"I want to be magic. I want to touch the heart of the world and make it smile. I want to be a friend of elves and live in a tree. Or under a hill. I want to marry a moonbeam and hear the stars sing. I don’t want to pretend at magic anymore. I want to be magic." —Charles de Lint.

"I want there to be a Shift so bad. I want to feel my brain slide back into the slot it was meant to be in, rest there the way it did before the fall of last year, back when I was young, and witty, and my teachers said I had incredible promise, and I spoke up in class because I was excited and smart about the world. I want the Shift so bad. I’m waiting for the phrase that will invoke it. It’ll be like a miracle within my life." —It's Kind of a Funny Story, Ned Vizzini.

"Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking, “I am falling to the floor crying,” but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it — you knew it would happen and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well." —Richard Siken.

"I’ve been very aware ever since I was a child how futile it is to start categorising. I know that sexually I am a lot more drawn to women than I am to men. But I do find it hard to define myself, because as soon as you state one thing, you deny everything else. Some people know exactly who they are and what they want to do. I don’t have that. I feel wider… not deeper or cleverer or anything, just wider…" —Rupert Graves.

"Be the best. That is, assuming that you are the best. Be the best you can possibly be, whatever that means to you. Absolutely do not step down in order to not threaten people. Don’t apologize. If you genuinely fucked up fine, you are allowed to apologize once but then stop apologizing. Think about how much you hear women apologizing for themselves for no reason, or being self-deprecating or self-abnegating out of habit. What the fuck are you apologizing for? For being too good?" —?????.

"I’m a massive daydreamer. I’m constantly lost within my own fantasies and my own thoughts personally, and I think maybe that is sort of represented in what we do for a living, the fact that we make believe everything and we escape into these other characters for a living." —Emily Browning.

"Youth isn’t just about running pell-mell at the sun yelling, ‘Damn it all to hell!’ Youth is about asking yourself who you are, what you can accomplish. It is about fervently drawing pictures every day, on the one hand thinking, ‘They’re all right, I’ve got something here,’ and on the other hand wondering if your work will be accepted by others, and worrying that it may all be an illusion and that you really don’t have any talent at all. This anguish in the midst of uncertainty and impatience is what youth is all about." —Hayao Miyazaki.

"I feel like young girls are told, I don't know, that they have to be this kind of princess and fragile. It's bullshit. You've got to be.. I identify much more with being a warrior, a fighter. If I was going to be a princess I'd be a warrior princess definitely. There's nothing wrong with being afraid. It's not the absence of fear, it's overcoming it. Sometimes you've got to blast through and have faith. While filming Perks of Being A Wallflower.. I was terrified. I was so nervous. New crew, new location, new cast. There's a scene where I have to mimic Susan Sarandon and I have to do this dance in front of extras and I felt ridiculous. I'm constantly doing things that are new, and that takes bravery I guess. Have faith in yourself, believe in yourself, and it'll all hopefully work out." —Emma Watson.

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

"Closing your eyes isn’t going to change anything. Nothing’s going to disappear just because you can’t see what’s going on. In fact, things will even be worse the next time you open your eyes. That’s the kind of world we live in. Keep your eyes wide open. Only a coward closes his eyes. Closing your eyes and plugging up your ears won’t make time stand still." —Haruki Murakami.

"I’ve had librarians say to me, “People in my school don’t agree with homosexuality, so it’s difficult to have your book on the shelves.” Here’s the thing: Being gay is not an issue, it is an identity. It is not something that you can agree or disagree with. It is a fact, and must be defended and represented as a fact.

To use another part of my identity as an example: if someone said to me, “I’m sorry, but we can’t carry that book because it’s so Jewish and some people in my school don’t agree with Jewish culture,” I would protest until I reached my last gasp. Prohibiting gay books is just as abhorrent…

Discrimination is not a legitimate point of view. Silencing books silences the readers who need them most. And silencing these readers can have dire, tragic consequences. Never forget who these readers are. They are just as curious and anxious about life as any other teenager." —David Levithan.

"I believe in things greater than us and I believe in love and human beings and I believe in reverence and spirituality and divinity. Whether or not that is embodied in whatever doctrines might call a god is not really important to me. I just believe in a greater something and I believe in good people." —Darren Criss.

Chuck: I can’t even hug you? What if you need a hug? A hug can turn your day around. Ned: I’m not a fan of the hug. Chuck: Then you haven’t been hugged properly. It’s like an emotional Heimlich. Someone puts their arms around you and they give you a squeeze and all your fear and anxiety come shooting out of your mouth in a big wet ‘what’ and you can breath again. —Pushing Daisies.

"If you’re feeling frightened about what comes next, don’t be. Embrace the uncertainty. Allow it to lead you places. Be brave as it challenges you to exercise both your heart and your mind as you create your own path towards happiness, don’t waste time with regret. Spin wildly into your next action. Enjoy the present, each moment, as it comes; because you’ll never get another one quite like it. And if you should ever look up and find yourself lost, simply take a breath and start over. Retrace your steps and go back to the purest place in your heart… where your hope lives. You’ll find your way again." —Everwood.

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

"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 possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something." —Kurt Vonnegut.

"The world doesn’t need any more hot chicks or tough guys or smooth-talkers — the world needs more you. And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise." —Bo Burnham.

"Nothing in the world is permanent, and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we’re still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it." —W. Somerset Maugham.

"I like flaws and feel more comfortable around people who have them. I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions." —Augusten Burroughs.

"You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don’t owe it to your mother, you don’t owe it to your children, you don’t owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked “female”." —?????.

"You know what? Fuck beauty contests. Life is one fucking beauty contest after another. School, then college, then work… Fuck that. And fuck the Air Force Academy. If I want to fly, I’ll find a way to fly. You do what you love, and fuck the rest." —Little Miss Sunshine.

"Anything that gets your blood racing is probably worth doing." —Hunter S. Thompson.

"It's awesome that you're a nerd girl, and don't try and not be a nerd girl. Because, everything that makes you feel alone, right now, in high school... is what's going to make you an awesome, interesting adult. And that's what's gonna attract awesome, interesting friends to you... So. Don't let go of that. I would say, go further with whatever you're interested in. I was lonely, too. And one told me I had nice legs, or a nice but. And... that's okay. Just, please continue being yourself. Okay!" —Gillian Jacobs.

"Cussing doesn’t come from a lack of vocabulary – I know all the other words. None of them speak the same language that my fucking heart does." —Anis Mojgani.

"I like people too much or not at all." —Sylvia Plath.

"Not that smart. Not that hot. Not that nice. Not that funny. That’s me: I’m not that." —Will Grayson, Will Grayson; John Green.

"In my mind I am eloquent; I can climb intricate scaffolds of words to reach the highest cathedral ceilings and paint my thoughts. But when I open my mouth, everything collapses." —Warm Bodies, Isaac Marion.

‎"I’m the kind of person who would rather get my hopes up really high and watch them get dashed to pieces than wisely keep my expectations at bay and hope they are exceeded. This quality has made me a needy and theatrical friend, but has given me a spectacularly dramatic emotional life." —Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, Mindy Kaling.

"My life - my personality, my habits, even my speech - is a combination of the books I choose to read, the people I choose to listen to, and the thoughts I choose to tolerate in my mind…" —Andy Andrews.

"I’m not anti-social. I’m just not social." —Woody Allen.

"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." —The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath.

"blemish, n.

The slight acne scars. The penny-sized, penny-shaped birthmark right above your knee. The dot below your shoulder that must have been from when you had chicken pox in third grade. The scratch on your neck- did I do that? This brief transcript of moments, written on the body, is so deeply satisfying to read." —The Lover's Dictionary, David Levithan.

"Trying to write about love is ultimately like trying to have a dictionary represent life. No matter how many words there are, there will never be enough." —The Lover's Dictionary, David Levithan.

"Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book." —The Fault in Our Stars, John Green.

"You do this, you do. You take the things you love and tear them apart or you pin them down with your body and pretend they’re yours." —Crush, Richard Siken.

"I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living." —Dr. Seuss.

"As long as you are doing it for just reasons that are balanced for you. It’s not even about judging what’s right or wrong, you know, who are we—there is nobody on this earth that can tell you what you’re feeling is wrong, you know? They can tell what you’re feeling is different than what they’re feeling. That said, I’m okay with people trying to do whatever it is they need to do to feel better. " —Zoe Saldana.

"And then I felt sad because I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can’t ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one. You wonder when your turn is going to be, or if it’s already happened." —Douglas Coupland.

"I exist in many different shades of gray. And I exist, in many aspects of my life, in much more complex ways than I believe a label allows. Not that I’m uncomfortable with one." —Amber Heard.

"I’m not a bitch. I just don’t take crap from anyone." —Megan Fox.

“My whole life, there have been people expecting me to be a certain way because of how I look. They expect certain things of me, expect me to be of a certain intelligence. I’m constantly walking a tightrope between the kind of roles I want to play and the kind of roles I’m expected to play.” —Amber Heard.

“I’m open to whoever. I think it is absurd to assume that I have to look in a certain category. A person should make choices — about who they want to marry, who they want to spend time with, who they want to fuck — based on a variety of options, and I hope that one day people will be more open-minded about that. It’s silly to look in one category or another. I would never imagine a mate based on a certain sex or race.” —Amber Heard.

"And all the books you’ve read have been read by other people. And all the songs you’ve loved have been heard by other people. And that girl that’s pretty to you is pretty to other people. And you know that if you looked at these facts when you were happy, you would feel great because you are describing unity." —The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky.

"You can close your eyes to the things you do not want to see, but you cannot close your heart to the things you do not want to feel." —Johnny Depp.

“Making music, it’s such a personal thing. You’re always making music; you’re making music that pleases you, and you kind of think, you know, ‘who the fuck else would listen to this?’ And so it’s really amazing to me how many people have taken it so to heart.” —Florence Welch.

"I believe in pink. I believe that laughing is the best calorie burner. I believe in kissing, kissing a lot. I believe in being strong when everything seems to be going wrong. I believe that happy girls are the prettiest girls. I believe that tomorrow is another day and I believe in miracles.” —Audrey Hepburn.

"I hated school. I hated school, and I didn’t realize why. I thought I was - there was something wrong with me for hating school and not being able to deal with school. At the time, it was ingrained in me that school was - if you’re not successful at school, you’re not going to be successful at life. And the hierarchy with subjects at school, the arts are given no credence and if they are, it’s false credence. So yeah, I look back on it and I get angry. I am angry about it because you know, there might be a brilliant ballerina somewhere in school that’s being forced to do maths and she’s seen as “difficult”. But if she was just allowed to express whatever gifts she has to offer, than she would be happy and she could make hundreds of other people joyous for a couple of hours per night." —Andrew Garfield.

"When adults say, ‘Teenagers think they are invincible’ with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don’t know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail." —Looking for Alaska, John Green.

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars." —On the Road, Jack Kerouac.

“I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go, things go wrong so that you appreciate them when they’re right, you believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself, and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.” —Marilyn Monroe.

“What they don’t understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you’re eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one. And when you wake up on your eleventh birthday you expect to feel eleven, but you don’t. You open your eyes and everything’s just like yesterday, only it’s today. And you don’t feel eleven at all. You feel like you’re still ten. And you are — underneath the year that makes you eleven.

Like some days you might say something stupid, and that’s the part of you that’s still ten. Or maybe some days you might need to sit on your mama’s lap because you’re scared, and that’s the part of you that’s five. And maybe one day when you’re all grown up maybe you will need to cry like if you’re three, and that’s okay. That’s what I tell Mama when she’s sad and needs to cry. Maybe she’s feeling three.

Because the way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one. That’s how being eleven years old is.” —Sandra Cisneros.

“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.

“Have no fear of perfection, you’ll never reach it.” —Salvador Dalí.

"We have been known from the very start. Our eye color, our hairline, our jawline, the shape of our big toe, the tone of our voice. These things have been designed from the very beginning.

What kind of music we listen to. The sort of skirt that looks good. The sort of cap that fits right. We have been made to find these things for ourselves and take them in as ours, like adopted children: habits, hobbies, idiosyncrasies, gestures, moods, tastes, tendencies, worries. We are all these things. They have been put in us for good measure.

Perhaps we don’t like what we see: our shapeless hair, our loss of hair, our shoe size, our dimples, our knuckles too big, our eating habits, our disposition. We have disclosed these things in secret, likes and dislikes, behind doors with locks, our lonely rooms, our messy desks, our empty hearts, our sudden bursts of energy, our sudden bouts of depression.

Don’t worry. Put away your mirrors and your beauty magazines and your books on tape. There is someone right here who knows you more than you do, who is making room on the couch, who is fixing a meal, who is putting on your favorite record, who is listening intently to what you have to say, who is standing there with you, face to face, hand to hand, eye to eye, mouth to mouth. There is no space left uncovered." —Sufjan Stevens.

"Before I die, I want to be somebody’s favorite hiding place, the place they can put everything they know they need to survive, every secret, every solitude, every nervous prayer, and be absolutely certain I will keep it safe. I will keep it safe." —Andrea Gibson.

“I want you to tell me about every person you’ve ever been in love with. Tell me why you loved them, then tell me why they loved you. Tell me about a day in your life you didn’t think you’d live through. Tell me what the word “home” means to you and tell me in a way that I’ll know your mother’s name just by the way you describe your bed room when you were 8. See, I wanna know the first time you felt the weight of hate and if that day still trembles beneath your bones. Do you prefer to play in puddles of rain or bounce in the bellies of snow? And if you were to build a snowman, would you rip two branches from a tree to build your snowman arms? Or would you leave the snowman armless for the sake of being harmless to the tree? And if you would, would you notice how that tree weeps for you because your snowman has no arms to hug you every time you kiss him on the cheek? Do you kiss your friends on the cheek? Do you sleep beside them when they’re sad, even if it makes your lover mad? Do you think that anger is a sincere emotion or just the timid motion of a fragile heart trying to beat away its pain? See, I wanna know what you think of your first name. And if you often lie awake at night and imagine your mother’s joy when she spoke it for the very first time. I want you tell me all the ways you’ve been unkind. Tell me all the ways you’ve been cruel. See, I wanna know more than what you do for a living. I wanna know how much of your life you spend just giving. And if you love yourself enough to also receive sometimes. I wanna know if you bleed sometimes through other people’s wounds.” —Andrea Gibson.