• "He who has a why to live can bear almost any how."

Friedrich Nietzsche

• "There is always something left to love."

Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

• "Deep rivers run quiet."

Haruki Murakami

• "My life is not an apology, but a life. It is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

• "I am rooted, but I flow."

Virginia Woolf, The Waves

• "The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea."

Vladimir Nabokov

• "If a person seems wicked, do not cast him away. Awaken him with your words, elevate him with your deeds, repay his injury with your kindness. Do not cast him away; cast away his wickedness."

Lao Tzu

• "Women have always been healers. They were the unlicensed doctors and anatomists of Western history. They were abortionists, nurses, and counselors. They were pharmacists, cultivating healing herbs and exchanging secrets of their uses. They were midwives, travelling from home to home and village to village. For centuries women were doctors without degrees, barred from books and lectures, learning from each other, and passing on experience from neighbor to neighbor and mother to daughter. They were called “wise women” by the people, witches or charlatans by the authorities. Medicine is part of our heritage as women, our history, our birthright."

Barbara Ehrenreich & Deirdre English, Witches Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers

• "I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow; but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing."

Agatha Christie

• "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. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough."

Ernest Hemingway

• "I can change, whittle my square edges to fit in a round hole. God, I hope I’m never going to massacre myself that way."

Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

• "One resolution I have made, and try always to keep, is this: ‘To rise above little things’."

John Burrough

• "If you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone."

Richard Yates

• "To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the 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 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, The Cost of Living

• "To me, a wicked man who is also eloquent/ Seems the most guilty of them all. He’ll cut your throat/ As bold as brass, because he knows he can dress up murder/ In handsome words."

Medea, from Euripides

• "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you."

Friedrich Nietzsche

• "Sometimes I see something so moving I know I’m not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave."

Don DeLillo, Underworld

• "I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness."

Simone Weil

• "Sometimes people think they know you. They know a few facts about you, and they piece you together in a way that makes sense to them. And if you don’t know yourself very well, you might even believe that they are right. But the truth is, that isn’t you. That isn’t you at all."

Leila Sales, This Song Will Save Your Life

• "Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."

Rainer Maria Rilke

• "Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them."

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

• "But a chair, sunlight, flowers: these are not to be dismissed. I am alive, I live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight."

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

• "And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good."

John Steinbeck, from East of Eden

• "Between my sleeping and dreaming,/ Between me and the one in me/ Who I suppose I am,/ A river flows without end."

Fernando Pessoa, “30 August 1933,” A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe

• "There is a globe welling up inside of me./ Mountain ranges ridging my skin,/ oceans filling my mouth. If I stay still/ long enough, I could become my own world."

Catherine Pierce, “Because I’ll Never Swim in Every Ocean”

• "The world is changed by your example, not your opinion."

Paulo Coelho

• "Are we living a life that is safe from harm? Of course not. We never are. But that’s not the right question. The question is: are we living a life that is worth the harm?"

Welcome To Night Vale

• I asked the poet Tony Hoagland what he thought about fear. He said fear was the ghost of an experience: we fear the reoccurrence of a pain we once felt, and in this way fear is like a hangover. The memory of our pain is a pain unto itself, and thus feeds our fear like a foyer with mirrors on both sides. And then he quoted Auden: “And ghosts must do again / What gives them pain.”

Mary Ruefle, Madness Rack, and Honey

• "I don’t think existence wants you to be serious. I have not seen a serious tree. I have not seen a serious bird. I have not seen a serious sunrise. I have not seen a serious starry night. It seems they are all laughing in their own ways, dancing in their own ways. We may not understand it, but there is a subtle feeling that the whole existence is a celebration."

Osho

• "Oh we’re a mess, poor humans, poor flesh—hybrids of angels and animals, dolls with diamonds stuffed inside them. We’ve been to the moon and we’re still fighting over Jerusalem. Let me tell you what I do know: I am more than one thing, and not all of those things are good. The truth is complicated. It’s two-toned, multi-vocal, bittersweet. I used to think that if I dug deep enough to discover something sad and ugly, I’d know it was something true. Now I’m trying to dig deeper."

Richard Siken, Spork Editor’s Pages: Black Telephone

• "We know what we are, but know not what we may be."

William Shakespeare, Hamlet

• Zandile,/ you do not need saving/ only reminding of who you are."

Tapiwa Mugabe, Zimbabwe