all the dragons in our lives

are perhaps princesses

expecting us to be handsome and brave

all the terrifying things

are perhaps nothing

but helpless things

waiting for us to help them

(Jean-Luc Godard, originated from Rainer Maria Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet #8")

"It doesn't happen all at once,' said the Skin Horse. 'You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.” (Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit)

"I've always envied those people who sleep easily. Their brains must be cleaner, the floorboards of their skull well swept, and all the little monsters are closed up in a steamer trunk at the foot of the bed." (David Benioff)

"Do you think god stays in heaven because he, too, lives in fear of what he's created?" (Steve Buscemi, Spy Kids II: The Island of Lost Dreams)

"You'll be fertilizer regardless, you might as well have interesting stories for the dirt."

"Offer a child a suitcase of sweets and they'll take it. Offer them all of time and space and they'll take that too. Which is why grownups were invented." (Doctor Who, Season 6 Episode 11: The God Complex)

"When a child first catches adults out — when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just — his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child’s world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing." (John Steinbeck, East of Eden)

“Like a magpie, I am a scavenger of shiny things: fairy tales, dead languages, weird folk beliefs, fascinating religions, and more.” (lips touch, laini taylor)

“Daughter of Eve from the far land of Spare Oom where eternal summer reigns around the bright city of War Drobe, how would it be if you came and had tea with me? (cs lewis)

"I want my music to sound like throwing yourself out of a tree, or off a tall building, or as if you’re being sucked down into the ocean and you can’t breathe. It’s something overwhelming and all-encompassing that fills you up, and you’re either going to explode with it, or you’re just going to disappear." (Florence Welch)

“The Church says: the body is a sin. Science says: the body is a machine. Advertising says: The body is a business. The Body says: I am a fiesta.” ― Eduardo Galeano, Walking Words

“Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.” — Chuck Klosterman, Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story

“He who does not answer the questions has passed the test.” — Franz Kafka

“Silence before being born, silence after death: life is nothing but noise between two unfathomable silences.” ― Isabel Allende, Paula

“Sitting there on the heather, on our planetary grain, I shrank from the abysses that opened up on every side, and in the future. The silent darkness, the featureless unknown, were more dread than all the terrors that imagination had mustered. Peering, the mind could see nothing sure, nothing in all human experience to be grasped as certain, except uncertainty itself; nothing but obscurity gendered by a thick haze of theories. Man’s science was a mere mist of numbers; his philosophy but a fog of words. His very perception of this rocky grain and all its wonders was but a shifting and a lying apparition. Even oneself, that seeming-central fact, was a mere phantom, so deceptive, that the most honest of men must question his own honesty, so insubstantial that he must even doubt his very existence.” ― Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker

When I heard the learn’d astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

- Walt Whitman, When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer

You are my sun, my moon, and all of my stars.

-E.E. Cummings

I would rather die of passion than boredom.

-Vincent Van Gogh

take your journals and paintings across the ocean when you leave these will remind you who you are when you get lost amid new cities they will also remind your children you had an entire life before them

excerpt from 'advice i would've given my mother on her wedding day' -rupi kaur

i saw a man pursuing the horizon; round and round they sped. i was disturbed at this; i accosted the man. "it is futile," i said, "you can never---"

"you lie" he cried, and ran on.

i love unmade beds. i love when people are drunk and crying and cannot be anything but honest in that moment. i love the look in people's eyes when they realize they're in love. i love the way people look when they first wake up and they've forgotten their surroundings. i love the gasp people take when their favorite character dies. i love when people close their eyes and drift to somewhere in the clouds. i fall in love with people and their honest moments all the time. i fall in love with their breakdowns and their smeared makeup and their daydreams. honesty is just too beautiful to ever put into words.

love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. if you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. but in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. it will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, iredeemable. to love is to be vulnerable.

-c.s. lewis

i'm restless. things are calling me away. my hair is being pulled by the stars again.

-anais nin

"the best way to know life is to love many things"

-vincent van gogh

normality is a paved road. it's comfortable to walk on but no flowers grow on it.

-vincent van gogh

just lie down on the sidewalk with your tongue against the concrete till the whole world dissolves like an uncoated pill

one day you'll be face to face with whatever saw fit to let you exist in the universe and you'll have to justify the space you've filled

i am sorry this world could not keep you safe may your journey home be a soft and peaceful one

13/11/15- rupi kaur

“When he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.” 
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite.” 
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“Good night, good night! parting is such sweet sorrow, 
That I shall say good night till it be morrow.” 
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“the body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project” – simone de Beauvoir

Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss." - Joan Didion