• The secret is to throw yourself into the water of life again and again, not to hang back, no reservations, risk everything, but above all strike out boldly with all you have.

— Arshile Gorky

• 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, A New Approach to the Table

• 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”

• "You will die a thousand times before you wake up feeling alive in your own skin. You will love all of the wrong hearts before you realize the strength in your own."
• No one knows for certain how much impact they have on the lives of other people. Oftentimes, we have no clue. Yet we push it just the same.

— Jay Asher, Thirteen Reasons Why

• 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

• The stronger person is not the one making the most noise but the one who can quietly direct the conversation toward defining and solving problems.

— Aaron T. Beck

• You are only invisible

to those who do not deserve to see you. — “here’s to another year of existence, beautiful, painful existence“ ~ Emma Bleker

• When you keep hurting someone, you do one of three things. Either you fill them up with hate, and they destroy everything around them. Or you fill them up with sadness, and they destroy themselves. Or you fill them up with justice, and they try to destroy everything that’s bad and cruel in this world. Me, I was the first kind of person.

— Nick Lake, In Darkness

• There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.

— Epictetus

• ‎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, English Teacher

• "I once read the sentence ‘I lay awake all night with toothache, thinking about toothache and about lying awake.’ That’s true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer."

— C.S. Lewis, from A Grief Observed

• “There is no designated time for anything in your life. You don’t have to have your first kiss at any certain time, you don’t have to get married in your 20s and you don’t have to do anything just because other people think it’s best. In fact, you will be much better off if you just do what your heart says. The day you stop caring what other people think is the day their opinions don’t mean anything, because you’re not there to give them weight."

—Brianna Wiest

• "As you get older, you really start to understand more about why people drink the night away, smoke their lungs black, or throw themselves off buildings."
• "You have to accept that some people are not made for deep conversations, or for holding you together when you’re about to fall apart, or for keeping you from unzipping your skin, or for talking you out of suicide, or to love you through the worst moments of your life. Some people are made for shallow exchanges, and ridiculous banter, and nothing more. And that’s okay. That doesn’t make them horrible people because they simply aren’t able to handle a storm like you. It doesn’t make you a bad person because you won’t divulge all the gritty details of your horror show. It makes you smart. You have to accept that there will be people that cannot give you what you need. It doesn’t mean they are not worth keeping in your life. You just have to figure out who these ones are before you’re disappointed. And you have to keep them at arm’s length. You cannot expect everyone in your life to understand, to be nonjudgmental, to get it. But that’s okay, because not everyone was made to impart wisdom, or wax-poetic, or speak on politics and the depravity of society, or discuss how crucial it is that the stigma of mental illness be abolished. There are times when you have to get away from all that heaviness. You have to. And you will need superficial conversation about Kim Kardashian’s arse, or a debate on the colour of The Dress. You will need those ones. So don’t go round cutting people off and dropping your friends. You need people for all your seasons. You need people or you won’t survive this."

— What my therapist told me this morning