• “The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn’t live boldly enough, that they didn’t invest enough heart, didn’t love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.” - Ted Hughes
• “‎Don’t expect to get anything back, don’t expect recognition for your efforts, don’t expect your genius to be discovered or your love to be understood. Act because you need to act.” - Paulo Coelho
• “Don’t take anything personally. Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won’t be the victim of needless suffering.” - Don Miguel Luis
• “As a whole, people suck. But a person can be extraordinary.” - Jim Butcher
• “I mean, the human race, we are a tribe, let’s face it, and let’s stop all this religious bullshit. I think everybody, or at least a lot of my friends, are just so exhausted with this whole self-importance of religious people. Just drop it. We’re all fucking animals, so let’s just make some universal tribal beat.” - Bjork
• “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most importantly, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” - Steve Jobs
• “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience” – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
• “Eventually soulmates meet, for they have the same hiding place.” - Robert Brault
• "“Let us toast to animal pleasures, to escapism, to rain on the roof and instant coffee, to unemployment insurance and library cards, to absinthe and good-hearted landlords, to music and warm bodies and contraceptives… and to the “good life”, whatever it is and wherever it happens to be.” - Hunter S. Thompson
• “ You’re twenty-one or twenty-nine and your heart’s been broken somewhere between four and twenty times—fetal-position-on-the-bathroom-floor broken, real-country-music broken—and you don’t know how you can ever be expected to go on like this for fifty more years and change. You have scars. You’ve injured your body in ways that will never fully heal, and you realize you are slowly, incorrigibly sliding away from some physical perfection you imagine you must have possessed sometime in the distant past. Maybe when you were fourteen. Maybe the day you were born. You’ve gone on and off your medication and the bottle. You’ve had your first marriage and maybe your first divorce, or maybe you’ve always broken things off or been broken off. You’ve fucked and you’ve made love. You’re pretty sure you know the difference now. You’ve thought of suicide in a post-adolescent way at least once. Practically. Stoically. Without any late-night phone calls. Just sober in a dimly lit bedroom, weighing cons and pros.” - Jane Sylvan
• "Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts." - Charles Dickens
• "“I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” - Steven Jay Gould
• "“I cannot stand small talk, because I feel like there’s an elephant standing in the room shitting all over everything and nobody is saying anything. I’m just dying to say, “Hey, do you ever feel like jumping off a bridge?” or “Do you feel an emptiness inside your chest at night that is going to swallow you?” But you can’t say that at a cocktail party.” - Paul Gilmartin
• "“It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.” - Chuck Palhaniuk
• "“Lately I’ve been thinking about who I want to love, and how I want to love, and why I want to love the way I want to love, and what I need to learn to love that way, and who I need to become to become the kind of love I want to be…….and when I break it all down, when I whittle it into a single breath, it essentially comes out like this: Before I die, I want to be somebody’s favorite hiding place, the place they can put everything they know they need to survive, every secret, every solitude, every nervous prayer, and be absolutely certain I will keep it safe. I will keep it safe.” - Andrea Gibson
• “The planet does not need more ‘successful’ people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every shape and form. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these needs have little to do with success as our culture has defined it.” - David Orr
• “Making love with you

Is like drinking sea water. The more I drink The thirstier I become, Until nothing can slake my thirst But to drink the entire sea.” — Kenneth Rexroth

• “Everything is a self-portrait. A diary. Your whole drug history’s in a strand of your hair. Your fingernails. The forensic details. The lining of your stomach is a document. The calluses on your hand tell all your secrets. Your teeth give you away. Your accent. The wrinkles around your mouth and eyes. Everything you do shows your hand.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

• “Letters of the condemned. Last words scratched on a cell’s wall. To write like that.”

— Anna Kamienska, “A Nest of Quiet,” trans. Clare Cavanagh

• “All I ever really want to know is how other people are making it through life—where do they put their body, hour by hour, and how do they cope inside of it.”

— Miranda July

• “Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read

to the end just to find out who killed the cook. Not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark, in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication. Not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot, the one you beat to the punchline, the door, or the one who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones that crimped your toes, don’t regret those. Not the nights you called god names and cursed your mother, sunk like a dog in the living room couch, chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness. You were meant to inhale those smoky nights over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches. You’ve walked those streets a thousand times and still you end up here. Regret none of it, not one of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing, when the lights from the carnival rides were the only stars you believed in, loving them for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved. You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake, ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied of expectation. Relax. Don’t bother remembering any of it. Let’s stop here, under the lit sign on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.” — Antilamentation, by Dorianne Laux

• “You don’t have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don’t have to explain what you plan to do with your life. You don’t have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don’t have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history or economics or science or the arts. You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that’s all.”

— Dear Sugar, The Rumpus

• “I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can.”

— Neil Gaiman

• “The whole world is you.

Yet you keep thinking there is something else.” — Hsueh-Feng

• “The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it — basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.”

— Charles Bukowski