don't take me to an expensive restaurant. Take me to your favorite part of the desert. Take me to a strip mall you went to a lot when you were younger. Buy us some time, we can walk to the beach and you can bury me. Yes, in my nice dress and everything. Don’t worry. Sand doesn’t stain. If you really want to show me a good time, take off your formal date personality and show me who you would be in six months if things go well with us. Tell me all about your career, tell me there isn’t anything else you’d rather be doing in the world. Tell me that you hate it and it’s killing you slowly. Anything but, “Yeah.” Anything but, “It’s okay. It’s good. it’s fine.” Nothing is ever just okay or good or fine, and if it is, I want nothing to do with it. Neither should you. Show me the scars in the crook of your arm. Now show me the pictures of her before she died. Distract me from the fact that I am disappearing more and more every day. I’ll try my best to do the same for you."
• "The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves." (Alan Watts)
• "Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying." (Arthur C. Clarke)
• "I tend to head for what’s amusing because a lot of things aren’t happy. But usually you can find a funny side to practically anything." (Maggie Smith)
• Most humans are never fully present in the now, because unconsciously they believe that the next moment must be more important than this one. But then you miss your whole life, which is never not now." (Eckhart Tolle)
• "The bravest thing I ever did was continuing my life when I wanted to die." (Juliette Lewis)
• "You must love in such a way that the person you love feels free." (Thich Nhat Hanh)
• "You can spend minutes, hours, days, weeks, or even months over-analyzing a situation; trying to put the pieces together, justifying what could’ve, would’ve happened… or you can just leave the pieces on the floor and move on." (Tupac Shakur)
• "There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So I buried them, and let them hurt me." (Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)
• "It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default." (J.K. Rowling)
• "I’m queer,” he says, simply. “I have a lot of really wonderful friends who are of very different sexes and genders. I am very much in love with no one in particular. I’ve been trying to figure out relationships, you know? I don’t know if it’s responsible for kids of my age to be so aggressively pursuing monogamous binds, because I don’t think we’re ready for them. The romanticism within our culture dictates that that’s what you’re supposed to be looking for. Then
  
  we find what we think is love — even if it is love — we do not yet have the tools. I do feel that it’s possible to be at this age unintentionally hurtful, just by being irresponsible — which is fine. I’m super down with being irresponsible. I’m just trying to make sure my lack of responsibility no longer hurts people. That’s where I’m at in the boyfriend/girlfriend/zefriend type of question." (Ezra Miller)
• "I didn’t have any friends at school, didn’t want any. I felt better being alone. I sat on a bench and watched the others play and they looked foolish to me." (Charles Bukowski)
• "I'm someone who’s mostly dead inside but still has a little hope for something extraordinary, which, as I said, is the worst breed of human, because it means I know everything is bullshit, but