• “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
• "Last words are for fools who haven't said enough."-Karl Marx
• "A lot of people never use their initiative because no-one told them to." -Banksy
• "The more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it becomes." -Vladimir Nabokov
• "The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “Destroy my desires, eradicate my ideals, show me something better, and I will follow you.” -Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” -Banksy
• “Why can’t I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which fits best and is most becoming?” -Sylvia Plath
• "There are no exceptions to the rule that everyone thinks they're an exception to the rules." -Banksy
• "It's a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue, and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don't see or care." -Jordan Baker, The Great Gatsby
• "I dislike bears. I think owls are a waste of time." -Stephen Colbert
• "Oh, stop feeling all misunderstood." -Hermione Granger
• "There is no shame in what you are feeling, Harry. On the contrary...the fact that you can feel pain like this is your greatest strength." -Albus Dumbledore
• "If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days." -Esther Greenwood, The Bell Jar
• "It is the unknown we fear when we look upon death and darkness, nothing more." -Albus Dumbledore
• "Yes, as through this world I've wandered, I've seen lots of funny men; some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen." -Woody Guthrie
• "...a shoe-shaped bath tub, within which I felt like Marat but with no white-necked maiden to stab me." -Lolita
• "You wasted life, why wouldn't you waste the afterlife?" -Ocean Breathes Salty, Modest Mouse
• "She was, obviously, one of those women whose polished words may reflect a book club or bridge club, or any other deadly conventionality, but never her soul." -Lolita
• "Undermine their pompous authority, reject their moral standards, make anarchy and disorder your trademarks. Cause as much chaos and disruption as possible but don't let them take you ALIVE." -Sid Vicious
• "I've only been in love with a beer bottle and a mirror." -Sid Vicious
• "She refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn't boring." -Zelda Fitzgerald
• “I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.” -Sylvia Plath
• “Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences.” -Sylvia Plath
• "For life's not a paragraph and death I think is no parenthesis." -EE Cummings
• "Expectation is the root of all heartache." -William Shakespeare
• "If somebody says, ”I love you,” to me, I feel as though I have a pistol pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but that which the pistol-holder requires? ”I love you, too.”" -Kurt Vonnegut
• "Learn, he says, that there will be hours, days and months ahead of feeling absolutely terrible and nothing can change that; neither new girlfriends, health professionals, changes of diet, dope, humility, or God." -Charles Bukowski
• "God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." -Voltaire
• "Until we have seen someone’s darkness, we don’t really know who they are. Until we have forgiven someone’s darkness, we don’t really know what love is." -Marianne Williamson
• “I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.” -Oscar Wilde
• “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” -Oscar Wilde
• “Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.” -Oscar Wilde
• "Seduce my mind and you can have my body, find my soul and I'm yours forever." -Anonymous
• “If I am going to be drowned – if I am going to be drowned – if I am going to be drowned, why in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate land and trees?” -Stephen Crane
• "A man said to the universe: “Sir, I exist!” “However,” replied the universe, “The fact has not created in me a sense of obligation.”" -Stephen Crane
• "I know there are times

when you will lay your head to rest and have a moment of brilliance that grows into a perfect order of words but you will fall asleep instead of painting it down on paper. When you wake up, you will have forgotten the idea completely and miss it like a front tooth but at least you know how to recognize moments of brilliance, because even at your worst you are fucking incredible." -Buddy Wakefield

• "If you’ve never been rocked back by the presence of purpose

this poem is too soon for you. Return to your mediocrity plug it into an amplifier and re-think yourself because some of us are on fire for the answer." -Buddy Wakefield

• "I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees." -Pablo Neruda
• "Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?" -Margaret Atwood
• "It’s deplorable that sexually adventurous young women are constantly told they are “degrading themselves” by seeking out various experiences, that every bit of enjoyment eats away at some secret store of purity. This whole tradition–the idea that women need be preserved in glass so as not to “ruin” themselves, lest they diminish their sexual value by “giving it away”–restricts the lived autonomy of women in ways I can’t even begin to articulate. None of the slut-shaming makes sense unless you assume women live to give themselves to men in their purest possible form." -Kerry Howley
• "You love me so much, you want to put me in your pocket. And I should die there smothered." -D.H. Lawrence
• "The world has never yet seen a truly great and virtuous nation because in the degradation of woman the very fountains of life are poisoned at their source." -Lucretia Mott
• "If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul." -Isaac Asimov
• "It was a small thing, but it was a thing, and things have a way of either dying or growing, and it wasn’t dying." -Miranda July
• "I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But as much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking." -Carl Sagan
• “And there were times when I knew how you felt, and it was hell to know it.”- Vladimir Nabokov
• “Femininity is depicted as weakness, the sapping of strength, yet masculinity is so fragile that apparently even the slightest brush with the feminine destroys it.” -Gwen Sharp
• "Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly." -Franz Kafka
• "You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame. How could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?" -Friedrich Nietzsche
• "It’s hard to hate someone once you understand them." -Lucy Christopher
• "I am tired of knowing nothing and being reminded of it all the time." -F. Scott Fitzgerald
• “If people want to let you go, just let them do it. They may not understand who you are. So don’t play around with fire; don’t give them their cake and let them eat it too. Here is your rule of thumb: they either commit to you or get none of you.” -Joey Furjanic
• “Plant your own garden and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.” -Veronica A. Shoffstall
• “Stay close to anything that makes you glad you are alive.” -Hafiz
• “I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.” -Vladimir Nabokov
• “Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?” -Clarice Lispector
• “What’s past is prologue.” -William Shakespeare
• “A bore is someone who takes away my solitude and doesn’t give me companionship in return.” -Henry David Thoreau
• “Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.” -Henry David Thoreau
• "I do not trust people who don’t love themselves and yet tell me, ‘I love you.’ There is an African saying which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt." -Maya Angelou
• “Holding on to anything is like holding on to your breath. You will suffocate. The only way to get anything in the physical universe is by letting go of it. Let go and it will be yours forever.” -Deepak Chopra
• “True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.” -Kurt Vonnegut
• “We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.” -Leo Tolstoy
• “You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.” -C.S. Lewis
• “Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” -Franz Kafka
• “I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.” -Ernest Hemingway
• “Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.” -Toni Morrison
• “Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.” -Oscar Wilde
• “Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.” -Jonathan Safran Foer
• "What a commentary on civilization, when being alone is being suspect; when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it — like a secret vice." -Anne Morrow Lindbergh
• “One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” -Jack Kerouac
• “Man is condemned to be free. Condemned because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does.” -Jean-Paul Sartre
• “I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.” -Albert Camus
• “What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more’ … Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’” -Friedrich Nietzsche
• "I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I cannot know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me — that I understand. And these two certainties — my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle — I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my conditions?" -Albert Camus
• “I always wonder why birds stay in the same place when they can fly anywhere on the earth, then I ask myself the same question.” -Harun Yayha
• "The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death — however mutable man may be able to make them — our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light." -Stanley Kubrick
• “Just remember: If one bird carried every grain of sand, grain by grain, across the ocean, by the time he got them all on the other side, that would only be the beginning of eternity.” -Truman Capote
• "I do not envy people who think they have a complete explanation of the world, for the simple reason that they are obviously wrong." -Salman Rushdie
• "If you live off a man’s compliments, you’ll die from his criticism." -Cornelius Lindsey
• "Draw a monster. Why is it a monster?" -Janice Lee
• "Good communication is just as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after." -Anne Morrow Lindbergh
• “Cunt again? It was odd how men … used that word to demean women when it was the only part of a woman they valued.” -Asha Greyjoy
• "Privilege does not mean that you’re rich, that you’ve had an easy life, that everything’s been handed to you, and you’ve never had struggle or to work hard. All it means is that there are some things in life that you will not experience— or ever have to think about— just because of who you are." -Franchesca Ramsey
• "Let us believe in a kind of optimism in which we are our own gods." -Percy Bysshe Shelley