these are quotes i have found all over.

“In fact, it has been remarked by some that Hobbits' only real passion is for food. A rather unfair observation, as we have also developed a keen interest in the brewing of ales and the smoking of pipe-weed. But where our hearts truly lie is in peace and quiet and good, tilled earth. For all hobbits share a love for things that grow. And, yes, no doubt to others, our ways seem quaint. But today of all days, it is brought home to me: It is no bad thing to celebrate a simple life.” – Bilbo Baggins

"Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men." - John F. Kennedy

"We could learn a lot from Crayons: some are sharp, some are pretty, some are dull, while others bright, some have weird names, but we have to learn how to live in the same box."

I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions. -- augusten burroughs

With our thoughts we make the world. -- Buddha: Siddhartha Gautama

No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks. -- Mary Wollstonecraft

Once the game is over, the king and the pawn go back in the same box. -- Italian proverb

They are always watching, always listening, recording everything. so i sing into the phone sometimes. maybe it cheers them up. -- asofterworld

I don't know where the artificial stops and the real starts. -- Andy Warhol

"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast" - Oscar Wilde (An Ideal Husband)

"Dreams are not that what you see in your sleep. Dreams are the things that do not allow you to sleep."

The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point however is to change it. - karl marx

"Maybe we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret weapon. A happiness weapon. A beauty bomb. And every time a crisis developed, we would launch one. It would explode high in the air - explode softly - and send thousands, millions, of little parachutes into the air. Floating down to earth - boxes of Crayolas. And people would smile and get a little funny look on their faces and cover the world with imagination."

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

In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit. -Albert Schweitzer

"Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share." — Mark Z. Danielewski (House of Leaves)

"I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him." -Booker T. Washington

"Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive." -Howard Thurman

"Fear less, hope more; / Whine less, breathe more; / Talk less, say more; / Hate less, love more; / And all good things are yours." --Swedish Proverb

"Happiness isn't good enough for me! I demand euphoria!" -Calvin (Calvin & Hobbes),

"The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up." -Paul Valery

"May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half-truths, and superficial relationships, so that you may live deep within your heart. May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that you may work for justice, freedom, and peace. May God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, and starvation, so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and to turn their pain into joy. And may God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in this world, so that you can do what others claim cannot be done." -Franciscan Blessing

the trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.

"perhaps the feelings that we experience when we are in love represent a normal state. being in love shows a person who he should be." -anton chekov

"Killing under the cloak of war is no different than murder." -Albert Einstein

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle." - Plato

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage. "-Anais Nin

"Love - real love, is loving someone when it’s hard, when they don’t deserve it, when they’ve hurt you in the worst way." - René Garcia

Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt. - shakespeare

"May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. 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. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself". Neil Gaiman

"Go be that starving artist you're afraid to be. Open up that journal and get poetic finally. Volunteer. Suck it up and travel. You were not born here to work and pay taxes. You were put here to be a part of a vast organism to explore and create. Stop putting it off. the world has much to offer than what's on 15 televisions at TGI fridays. Take pictures. Scare people. Shake up the scene." - Jason Mraz

"People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown." - Chuck Palahniuk

"What I want is to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction." - Chuck Palahniuk

the more you read and the more you teach yourself, the less you rely on something like drugs to take you to a better place -peter doherty

the poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman -wallace stevens

people should fall in love with their eyes closed -andy warhol

i don’t hate people, i just feel better when they aren’t around -charles bukowski

fashion is what you adopt when you don’t know who you are -quentin crisp

the world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think -horace walpole

i generally am a lazy bastard who wants to get the job done as fast as possible just to be able to be lazy again -gert wiescher

we all die. the goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will -chuck palahniuk

imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring. -marilyn monroe

you’re not a kid anymore. you have the right to choose your own life. you can start again. if you want a cat, all you have to do is choose a life in which you can have a cat. it’s simple. it’s your right. -haruki murakami, the wind-up bird chronicle

i love you also means i love you more than anyone loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, i love you in a way that no one loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, i love you in a way that i love no one else, and never have loved anyone else, and never will love anyone else. -jonathan safran foer, everything is illuminated

style is knowing who you are, what you want to say and not giving a damn -gore vidal

the idea of waiting for something makes it more exciting. -andy warhol

you’re missing out. you know, when it works, love is pretty amazing. it’s not overrated. there’s a reason for all those songs. -sarah dessen

the truth is, everybody is going to hurt you, you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for -bob marley

“I have missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take the game winning shot and missed. And I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why, I succeed.”- Michael Jordan

“ We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations. — Anaïs Nin

To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer. To suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy then is to suffer. But suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be unhappy one must love, or love to suffer, or suffer from too much happiness. I hope you're getting this down.(Woody Allen)

We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, "O me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless... of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life? Answer. That you are here - that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse." That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

To scream at the top of their lungs in horrified hellish rage every morning at daybreak to warn us all of the truth. They know the truth. Screaming bloody murder all over the world in our ears, but sadly we don't speak bird.

When you're attracted to someone, it just means that your subconscious is attracted to their subconscious, subconsciously. So what we think of as fate is just two neuroses knowing that they are a perfect match.

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.” (Neil Gaiman)

The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open. -- Chuck Palahniuk

We women are expected to love our children as soon as they leave our bodies, but who among us has not felt disappointment at the sight of a daughter or felt the dark gloom that settles upon the mind even when holding a precious son, if he does nothing but cry and makes your mother-in-law look at you as though your milk were sour? We may love our daughters with all our hearts, but we must train them through pain. We love our sons most of all, but we can never be a part of their world, the outer realm of men. We are expected to love our husbands from the day of Contracting a Kin, though we will not see their faces for another six years. We are told to love our in-laws, but we enter those families as strangers, as the lowest person in the household, just one step on the ladder above a servant. We are ordered to love and honor our husbands’ ancestors, so we perform the proper duties, even if our hearts quietly call out gratitude to our natal ancestors. We love our parents because they take care of us, but we are considered worthless branches on the family tree. We drain the family resources. We are raised by one family for another. As happy as we are in our natal families, we all know that parting is inevitable. So we love our families, but we understand that this love will end in the sadness of departure. All these types of love come out of duty, respect, and gratitude. Most of them, as the women in my country know, are sources of sadness, rupture and brutality. (Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Lisa See)

Didn’t you know? Imagination is the politics of dreams; imagination turns every word into a bottle rocket. Adrian, imagine every day is Independence Day and save us from traveling the river changed; save us from hitchhiking the long road home. Imagine an escape. Imagine that your own shadow on the wall is a perfect door. Imagine a song stronger than penicillin. Imagine a spring with water that mends broken bones. Imagine a drum which wraps itself around your heart. Imagine a story that puts wood in the fireplace. (The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven)

You forget all of it anyway. First, you forget everything you learned--the dates of the Hay-Herran Treaty and the Pythagorean theorem. You especially forget everything you didn't really learn, but just memorized the night before. You forget the names of all but one or two of your teachers, and eventually you'll forget those, too. You forget your junior year class schedule and where you used to sit and your best friend's home phone number and the lyrics to that song you must have played a million times. For me, it was something by Simon & Garfunkel. Who knows what it will be for you? And eventually, but slowly, oh so slowly, you forget your humiliations--even the ones that seemed indelible just fade away. You forget who was cool and who was not, who was pretty, smart, athletic, and not. Who went to a good college. Who threw the best parties. Who could get you pot. You forget all of them. Even the ones you said you loved, and even the ones you actually did. They're the last to go. And then once you've forgotten enough, you love someone else. (Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac, Gabrielle Zevin)

I went into the desert to forget about you. But the sand was the color of your hair. The desert sky was the color of your eyes. There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you. (Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides)

The bird with a torn in its breast, it follows an immutable law; it is driven by it knows not what to impale itself, and die singing. At the very instant the thorn enters there is no awareness in it of the dying to come; it simply sings and sings until there is not the life left to utter another note. But we, when we put the thorns in our breasts, we know. We understand. And still we do it. Still we do it. (The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCullough)

"Without ice cream, there would be darkness and chaos." -Don Kardong

"The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others." -Vincent Van Gogh

"Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable, let's prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself and see if we may not eff it after all."

“everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. ” - leo tolstoy

Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.

i would rather watch somebody buy their underwear than read a book they wrote

"Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves."

"The so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.... The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness--awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: 'This is water, this is water.'" -David Foster Wallace

"The only dream worth having … is to dream that you will live while you’re alive and die only when you’re dead … To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or to complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget." -Arundhati Roy

"I like to see people reunited, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can't tell fast enough, the ears that aren't big enough, the eyes that can't take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone." -Jonathan Safran Foer

“People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.” -Milan Kundera

"Who knows how to make love stay? Tell love you are going to Junior's Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if loves stays, it can have half. It will stay.

"Just because you're naked doesn't mean you're sexy. Just because you're cynical doesn't mean you're cool." -Tom Robbins

"If you believe in peace, act peacefully; if you believe in love, acting lovingly; if you believe every which way, then act every which way, that's perfectly valid - but don't go out trying to sell your beliefs to the system. You end up contradicting what you profess to believe in, and you set a bum example. If you want to change the world, change yourself." -Tom Robbins

"There are only two mantras, yum and yuck, mine is yum." -Tom Robbins

"Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion -- these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated." -David Foster Wallace

"Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness." -David Foster Wallace

"Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer." -Barbara Kingsolver

"'Here's what I think, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,' said May Kasahara. 'Everybody's born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I'd really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person. But I can't seem to do it. They just don't get it. Of course, the problem could be that I'm not explaining it very well, but I think it's because they're not listening very well. They pretend to be listening, but they're not, really. So I get worked up sometimes, and I do some crazy things.'" -Haruki Murakami

"But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o'clock in the morning." -Haruki Murakami

"There's a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do. It doesn't happen all the time. It's these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel unalone -- intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I'm in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don't with other art." -David Foster Wallace

“The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.” — Thomas Paine

“In the depths of winter I finally learned there was in me an invincible summer.” — Albert Camus

Whatever you do in life will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it. –Gandhi

"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing." - Benjamin Franklin

“You must write every single day of your life. You must lurk in libraries to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. May you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.” —Ray Bradbury

“Try to learn to breathe deeply; really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell.” —William Saroyan’s advice to young writers

“Too many people spend money they haven’t earned, to buy things they don’t want, to impress people they don’t like.” -Will Smith

"We can't all be heroes. Somebody has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by. –Will Rogers

“Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they have all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe.” —Neil Gaiman

“It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.” —Oscar Wilde

"No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hears tells them is not.” —Oscar Wilde

“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.” —Henry David Thoreau

"The world is a dangerous place. Not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing." -ALBERT EINSTEIN

"Art gives us the illusion of liberation from the sordid business of being." -FERNANDO PESSOA

"Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion." -JACK KEROUAC

"People take different roads seeking fulfillment and happiness. Just because they’re not on your road doesn’t mean they’ve gotten lost." -DALAI LAMA

"You pile up enough tomorrows and you’ll find you’re left with nothing but a lot of empty yesterdays. I don’t know about you but I’d like to make today worth remembering. -PROFESSOR HAROLD HILL, THE MUSIC MAN

"Today is your big moment. Moments, really. The life you’ve been waiting for is happening all around you. The scene unfolding right outside your window is worth more than the most beautiful painting, and the crackers and peanut butter that you’re having for lunch on the coffee table are as profound, in their own way, as the Last Supper. This is it. T his is life in all its glory, swirling and unfolding around us, disguised as pedantic, pedestrian non-events. But pull off the mask and you will find your life, waiting to be made, chosen, woven, crafted."

"Everyone feels that void. Everyone who has the balls to look inside themselves, anyway. It’s what life’s all about.. a search." -TIFFANIE DEBARTOLO

"People are lonely because they build walls instead of bridges." -JOSEPH F. NEWTON

"Many people lose the small joys in the hope for the big happiness." -PEARL S. BUCK

“I think it’s interesting the two drugs that are legal - alcohol and cigarettes, two drugs that do absolutely nothing for you at all - are legal, and the drugs that might open your mind up to realise how you’re being fucked every day of your life? Those drugs are against the law. Coincidence? See, I’m glad mushrooms are against the law, cos I took ‘em one time, you know what happened to me? I laid in a field of green grass for four hours, going, ‘My God, I love everything.’ Yeah, now if that isn’t a hazard to our countries…How are we gonna justify arms dealing if we know we’re all one?” —Bill Hicks

“Don’t do anything by half. If you love someone, love them with all your soul. When you go to work, work your ass off. When you hate someone, hate them until it hurts.” —Henry Rollins

“It is more fun to talk with someone who doesn’t use long, difficult words but rather short, easy words like ‘What about lunch?” —Winnie the Pooh

“They say drugs are not the answer, but really, what is the question?” —Janet Fitch, Paint It Black

“The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it.” —W. M. Lewis

“The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid of ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror” —Oscar Wilde

“What you feel only matters to you. It’s what you do to the people you say you love, that’s what matters.” —Tom Wilkinson

“I live in a world of fantasy so keep your reality away from me" -Itzah C. Kret

“I believe that the very purpose of our life is to seek happiness. That is clear. Whether one believes in religion or not, whether one believes in this religion or that religion, we all are seeking something better in life. So, I think, the very motion of our life is towards happiness.” —Dalai Lama

"The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once." - Albert Einstein

“It seems to me that any sensible person must see that violence does not change the world and if it does, then only temporarily.” -Martin Scorsese

“Try to realize it’s all within yourself, no one else can make you change. And to see you’re really only very small and life flows on within you and without you.” —George Harrison

“The first human being who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.” —Sigmund Freud