• An entire sea of water can’t sink a ship unless it gets inside the ship. Similarly, the negativity of the world can’t put you down unless you allow it to get inside you.

— Goi Nasu

• That’s how you know you love someone, I guess. When you can’t experience anything without wishing the other person were there to see it, too.

— Kaui Hart Hemmings

• Some people are born with tornadoes in their lives, but constellations in their eyes. Other people are born with stars at their feet, but their souls are lost at sea.

Nikita Gill, Perspectives

• I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us.

— Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

• I promised no more poetry and I’d rather think of this as a confession: you are still the first person I want to share new things with.

Trista Mateer, Honeybee

• "Don’t think about what can happen in a month. Don’t think about what can happen in a year. Just focus on the 24 hours in front of you and do what you can to get closer to where you want to be." —Eric Thomas
• It’s like the people who believe they’ll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn’t work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.

— Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

• "Do you ever miss yourself? The person you were before you had your first heartbreak or before you got betrayed by a person you trusted?"
• "You don’t need religion to have morals. If you can’t determine right from wrong then you lack empathy, not religion." —Kane Bailey
• There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.

— Epictetus

• I want you to stop running from thing to thing to thing, and to sit down at the table, to offer the people you love something humble and nourishing, like soup and bread, like a story, like a hand holding another hand while you pray. We live in a world that values us for how fast we go, for how much we accomplish, for how much life we can pack into one day. But I’m coming to believe it’s in the in-between spaces that our lives change, and that the real beauty lies there.

— Shauna Niequist

• He was no longer sure, he had in fact never been sure, whether he liked his life because he really did or whether he liked it because he was supposed to.

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

• The more I thought about my life up to then, the more I hated myself. It wasn’t that I didn’t have a few good memories—I did. A handful of happy experiences. But, if you added them up, the shameful, painful memories far outnumbered the others. When I thought of how I’d been living, how I’d been approaching life, it was all so trite, so miserably pointless. Unimaginative middle-class rubbish, and I wanted to gather it all up and stuff it away in some drawer. Or else light it on fire and watch it go up in smoke (though what kind of smoke it would emit I had no idea).

— Haruki Murakami, “Yesterday”

• 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.

— Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

• Hell is when people you love the most reach right into your soul and rip it out of you. And they do it because they can.

— Jess Rothenberg, The Catastrophic History of You and Me

• ‎You have to be the kind of person who can make the best out of a Tuesday. You know those people who live for the weekends? They’re wishing their life away. You have to find something worth living for or else you’ll look back and realize you’ve wasted your life away.

— Drew Marvin

• Real love is always chaotic. You lose control; you lose perspective. You lose the ability to protect yourself. The greater the love, the greater the chaos. It’s a given and that’s the secret.

— Jonathan Carroll, White Apples

• It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things.

— Lemony Snicket, Horseradish

• Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive.

— Josephine Hart, Damage

• Some friends don’t understand this. They don’t understand how desperate I am to have someone say, I love you and I support you just the way you are because you’re wonderful just the way you are. They don’t understand that I can’t remember anyone ever saying that to me. I am so demanding and difficult for my friends because I want to crumble and fall apart before them so that they will love me even though I am no fun, lying in bed, crying all the time, not moving. Depression is all about If you loved me you would.

— Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

• You know what, I can over think everything and find a million ways to doubt myself. I’ve just come to realize that, we’re only here briefly. And while I’m here, I wanna allow myself joy. So fuck it.

— Her (2014)

• What’s the worst thing I’ve stolen? Probably little pieces of other people’s lives. Where I’ve either wasted their time or hurt them in some way. That’s the worst thing you can steal, the time of other people. You just can’t get that back.

— Chester Bennington

• I approach most things in life with a dangerous level of confidence to balance my generally low self-esteem.

— Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist

• I guess I’ll never measure up to anyone’s expectations. I surely don’t measure up to what I’d like to be.

— Beatrice Sparks, Go Ask Alice

• 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 that make you feel alone.

— Robin WIlliams, World’s Greatest Dad (2009)

• So please ask yourself: What would I do if I weren’t afraid? And then go do it.

— Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

• 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

• 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

• “No matter how careful you are, there’s going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn’t experience it all. There’s that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should’ve been paying attention. Well, get used to that feeling. That’s how your whole life will feel some day. This is all practice.”

-Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters