• "Identity is an ever-unfinished conversation."

Stuart Hall

• "If you want to kill yourself, kill what you don’t like. I had an old self that I killed. You can kill yourself too, but that doesn’t mean you got to stop living."

Vargus, Archie’s Final Project

• "We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger."

T. S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party

• "I’m being unnecessarily brutal, you say. Too blunt, too graphic. You want things to go on the way they are and yet you don’t like this future./ You don’t like this future? Switch it off. Order another."

Margaret Atwood, from Good Bones & Simple Murders

• "If we affirm one moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence. For nothing is self-sufficient, neither in us ourselves nor in things; and if our soul has trembled with happiness and sounded like a harp string just once, all eternity was needed to produce this one event—and in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed."

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

• "Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid."

Frederick Buechner

• "You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen."

Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

• "I know now, after fifty years, that the finding/losing, forgetting/remembering, leaving/returning, never stops. The whole of life is about another chance, and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance."

Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

• "I don’t pay attention to the world ending. It has ended for me many times and began again in the morning."

Nayyirah Wahee

• "Something in me will save me from utter ruin no matter what comes."

Tennessee Williams, Notebooks

• "But there’s something in me that just keeps going on. I think it has something to do with tomorrow, that there is always one, and that everything can change when it comes."

Augusten Burrough

• "When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it."

Henry Ford

• "be easy. take your time. you are coming home to yourself."

nayyirah waheed, the becoming | wing

• "Will I be something? Am I something? And the answer comes: You already are. You always were. And you still have time to be."

Anis Mojgani

• "No one warns you about the amount of mourning in growth."

Té V. Smith Releasing & Receiving

• "A flower does not think of competing to the flower next to it. It just blooms."

Zen Shin Talks

• "Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows."

Emil Cioran

• "Among other things,/ thanks for explaining/ how the generous death/ of old trees/ forms/ the red powdered floor/ of the forest."

Dorothea Grossman, “For Allen Ginsberg

• "still, a great deal of light falls on everything."

vincent van gogh, in a letter to his brother

• "There’s an opposite to déjà vu. They call it jamais vu. It’s when you meet the same people or visit places, again and again, but each time is the first. Everybody is always a stranger. Nothing is ever familiar."

Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

• "Just keep going. No feeling is final."

Rainer Maria Rilke, from “Go to the Limits of Your Longing,” trans. Joanna Macy & Anita Barrows

• "You listen and you know / you could live a better life than you do, be / softer, kinder. And maybe this year you will / be able to do it."

Mary Oliver, from New and Selected Poems, Vol. Two

• "Once I witnessed a windstorm so severe two 100-year-old trees were uprooted on the spot. The next day, walking among the wreckage, I found the friable nests of birds, completely intact and unharmed on the ground. That the featherweight survive the massive, that this reversal of fortune takes place among us—that is what haunts me. I don’t know what it means."

Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey

• "But I’m dizzy./ I don’t know if I’m seeing or if I’m sleeping,/ If I am who I was,/ If I’m remembering or if I’m forgetting./ Something hazily flows/ Between who I am and what I was,/ And it’s like a river, or a breeze, or a dreaming"

Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems

• "I have cultivated several personalities within myself. I constantly cultivate personalities."

Fernando Pessoa, from The Book of Disquiet

• "The humiliation I go through/ when I think of my past/ can only be described as grace./ We are created by being destroyed."

Franz Wright, from ‘Letter’

• Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it every minute."

Franz Kafka, 1912 diary entry