• "Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family. Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one."

-Jane Howard

• "There must be more to life than having everything. "

-Maurice Sendak

• "So many words, so much to do, so little done, such things to be."

-Lord Alfred Tennyson

• "We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us."

-Joseph Campbell

• “You gotta learn to leave the table when Love is no longer being served”

—Nina Simone

• "I began to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life. If you are interested in something, no matter what it is, go at it full speed ahead. Embrace it with both arms, hug it, love it and above all become passionate about it. Lukewarm is no good. Hot is no good, either. White hot and passionate is the only thing to be."

- Roald Dahl

• “I can’t emphasize enough the importance of solo adventures. Everything from eating lunch by yourself to strolling in the park alone all help to shape your sense of independence. If you’re never by yourself how will you ever know yourself.”

—(via witchwooman)

• “Spend your free time the way you like, not the way you think you’re supposed to. Stay home on New Year’s Eve if that’s what makes you happy. Skip the committee meeting. Cross the street to avoid making aimless chitchat with random acquaintances. Read. Cook. Run. Write a story.”

—Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking

• “Get scared. It will do you good. Smoke a bit, stare blankly at some ceilings, beat your head against some walls, refuse to see some people, paint and write. Get scared some more. Allow your little mind to do nothing but function. Stay inside, go out - I don’t care what you’ll do; but stay scared as hell. You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetical justice to your soul and simply experience yourself.”

—Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1951-1959

• “I have this demon who wants me to run away screaming if I am going to be flawed, fallible. It wants me to think I’m so good I must be perfect. Or nothing. I am, on the contrary, something: a being who gets tired, has shyness to fight, has more trouble than most facing people easily.”

—Sylvia Plat

• “darling,

the person that hurts you will not stick around to stitch you up, so you better learn to heal yourself with your own two hands.” —m.v., be your own savior

• In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice.

- Marquis de Sade

• "Your heart just breaks, that’s all. But you can’t judge, or point fingers. You just have to be lucky enough to find someone who appreciates you.”

-Audrey Hepburn

• "Once you move away from home, it’s never quite the same again. You expect everything to be just as you left it, and it never is. It’s almost the first step into adulthood, realizing you've got to make your own way."

-Saoirse Ronan

• “But sometimes we get sad about things and we don’t like to tell other people that we are sad about them. We like to keep it a secret. Or sometimes we are sad but we don’t really know we are sad. So we say we aren’t sad. But really we are.”

—Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog In the Night-Time

• “Never apologize for burning too brightly or collapsing into yourself every night. That is how galaxies are made.”

—Tyler Kent White

• “I don’t feel very good about myself. 
People always leave me. 
Nobody can stand me for very long. 
I wish I could cut my tongue out, 
or take out the part of my brain 
that has opinions. Or cares. 
I wish I could be simple. 
Be quiet, introverted, or shy. 
I’m half way in between a wallflower 
at a party and Elvis Presley. 
People love one or the other. 
In between is no place to be.”

—Taken from a one page play by Jack White

• “I’m not sure what I’ll do, but— well, I want to go places and see people. I want my mind to grow. I want to live where things happen on a big scale.”

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Ice Palace

• “I survived because the fire inside me burned brighter than the fire around me.”

—Joshua Graham

• “I have lost and loved and won and cried myself to the person I am today.”

—Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles; in search for The Great Perhaps

• “To be frank, I think his world had vanished long before he ever entered it. But I will say: he certainly sustained the illusion with a marvellous grace.”

—Mr. Moustafa, in Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel.

• “It disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional.”

—Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

• “I have my mother’s mouth and my father’s eyes; on my face they are still together.”

—Warsan Shire

• “My idea of rich is that you can buy every book you ever want without looking at the price and you’re never around assholes. That’s the two things to really fight for in life.”

—John Waters

• "I CAN’T UN-KNOW THE MONSTERS BUT I CAN BECOME THE PERSON WHO WOULD HAVE SAVED THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD ME."

- 3/365, WESLEY KING

• “Don’t you dare, Shrink yourself, For someone else’s comfort -Do not become small, For people who refuse to grow.”

—m.v., Advice to my future daughter, #2.

• "The reason I talk to myself is because I’m the only one whose answers I accept."

-George Carlin

• "Do not try to be pretty. You weren’t meant to be pretty; you were meant to burn down the earth and graffiti the sky. Don’t let anyone ever simplify you to just “pretty.”

-Things I Wish My Mother Had Taught Me | d.a.s

• "Do not be so sweet

That people will eat you up. Nor so bitter that They will spit you out." -Pashto Folk

• "People aren’t books, I’ve learned.

You can’t bookmark your favorite pieces to return to whenever you’re feeling lonely; when the nights get too cold and you need something familiar to keep you warm, you can’t reopen their spines and wear out their pages and call that obsession love." -Pavana पवन

• "For a star to be born, there is one thing that must happen: a gaseous nebula must collapse. So collapse. Crumble. This is not your destruction. This is your birth."

-n.t.

• "Just be honest with me or stay away from me. It’s not that difficult."

-Unknown

• "I no longer have the energy for meaningless friendships, forced interactions or unnecessary conversations. If we don’t vibrate on the same frequency there’s just no reason for us to waste our time. I’d rather have no one and wait for substance than to not feel someone and fake the funk."

-Joquesse Eugenia

• "Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it."

-David Foster Wallace

• "You will always be too much of something for someone: too big, too loud, too soft, too edgy. If you round out your edges, you lose your edge.

Apologize for mistakes. Apologize for unintentionally hurting someone — profusely. But don’t apologize for being who you are." -Danielle Laporte

• "I have my mother’s mouth and my father’s eyes; on my face they are

still together." -Warsan Shir

• "I’m not going to censor myself to comfort your ignorance."

-Jon Stewart

• "I want to be the last person who ever kisses you… That sounds bad, like a death threat or something. What I’m trying to say is, you’re it. This is it for me."

-Eleanor & Park, Rainbow Rowell

• "No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path."

—Gautama Buddha

• “If you’re sad, add more lipstick and attack.”

—Coco Chanel

• “well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love. I like to work, read, learn, and understand life…”

—Langston Hughes

• "It seems very safe to me to be surrounded by green growing things and water."

-BARBARA KINGSOLVER

• “When we are motivated by compassion and wisdom, the results of our actions benefit everyone, not just our individual selves or some immediate convenience. When we are able to recognize and forgive ignorant actions of the past, we gain strength to constructively solve the problems of the present.”

—Dalai Lama

• “I don’t expect anyone to respect me anymore. I don’t expect anyone to love me anymore. When we place expectation on other people we give away our own power in life.”

—Alice Nicholls

• “I started promising myself to

never stay anywhere I’m not very much wanted. I have too many scars to be breaking my bones to fit into places that weren’t made to fit me.” -anneisrestless

• “I used to think the worst thing in life was to end up all alone, it’s not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel all alone”

—Robin Williams

• “Sometimes, carrying on, just carrying on, is the superhuman achievement.”

—Albert Camus, The Fall

• “I started promising myself to
never stay anywhere I’m not
very much wanted. I have too
many scars to be breaking 
my bones to fit into places
that weren’t made to fit me.”

—(uhkillease)

• “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, quoted in Esquire’s “What I’ve Learned”

• “We are all connected; To each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe, atomically. Not only are we in the universe, the universe is in us.”

—Neil DeGrasse Tyson

• “On the bright side, my coffee will never get cold in hell.”

—(via fiftyshadesofselfdestruction)

• “Say it before you run out of time. Say it before it’s too late. Say what you’re feeling. Waiting is a mistake.”

—(via invisuble)

• “You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You're on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who'll decide where to go...”

― Dr. Seuss, Oh, The Places You'll Go!

• If you’re not humble in this world, this world will thrust humbleness upon you.

-MIKE TYSON

• I keep wondering, how many people do you need to be, before you can become yourself.

-IAIN S. THOMAS

• “It’s not that I can’t fall in love. It’s really that I can’t help falling in love with too many things all at once So, you must understand why I can’t distinguish between what’s platonic and what isn’t, because it’s all too much and not enough at the same time.”

—Jack Kerouac

• “It’s about moments in life that are great but don’t last. They don’t go on, but you always have the memory and they have an effect on you. That’s what I was thinking about.”

—Sofia Coppola on Lost In Translation

• “Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. I think that a lot of what people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.”

— Aaron Swartz

• “I’m not gonna sit around and waste my precious divine energy trying to explain and be ashamed of things you think are wrong with me.”

— Esperanza Spalding

• “It took a special kind of guts to be a fuck up as a woman, I thought. To say to hell with being the nice girl, the responsible one, the one who makes sure the man takes care of himself and eats properly and doesn’t take too many drugs. To be just as nihilistic and self-destructive as a man, knowing all along that you’ll get crucified for it, because somehow, the world will make everything your fault. He’ll be a martyr, and you’ll be a succubus. He’ll be a genius and you’ll be a groupie, He’ll be a hero, and you’ll be an ugly fat crack whore who deserves to die.”

—Courtney Love

• “I began to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life. If you are interested in something, no matter what it is, go at it full speed ahead. Embrace it with both arms, hug it, love it and above all become passionate about it. Lukewarm is no good.”

—Roald Dahl

• “I tell my students, ‘When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.”

—Toni Morrison

• "Anything that gets your blood racing is probably worth doing."

-Hunter S. Thompson

• If you’re not humble in this world, this world will thrust humbleness upon you.

-MIKE TYSON

• "Do not look at yourself with disgust, you are a gift to this earth. You are beautiful, you are a light, an energy, an essence. You are nature herself.”

— Heidi Pickett

• “I’m still depressed, but how depressed I am varies, which is good. Much of the time, it’s a comfortable numbness that just makes things feel muted. Other times, I’m standing in the shower or something and I can feel the nothingness hurtling toward me at eight thousand miles per hour and there’s nothing I can really do aside from let it happen and wait until it goes away again.”

—Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half

• “Make sure you tell the people you love that you love them. Loudly and often. You never know when it might be too late.”

—Tom Hiddleston

• You are allowed to be alive. You are allowed to be somebody different. You are allowed to not say goodbye to anybody or explain a single thing to anyone, ever.”

—Augusten Burroughs

• "There has never been a sadness that can’t be cured by breakfast food.”

—Ron Swanson

• “A few times in my life I’ve had moments of absolute clarity. When for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh. It’s as though it had all just come into existence.
• I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be.”

—Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man

• “It’s amazing how words can do that, just shred your insides apart.”

—Lauren Oliver, Delirium

• “I felt like crying but nothing came out. it was just a sort of sad sickness, sick sad, when you can’t feel any worse. I think you know it. I think everybody knows it now and then. but I think I have known it pretty often, too often.”

—Charles Bukowski, Tales of Ordinary Madness

• "Keep going until you can’t stand it anymore. Bring your mood to a boil and let out a shrill war cry at the top of your lungs. This is your fight. Make the changes you’ve been dying to see, since there is no convenient time to do so. Do it now. Walk away from the TV, the plot is predictable anyway. 10-30 episodes in, they finally kiss, they’re together for a bit. Then break up. Use that time to make a world worth living in instead. You’ll thank yourself later."

-Wish Candy

• "You’re going to meet many people with domineering personalities: the loud, the obnoxious, those that noisily stake their claims in your territory and everywhere else they set foot on. This is the blueprint of a predator. Predators prey on gentleness, peace, calmness, sweetness and any positivity that they sniff out as weakness. Anything that is happy and at peace they mistake for weakness. It’s not your job to change these people, but it’s your job to show them that your peace and gentleness do not equate to weakness. I have always appeared to be fragile and delicate but the thing is, I am not fragile and I am not delicate. I am very gentle but I can show you that the gentle also possess a poison. I compare myself to silk. People mistake silk to be weak but a silk handkerchief can protect the wearer from a gunshot. There are many people who will want to befriend you if you fit the description of what they think is weak; predators want to have friends that they can dominate over because that makes them feel strong and important. The truth is that predators have no strength and no courage. It is you who are strong, and it is you who has courage. I have lost many friends over the fact that when they attempt to rip me, they can’t. They accuse me of being deceiving; I am not deceiving, I am just made of silk. It is they who are stupid and wrongly take gentleness and fairness for weakness. There are many more predators in this world, so I want you to be made of silk. You are silk."

- C. JoyBell C.

• "You need to be content with small steps. That’s all life is. Small steps that you take every day so when you look back down the road it all adds up and you know you covered some distance."

- Katie Kacvinsky, Awaken

• "Life should be a risk. It’s more than a straight line that you can see clearly from one point to the other. It dips and curves and you never know what’s around the bend sometimes until you get there. That scares a lot of people. But that’s the beauty of it."

- Katie Kacvinsky, Awaken

• "Because if you’re lucky enough to have people in your life that make you happy, that inspire you, that move you, you need to devour each moment you have together because you never know how many of those moments you have left. These people are sacred."

- Katie Kacvinsky, First Comes Love

• "Holding people away from you, and denying yourself love, that doesn’t make you strong. if anything, it makes you weaker. Because you’re doing it out of fear."

- Sarah Dessen, This Lullaby

• All you can do is do something for yourself, believe in it, love it, and then fucking put it out there in the world and hope that people like it, love it.

-Joaquin Phoenix

• “You just do it. You force yourself to get up. You force yourself to put one foot before the other, and God damn it, you refuse to let it get to you. You fight. You cry. You curse. Then you go about the business of living. That’s how I’ve done it. There’s no other way.”

—Elizabeth Taylor

• “You will never be completely at home again, because part of your heart always will be elsewhere. That is the price you pay for the richness of loving and knowing people in more than one place.”

—Miriam Adeney

• “The only thing I know is this: I am full of wounds and still standing on my feet.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis

• “I was half in love with her by the time I sat down. That’s the stupid thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they’re not much to look at, or even if they’re sort of stupid, you half fall in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy. They really can.”

—Holden Caulfield

• “And every day, the world will drag you by the hand, yelling, “This is important! And this is important! And this is important! You need to worry about this! And this! And this! And each day, it’s up to you to yank your hand back, put it on your heart and say, “No. This is what’s important.”

-I Wrote This for You by Iain Thomas

• “The only escape from the miseries of life are music and cats...”

― Albert Schweitzer

• “The only truth is music.”

― Jack Kerouac

• “You either like me or you don’t. It took me twenty-something years to learn how to love myself, I don’t have that kinda time to convince somebody else.”

— Daniel Franzese

• “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

— Maya Angelou

• “Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I’ve told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.”

— Janet Fitch, White Oleander

• “If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him”

— John F Kennedy