- ― Franz Kafka
- "A girl expecting rescue never learns to save herself."
- "A man will steal your car or burn your house down or beat the shit out of you, but a woman will ruin your fucking life. A man will cut your arm off and throw it in a river, but he'll leave you, as a human being, intact. He won't fuck with who you are. Women are nonviolent but they will shit inside your heart." Louis C.K.: Chewed Up
- "After you find out all the things that can go wrong, your life become less about living and more about waiting. For cancer. For dementia. Every look in a mirror, you scan for the red rash that means shingles." (Chuck Palahniuk, Choke)
- "Age isn't how old you are but how old you feel." (Gabriel García Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores)
- "All fiction you can feel is real."
- "All my life I've felt like somebody's wife, or mother, or daughter. Even when we were together I never knew who I was. That's why I had to go away." (Kramer vs. Kramer)
- "America for business. France for love." (Populaire)
- "Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first one who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior." (J.D Salinger)
- "And I can't help but to run my fingers down your spine like you are my favorite book. But I still cannot read you, you are your own language. Your pages are tired and torn, but I want you, I want it all." (Michelle K, Like a Book)
- "And it's funny how when somebody saves you, the first thing you want to do is save other people. All other people. Everybody." (Chuck Palahniuk, Choke)
- "Being desperate can be wonderful if you can bear it. Desperate people expect nothing. That's usually when the best stuff appears." (Madrid, 1987)
- "Both of us grew and changed together. But that's also the hard part, growing without growing apart, changing without scaring the other person." (Her)
- "Don't let yourself die without knowing the wonder of fucking with love." (Gabriel García Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores)
- "Drowning people sometimes die fighting their rescuers."
- "Então que importância tinha, perguntou a si mesma, seguindo para a Bond Street, que importância tinha se inevitavelmente deixaria de existir; se tudo isso iria continuar sem ela; ressentia-se com aquilo, ou não seria um consolo crer que a morte era o fim absoluto?" (Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway)
- "Every day I discover more and more beautiful things. It’s enough to drive one mad. I have such a desire to do everything, my head is bursting with it." (Claude Monet)
- "Every little bit helps. But it helps so little."
- "Everything that comes together falls apart."
- "For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you." — Neil deGrasse Tyson
- "For what it’s worth: it’s never too late to be whoever you want to be. I hope you live a life you’re proud of, and if you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again." — F. Scott Fitzgerald
- "Go somewhere. Think about it."
- "Had I told the sea what I felt for you, it would have left its shores, its shells, its fish, and followed me." (Nizar Qabbani)
- "He looked at me like I was crazy. Most of my lovers do, and that’s partly why they love me, and partly why they leave." (Jeanette Winterso)
- "He was a few medications away from falling completely apart."
- "Her sentences were icebergs, with just the tip of her thought coming out of her mouth, and the rest kept up in her head, which I was starting to think was more and more beautiful the longer I looked at her." (Gregory Galloway)
- "Her soul felt like a tomato that had been left at the bottom of the fridge for four months. Black, reeking, rotting. One touch and it would collapse. It sat at her center, infecting her entire being with filth." (Marian Keyes, This Charming Man)
- "How many times can everybody tell you that you are the oppressive, prejudiced enemy before you give up and become the enemy?" (Chuck Palahniuk, Choke)
- "How sweet it must be to feel all the pain at once, then never again."
- "I always had understood that dying of love was mere poetic license. That afternoon, back home again without the cat and without her, I proved that it was not only possible to but that I myself, an old man without anyone, was dying of love. But I also realized that the contrary was true as well: I would not have traded the delights of my suffering for anything in the world." (Gabriel García Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores)
- "I am going for a long walk." (Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar)
- "I am mine before I am ever anyone else's."
- "I am not a graceful person. I am not a Sunday morning or a Friday sunset. I am a Tuesday 2am, I am gunshots muffled by a few city blocks, I am a broken window during February."
- "I am not afraid of storms for I am learning how to sail my ship." (Louisa May Alcott)
- "I am, at least, the master of my own downfall."
- "I don't like standard beauty. There is no beauty without strangeness." (Karl Lagerfeld)
- "I don't want to go where I am going, I just want to leave where I am."
- "I felt dreadfully inadequate. The trouble was, I had been inadequated all along, I simply hadn't thought about it." (Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar)
- "I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like the date on a tombstone." (Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar)
- "I felt very silly and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo." (Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar)
- "I pressed my lips against his ear and whispered again, It's not your fault. Perhaps this was really the only thing I had ever wanted to say to anyone, and be told." (Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You)
- "I thought at the time that I couldn't be horrified anymore, or wounded. I suppose that's a common conceit, that you've already been so damaged that damage itself, in its totality, makes you safe." (Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin)
- "I wanted so badly to lie down next to her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together, in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane." (Looking for Alaska, John Green)
- "I wanted to crawl into her chest and kiss everything that she’d thought I’d hate."
- "I was lost then and I am lost now, and I doubt I'll ever know which way to go."
- "I wasn't sure whether I liked her, and I doubted whether I could trust her, but I cared at least enough to try to find out." (John Green, Looking for Alaska)
- "I will love you until all the codes and hearts have been broken and until every anagram and egg has been unscrambled." (Lemony Snicket, The Beatrice Letters)
- "I would save the receptionist."
- "If I could translate the badness in my head into physical pain, you would put a pillow over my face out of compassion. I mean that if I was a dog, you would shoot me." (Marian Keyes, The Mystery Of Mercy Close)
- "If love did not exist I would be so goddamn sane."
- "If you can't fall in love in San Francisco you can't fall in love anywhere." (Blue Jasmine)
- "I'll never forget that night when none of us said a single world."
- "I'm glad to have my disappointment, which is much better than having nothing."
- "I'm not so much a good friend as I am the doctor who wants to adjust your spine every week. Or the dealer who sells you heroin. [...] I'm not so much a good friend as I am the savior who wants you to worship him forever. [...] I'm not so much a good friend as I am the parent who never wants you to really grow up." (Chuck Palahniuk, Choke)
- "Im scared you will realize I'm just bones and questions and leave me for something solid." (Clementine von Radics)
- "Is it me, is it you, or is it something in between?"
- "It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther." (Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar)
- "It was not so much, she would write in her journal, that she wanted to have sex with women, but she wanted to disappear inside of them forever. To hide." (The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold)
- "I've heard people say that suffering from depression is like being stalked by a big black dog. Or like being encased in a glass. It was different for me, I felt more like I'd been poisoned. Like my brain was squirting out dirty brown toxins, poluting everything - my vision and my taste buds and most of all my thoughts." (Marian Keyes, The Mistery Of Mercy Close)
- "Jealousy knows more than truth does." (Gabriel García Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores)
- "Like a shadow, I am and I am not." (Rumi)
- "Love isn’t soft, like those poets say. Love has teeth which bite and the wounds never close." (Stephen King)
- "Meriwether Lewis's last words were, 'I am not a coward, but I am so strong. So hard to die.' I don't doubt that it is, but it cannot be much harder than being left behind." (John Green, Looking for Alaska)
- "Morality, too, is a question of time." (Gabriel García Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores)
- "Music gets in the way. In movies it is like a traffic signal for the audience, so they know when to cry or when to be scared. I know exactly how I am supposed to feel right now." (Madrid, 1987)
- "My mother's eyes were oceans, and inside them there was loss." (The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold)
- "Nothing is more practical than finding God, that is, than falling in love in a quite absolute, final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you will do with your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, who you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything." — Fr. Pedro Arrupe, S.J.
- "Only the broken will want to repair you."
- "Please leave the radio on with the sound turned down. Please leave me almost alone."
- "Poems never judge me for healing wrong." (Clementine von Radics)
- "Seeing and touching her in the flesh, she seemed less real to me than in my memory." (Gabriel García Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores)
- "Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it."
- "She was the still point of a turning world. I never got over that girl. Never." (The Virgin Suicides)
- "Sitting here in traffic, my heart would beat at a regular speed. I am not alone. Trapped here, I could just be a normal person headed home to a wife, kids, a house. I could pretend that my life was more than just waiting for the next disaster. That I knew how to function. The way other kids would play house, I could play the commuter." (Chuck Palahniuk, Choke)
- "Sometimes I think I have felt everything I'm ever gonna feel. And from here on out, I'm not gonna feel anything new. Just lesser versions of what I've already felt." (Her)
- "Sorrow is like smoking: it is enjoyable at first, romantic and makes you seem mysterious and intelligent. However, it is ravenously addictive and will repel the people around you. Over time, it consumes you and proceeds to rot you from the inside out."
- "Starting over isn't crazy. Crazy is being miserable and walking around half-asleep, numb, day after day after day. Crazy is pretending to be happy, pretending that the way things are is the way they have to be for the rest of your bleeding life."
- "Strange as it may seem, I still hope for the best, even though the best, like an interesting piece of mail, so rarely arrives, and even when it does it can be lost so easily." (Lemony Snicket, The Beatrice Letters)
- "Thanks to her I confronted my inner self for the first time as my ninetieth year went by. I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature. I discovered that I am not disciplined out of virtue but as a reaction to my negligence, that I appear generous in order to conceal my meanness, that I pass myself off as prudent because I am evil-minded, that I am conciliatory in order not to succumb to my repressed rage, that I am punctual only to hide how little I care about other people's time. I learned, in short, that love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac." (Gabriel García Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores)
- "That is the fear. I have lost something important, and I cannot find it, and I need it. It is fear like if someone lost his glasses and went to the glasses store and they told him that the world had run out of glasses and he would just have to do without." (John Green, Looking for Alaska)
- "That's what we are, two castaways. I am a dead body washed up on the beach and you are still swimming, desperately trying to get hold of something. You are young and still think there is something out there, floating, that resembles dreams. And there isn't. This is it." (Madrid, 1987)
- "The driver warned me: Be careful, scholar, they kill in that house. I replied: If it's for love it doesn't matter." (Gabriel García Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores)
- "The heart is not like a box that gets filled up. It expands in size the more you love." (Her)
- "The invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy, love." (Gabriel García Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores)
- "The next time that you feel really good, just keep feeling that way for the rest of your life."
- "The only definitive thing is death." (Gabriel García Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores)
- "The only way we felt close to the girls was through these impossible excursions which have scared us forever, making us happier with dreams than wives." (The Virgin Suicides)
- "The same thing happened over and over: I would catch sight of some flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn't do at all." (Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar)
- "The sensation of falling into the past is not unlike that of coming home for the holidays."
- "The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence. I knew perfectly well the cars were making a noise, and the people in them and behind the lit windows of the buildings were making a noise, and the river was making a noise, but I couldn't hear a thing. The city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all for the good it did me." (Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar)
- "The truth is, most of us discover where we are heading when we arrive." (Calvin and Hobbes)
- "The world is a book and those who don't travel only read a page." (St. Augustine)
- "There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars." — Jack Kerouac
- "Those who do not sing cannot even imagine the joy of singing." (Gabriel García Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores)
- "Though it may be more romantic to picture the bereaved as gaunt, I imagine you can grieve as efficiently with chocolates as with tap water." (Lionel Shriver, We Need To Talk About Kevin)
- "We knew that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was to create the noise that fascinated them. They knew everything about us, but we couldn't fathom them at all." (The Virgin Suicides)
- "We lose ourselves in the things we love. We find ourselves there, too"
- "Weird love's better than no love at all." (Stephen King)
- "What are we, if not an accumulation of our memories?" (S. J. Watson, Before I Go To Sleep)
- "What was wrong was never understood, and what was right never lasted." (Bukowski)
- "What you are comes to you."
- "Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will." (Cheryl Strayed)
- "When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else." (Margaret Atwood)
- "Wherever I sat - on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air." (Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar)
- "You and I were just destined to cross paths. Each on a track, headed in opposite directions." (Madrid, 1987)
- "You are at once both the quiet and confusion of my heart." (Franz Kafka)
- "You are here. All that was lost is now found."
- "You know, most people will never taste that kind of love. At least I tasted it once." (The Virgin Suicides)
- "You shall love your crooked neighbour / with your crooked heart." (W. H. Auden)
- "Your 20’s are your ‘selfish’ years. It’s a decade to immerse yourself in every single thing possible. Be selfish with your time, and all the aspects of you. Tinker with shit, travel, explore, love a lot, love a little, and never touch the ground." — Kyoko Escamilla
- "Your body is not a temple. Your body is the house you grew up in. How dare you try to burn it to the ground?" (Sierra DeMulder)
- "You're not old enough to know how bad life gets." (The Virgin Suicides)
- “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” —Banksy
- “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.”
- “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
- “I read once that the ancient Egyptians had fifty words for sand & the Eskimos had a hundred words for snow. I wish I had a thousand words for love, but all that comes to mind is the way you move against me while you sleep & there are no words for that.” ― Brian Andreas, Story People: Selected Stories & Drawings of Brian Andreas
- “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
- “It wasn’t my day. My week. My month. My year. My life. God damn it.” ― Charles Bukowski, Pulp
- “Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I’m not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you’ve felt that way.” — Charles Bukowski
- “Why didn’t I learn to treat everything like it was the last time? My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future.” — Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
- •"I just try to cheer people up," said Bonnie. "If that's a crime, I never heard about it till now. I'll stop saying it from now on. I beg your pardon. I did not mean to give offense."
- •"I've lost my way," said Dwayne. "I need somebody to take me by the hand and lead me out of the woods."
- •"Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery."
- •"The painting did not exist until I made it," Karabekian went on. "Now that it does exist, nothing would make me happier than to have it reproduced again and again, and vastly improved upon, by all five-year-olds in town. I would love for your children to find pleasantly and playfully what it took me many angry years to find."
- •"You have no use for truth?" said Beatrice. "You know what truth is?", said Karabekian. "It's some crazy thing my neighbor believes. If I want to make friends with him, I'll ask what he believes. He tells me, and I say, 'Yeah, yeah - ain't it the truth?'"
- •"You're tired," she said. "Why wouldn't you be tired? You work so hard. I feel sorry for men, they work so hard. You want to sleep for a while?"
- •Abe Cohen, the jeweler, said to Karabekian, "If artists would explain more, people would like art more. You realize that?"
- •All loose things seem to drift down to the sea, and so did I. (Louis L'Amour)
- •As three unwavering bands of light, we were simple and separate and beautiful. As machines, we were flabby bags of ancient plumbing and wiring, of rust hinges and feeble springs. And our interrelationships were Byzantine.
- •Don't beat yourself up for not knowing all the answers. You don't always have to know who you are. You don't have to have the big picture, or know where you're heading. Sometimes it's enough just to know what you're going to do next. (Undomestic Goddess)
- •If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead. It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done.
- •It's so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world. (Paper Towns)
- •Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done.
- •The more you know who you are, and what you want, the less you let things upset you. (Lost in Translation)
- •The proper ending for any story about people it seems to me, since life is now a polymer in which the earth is wrapper so tightly, should be that same abbreviation, which I now write large because I feel like it, which is this one: ETC.
- •What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well. (Antoine de Saint Exupery)
- •When you feel like giving up, remember why you held on so long in the first place. (Jared Leto)
- •You don't have to test everything to destruction just to see if you made it right. (Good Omens)
- A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. -Franz Kafka
- courage doesn't always roar. sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, "i will try again tomorrow."
- Disturb us, Lord -Francis Drake
- Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly, To venture on wilder seas Where storms will show Your mastery; Where losing sight of land, We shall find the stars.
- Disturb us, Lord, when We are too pleased with ourselves, When our dreams have come true Because we dreamed too little, When we arrived safely Because we sailed too close to the shore.
- Disturb us, Lord, when With the abundance of things we possess We have lost our thirst For the waters of life; Having fallen in love with life, We have ceased to dream of eternity And in our efforts to build a new earth, We have allowed our vision Of the new Heaven to dim.
- Franz Kafka
- http://capecott.tumblr.com/tagged/poem
- http://gabrielgadfly.com/poetry/the-lily-and-the-rug
- http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/1742.Jack_Kerouac
- I saw that sign," said Dwayne, "and I couldn't help wondering if that was what God put me on earth for - to find out how much a man could take without breaking."
- It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.
- Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness.
- The cure for anything is salt water - sweat, tears, or the sea. Isak Dinesen
- The Uses of Sorrow (In my sleep I dreamed this poem)
- We ask you to push back The horizons of our hopes; And to push back the future In strength, courage, hope, and love.
dec 15 2013 ∞
feb 4 2014 +