- "It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.” — Charles Dickens (Great Expectations)
- "I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no melancholy.”— Charles Baudelaire
- "The sea is nothing but a library of all the tears in history.” — Lemony Snicket, The End.
- "To be sucking your thumb in Rome by the Tiber among fallen leaves.” — American Sentences, Allen Ginsberg, 1990
- “Introverts are collectors of thoughts, and solitude is where the collection is curated and rearranged to make sense of the present and future.”
- “Photography is a tool for dealing with things everybody knows about but isn’t attending to. My photographs are intended to represent something you don’t see.” — Emmet Gowin
- “I am happy: this cold is so pure, this night so pure: am I myself not a wave of icy air? With neither blood, nor lymph, nor flesh. Flowing down this long canal towards the pallor down there. To be nothing.but coldness.” — Jean-Paul Sartre
- "Homespun harlequin boys and girls stepped out in crochet and ribbons while coloured tears glittered down their cheeks.” — Katy Smail
- “A person, scattered in space and time, is no longer a woman but a series of events on which we can throw no light, a series of insoluble problems.” — PROUST
- “They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered” — This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald
- “She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening.” — The Lady of the House of Love | Angela Carter
- “There are dandelion weeds invading the circuitboards of our skeletal systems, mermaid scales that glisten in face of number-colon-number 11:11, and they grow grow grow until the mirage implodes leaving us exhausted we’re crawling through the drowning cacophony of silence.”
- “But you, you foolish girl, you have gone home to a leaky castle across the sea to lie awake in linen smelling of lavender, and hear the nightingale, and long for me.” — Short Story | Edna St. Vincent Millay
- "Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant, filled with odd waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don't always like." Lemony Snicket
- "Vous au moins, vous ne risquez pas d'être un légume, puisque même un artichaut a du cœur." (At least you'll never be a vegetable — even artichokes have hearts.) Amelie Poulain, Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amelie Poulain
- "Just like any woman, we weave our stories out of our bodies. Some of us through our children, or our art; some do it just by living. It's all the same." Francesca Lia Block
- "Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten." G. K. Chesterton
- "Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it." Maurice Sendak
- "Cute is when your personality shines through your looks. Like, when you see someone’s personality in the way they walk and you just feel like hugging them every time you see them." Natalie Portman
- "I once hand made a girlfriend a 50 page leather bound book. It was an illustrated fairy tale about a princess and an eccentric magician. The magician had his heart broken so badly in the past that instead of keeping it in his chest where it could easily get hurt again, he kept it locked up in a rusty trunk under his bed, where it had withered into a shriveled apricot. A lot happens that can’t really be summed up in one paragraph, but at the end, his apricot heart swells to the size of a house and they end up living happily ever after inside of it. It took me about a month to make, it was all rhyming, hand painted… something I was pretty gosh darn proud of. I really poured a lot into it, and I think its filled with some of my best paintings yet. Sadly in real life the story didnt end as happy as it did in the book. Lets just say I’m living alone in that giant apricot heart at the moment." Matthew Gray Gubler
- "Yes, I guess you could say I am a loner, but I feel more lonely in a crowded room with boring people than I feel on my own." Henry Rollins
- "Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve. Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag.She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she finds the book she wants. You see the weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a second hand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow. She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book. Buy her another cup of coffee. Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice. It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas and for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry, in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does. She has to give it a shot somehow. Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world. Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who understand that all things will come to end. That you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two. Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilightseries. If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are. You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype. You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots. Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads. Or better yet, date a girl who writes." Rosemary Urquico
- "I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says “Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again." Lewis Carroll
- I like it when it rains hard. It sounds like white noise everywhere, which is like silence but not empty. — Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
- If I knew I was going to die at a specific moment in the future, it would be nice to be able to control what song I was listening to; this is why I always bring my iPod on airplanes. - Chuck Klosterman, Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of True Story
- She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful-Neil Gaiman
- I said that I’m a fairy… and I prefer to dance and fly with the butterfly but they made me talk and walk - and I hate walking and talking-Sasha Pivovarova
- There is a theory which states that if ever for any reason anyone discovers what exactly the Universe is for and why it is here it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another that states that this has already happened-Douglas Adams
- I hate slick and pretty things. I prefer mistakes and accidents. Which is why I like things like cuts and bruises - they're like little flowers. I've always said that if you have a name for something, like 'cut' or 'bruise,' people will automatically be disturbed by it. But when you see the same thing in nature, and you don't know what it is, it can be very beautiful-David Lynch
- The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder-Virginia Woolf
- 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
- Thomas Edison's last words were 'It's very beautiful over there'. I don't know where there is, but I believe it's somewhere, and I hope it's beautiful-John Green
- Apparently orgasm is the only point where your mind becomes completely empty—you think of nothing for that second. That’s why it’s so compelling—it’s a tiny taste of death. Your mind is void—you have nothing in your head save white light-Jeff Buckley
- I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night-Galileo Galilei
- I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees-Pablo Neruda
- I will love you as the iceberg loves the ship, and the passengers love the lifeboat and the lifeboat loves the teeth of the sperm whale, and the sperm whale loves the flavor of naval uniforms-Lemony Snicket
- Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love-Rainer Maria Rilke
- From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity-Edvard Munch
- People who talk about their dreams are actually trying to tell you things about themselves they’d never admit in normal conversation-Chuck Klosterman
- "Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing." —Sylvia Plath
- "The two hardest things to contemplate in life are failure and age; and those are one and the same. Perfection is the natural consequence of eternity: wait long enough, and anything will realize its potential. Coal becomes diamonds, sand becomes pearls, apes become men. It’s simply not given to us, in one lifetime, to see those consummations, and so every failure becomes a reminder of death. But love is a special kind of failure… It’s a reminder that some consummations, no matter how devoutly wished for, never come, that some apes will never be men, not in all the world’s ages. What’s a monkey to think, who with a type writer and eternity still can’t eke out Shakespeare?" —From The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason
- "There’s been time this whole time. You can’t kill time with your heart. Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still." —David Foster Wallace
- "And then, at other times, she fell back, became herself - sea and sand and moisture, and no embrace then seemed violent enough, brutal enough, bestial enough." —‘Elena’, Anais Nin
- "There Was a Little Girl” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: There was a little girl/Who had a little curl/Right in the middle of her forehead./When she was good/She was very good indeed,/But when she was bad she was horrid.
- "Don’t Kanye me. Or I’ll Chris Brown you and Tiger Woods your mother."
- "I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? … All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood, and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is ape to man? A laughing stock or painful embarrassment. And man shall be that to overman: a laughingstock or painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape…. The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth…. Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman—a rope over an abyss … what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end." —Friedrich Nietzsche
mar 22 2011 ∞
mar 23 2011 +