• "I'm still writing about you and you haven't read a word."
• “There are a million ways to bleed. But you are by far my favorite.”
• "When the world pushes you to your knees, you are in the perfect position to pray."
• "There is nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shore line, no matter how many times it is sent away."
• "I leave before being left. I decide."
• "I felt I was on fire with the things I could’ve told you. I just assumed you eventually would ask."
• “The heart will rest and feel relief if it is settled with Allah and it will worry and be anxious if it is settled with people.”
• “If a writer falls in love with you, you can never die.”
• "I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?"
• “The loneliest people are the kindest. The saddest people smile the brightest. The most damaged people are the wisest. All because they do not wish to see anyone else suffer the way they do.”
• “I couldn’t bear to think about it; and yet, somehow, I couldn’t think about nothing else.”
• “Thomas Edison’s last words were ‘It’s very beautiful over there.’ I don’t know where ‘there’ is, but I believe it’s somewhere, and I hope it’s beautiful."
• "Your life does not get better by chance, it gets better by change."
• "But who can remember pain once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind."
• “Writers aren’t exactly people. They’re a whole bunch of people trying to be one person.”
• "God gives and forgives, humans get and forget."
• “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.”
• “Things that matter are not easy. Feelings of happiness are easy. Happiness is not. Flirting is easy. Love is not. Saying you’re friends is easy. Being friends is not.”
• "Think of how many people have sat next to you on a bus, train, whatever. Now think how many people have sat next to you on purpose with their fingers crossed in hope that you’ll talk to them. I’m sure somebody has. There’s plenty of times when somebody’s seen you and hoped that you spoke to them, but you never did because you don’t have the guts and neither do they. Don’t go around thinking nobody likes you and that you’re not loved. There’s been plenty of times when a stranger has spotted you and thought “Oh, they’re just my type” but haven’t had the courage or confidence to open their mouth and initiate a conversation. The funny thing is, neither have you."
• "Isn’t it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?"
• "It’s like when someone says, ‘How are you?’ Do you say, ‘Well, my head hurts and I’m lonely and depressed and I’m worried about everything and the world is collapsing and full of evil’? Or do you say, ‘I’m fine’?"
• "I think the most common cause of insomnia is simple; it’s loneliness."
• "Things will get easier. People's minds will change. And you should be alive to see it."
• "Who lives sees, but who travels sees more."
• “No amount of guilt can change the past and no amount of worrying can change the future. Go easy on yourself for the outcome of all affairs is determined by Allah’s decree. If something is meant to go elsewhere, it will never come your way, but if it is yours by destiny, it cannot flee.”
• "If we magnified our successes as much as we magnify our disappointments, we'd all be much happier."
• "I have the deepest affection for intellectual conversations. The ability to just sit and talk. About love, about life, about anything, about everything. To sit under the moon with all the time in the world, the full-speed train that is our lives slowing to a crawl. Bound by no obligations, barred by no human limitations. To speak without regret or fear of consequence. To talk for hours and about what’s really important in life."
• “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable."
• "I don’t know what’s worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what you’ve always wanted to be, and feel alone."
• "If you wanna fly, you've got to give up the shit that weighs you down."
• "One of the cruelest things you can do to another person is pretend you care about them more than you really do."
• "You are the books you read the films you watch, the music you listen to, the people you meet, the dreams you have, the conversations you engage in. You are what you take from these. You are the sound of the ocean, the breath of fresh air, the brightest light and the darkest corner. You are a collective of every experience you have had in your life. You are every single second of every single day. So drown yourself in a sea of knowledge and existence. Let the words run through your veins and let the colours fill your mind."
• "Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time."
• "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."
• "I want to live in the deepest parts of your mind where all the bad thoughts are so I can stop them like a dreamcatcher before you can feel it."
• "Paper has more patience than people."
• "When you're traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road."
• “I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don’t know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness.”
• "Respect yourself enough to walk away from anything that no longer serves you, grows you, or makes you happy."
• “True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.”
• “Those whom God will use mightily, He wounds deeply.”
• "Life doesn’t give you the people you want. It gives you the people you need. To help you, to hurt you, to love you, to leave you, and to make you into the person you were meant to be."
• "The red washing down the bathtub can’t change the color of the sea at all."
• "The human body essentially recreates itself every six months. Nearly every cell of hair and skin and bone dies and another is directed to its former place. You are not who you were last February."
• "God gives His hardest battles to His toughest soldiers."
• "We tend to judge others by their behaviour and ourselves by our intentions."
• "I’ve learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way he handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights."
• “Perhaps we don’t like what we see: our hips, our loss of hair, our shoe size, our dimples, our knuckles too big, our eating habits, our disposition. We have disclosed these things in secret, likes and dislikes, behind doors with locks, our lonely rooms, our messy desks, our empty hearts, our sudden bursts of energy, our sudden bouts of depression. Don’t worry. Put away your mirrors and your beauty magazines and your books on tape. There is someone right here who knows you more than you do, who is making room on the couch, who is fixing a meal, who is putting on your favorite record, who is listening intently to what you have to say, who is standing there with you, face to face, hand to hand, eye to eye, mouth to mouth. There is no space left uncovered. This is where you belong.”
• "You know that one "friend" who only calls you when they need something? God has about 4 billion of those. Don't let it be you."
• “No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself.”
• “I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go, things go wrong so that you appreciate them when they're right, you believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself, and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.”
• “Be happy for no reason, like a child. If you are happy for a reason, you’re in trouble because that reason can be taken from you.”
• "You can’t live your life for other people. You’ve got to do what’s right for you, even if it hurts some people you love."
• "There is a crack in everything – that’s how the light gets in."
• "The most important thing in life is to stop saying ‘I wish’ and start saying ‘I will.’ Consider nothing impossible, then treat possiblities as probabilities."
• “Time is the great teacher. Unfortunately, it kills all of its students.”
• “We’re so self-important. So arrogant. Everybody’s going to save something now. Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save the snails. And the supreme arrogance? Save the planet! Are these people kidding? Save the planet? We don’t even know how to take care of ourselves; we haven’t learned how to care for one another. We’re gonna save the fuckin’ planet? … And, by the way, there’s nothing wrong with the planet in the first place. The planet is fine. The people are fucked! Compared with the people, the planet is doin’ great. It’s been here over four billion years … The planet isn’t goin’ anywhere, folks. We are! We’re goin’ away. Pack your shit, we’re goin’ away. And we won’t leave much of a trace. Thank God for that. Nothing left. Maybe a little Styrofoam. The planet will be here, and we’ll be gone. Another failed mutation; another closed-end biological mistake.”
• "The cure for anything is salt water - sweat, tears, or the sea."
• "I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can't accept not trying."
• “In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.”
• "There are so many people out there who will tell you that you can't. What you have to do is turn around and say 'Watch me"."
• “It was one of the best days of my life, a day during which I lived my life and didn't think about my life at all.”
• "I usually solve problems by letting them devour me."
• "Stop spending time with the wrong people. Life is too short to spend time with people who suck the happiness out of you. If someone wants you in their life, they’ll make room for you. You shouldn’t have to fight for a spot. Never, ever insist yourself to someone who continuously overlooks your worth. And remember, it’s not the people that stand by your side when you’re at your best, but the ones who stand beside you when you’re at your worst that are your true friends."
• "So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be.”
• “I've always envied people who sleep easily. Their brains must be cleaner, the floorboards of the skull well swept, all the little monsters closed up in a steamer trunk at the foot of the bed.”
• "I’ve got a bad case of the 3:00 A.M. guilts—you know, when you lie in bed awake and replay all those things you didn’t do right? Because, as we all know, nothing solves insomnia like a nice warm glass of regret, depression, and self-loathing. Okay, I don’t really hate myself. But I do piss myself off—quite a bit, actually—and sometimes I need a good, stern talking-to about important elements in my life."
• “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
• "'What are you?' 'To define is to limit.'"
• "Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared."
• "Astaghfirullah for my past. InshaAllah for my future. Alhamdulillah for today."
• "The human body is made of 72% pure water. This is why we feel so at ease in the sea. Our bodies call us to enter its realms, be sheltered by its refreshing hugs and smouldered by its wet kisses. Give in to the scent of salt, the scent of our souls."
• "The bravest thing I ever did was continuing my life when I wanted to die."
• “I’ll leave you with one final thought: no one ever lay on their deathbed and thought, “Damn, what a waste of a life. If only I’d been a size zero.”
• “In Austin, someone has scrawled on the bathroom wall of a cafe on Congress Street, “I don’t know if you or I exist, but somewhere there are poems about us.”
• "I just did some calculations and I've been able to determine that you're full of shit.”
• "I used to feel so alone in the city. All those gazillions of people and then me, on the outside. Because, how do you meet a new person? I was very stumped by this for many years. And then I realized, you could just say, “Hi.” They may ignore you. Or you may marry them. And that possibility is worth that one word."
• “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
• "I used to think the worst thing in life was to end up all alone. It’s not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel all alone."
• "They say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time."
• “If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are. Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.”
• "Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease."
• "Some people build fences to keep people out and other people build fences to keep people in."
• "'Things usually work out in the end.' 'What if they don’t?' 'That just means you haven’t come to the end yet.'"
• "Each second we live is a new and unique moment of the universe, a moment that will never be again. And what do we teach our children? We teach them that two and two make four and that Paris is the capital of France. When will we also teach them what they are? We should say to each of them: Do you know what you are? You are a marvel. You are unique. In all the years that have passed, there has never been another child like you. Your legs, your arms, the way you move. You may become a Shakespeare, a Michelangelo, a Beethoven. You have the capacity for anything. Yes, you are a marvel. And when you grow up, can you then harm another who is, like you, a marvel? You must work, we must all work, to make the world worthy of its children."
• "Things change. And friends leave. And life doesn’t stop for anybody."
• "Night time is really the best time to work. All the ideas are there to be yours because everyone else is asleep."
• “Do yourself a favor. Before it’s too late, without thinking too much about it first, pack a pillow and a blanket and see as much of the world as you can. You will not regret it. One day it will be too late."
• "Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee?"
• "You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that the future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.”
• "I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am, I am, I am."
• “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
• ”I think you could fall in love with anyone if you saw the parts of them that no one else gets to see. Like if you followed them around invisibly for a day and you saw them crying in their bed at night or singing to themselves as they make a sandwich or even just walking along the street and even if they were really weird and had no friends at school, I think after seeing them at their most vulnerable you wouldn’t be able to help falling in love with them.”
• "To be alive at all is to have scars."
• "I am so busy keeping my head above water that I scarcely know who I am, much less who anyone else is."
• "I don’t know if you’ve ever felt like that. That you wanted to sleep for a thousand years. Or just not exist. Or just not be aware that you do exist. Or something like that. I think wanting that is very morbid, but I want it when I get like this. That’s why I’m trying not to think. I just want it all to stop spinning."
• "Books have to be heavy because the whole world’s inside them."
• “Friendship is like a glass ornament, once it is broken it can rarely be put back together exactly the same way.”
• "Memories are what warm you up from the inside. But they’re also what tear you apart."
• "The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther."
• "You don’t need water to feel like you’re drowning, do you?"
• "To be nobody but yourself, in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you like everybody else, means to fight the hardest battle any human being can fight; and never stop fighting."
• "I felt a tremendous distance between me and everything real."
• “So, I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we’ll never know most of them. But even if we don’t have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there.”
• "What is your favorite word?” “And. It is so hopeful."
• "I think that if I ever have kids, and they are upset, I won't tell them that people are starving in China or anything like that because it wouldn't change the fact that they were upset. And even if somebody else has it much worse, that doesn't really change the fact that you have what you have."
• "Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you anywhere."
• "And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long."
• "I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it."
• "Songs are as sad as the listener.”
• "A photograph never grows old. You and I change, people change all through the months and years, but a photograph always remains the same. How nice to look at a photograph of mother or father taken many years ago! You see them as you remember them. But, as people live on, they change completely. That is why I think a photograph can be kind."
• “A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
• "Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living."
• "And I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means I survived."
• "The dead know only one thing: it is better to be alive."
• "I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."
• "One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful."
• "You know that point in your life when you realize the house you grew up in isn’t really your home anymore? All of a sudden even though you have some place where you put your shit, that idea of home is gone. You’ll see one day when you move out it just sort of happens one day and it’s gone. You feel like you can never get it back. It’s like you feel homesick for a place that doesn’t even exist."
• "If I had a flower for every time I thought of you, I could walk through my garden forever."
• “What becomes of words when they never find the eyes they were written for?”
• "I also hate people to ask cheerfully how you are when they know you’re feeling like hell and expect you to say ‘fine.'"
• "It’s better to burn out than to fade away."
• "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."
• "Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people."
• "The sign of intelligence is that you are constantly wondering. Idiots are always dead sure about every damn thing they are doing in their life."
• "I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once."
• "Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing."
• "No matter where I go, I still end up me. What’s missing never changes. The scenery may change, but I’m still the same incomplete person. The same missing elements torture me with a hunger that I can never satisfy. I think that lack itself is as close as I’ll come to defining myself."
• "Nobody really cares if you’re miserable, so you might as well be happy."
• "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."
• "People say hell is endless. They say it’s our worst nightmare, the face of our darkness. But whatever it is, however it is, I say hell is empty, and all the devils are here."
• "Forgive others, not because they deserve forgiveness, but because you deserve peace."
• “So many people enter and leave your life. Hundreds of thousands of people. You have to keep the door open so they can come in. But it also means you have to let them go.”
• "Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it."
• "So let me say this as clearly as I can — the United States is not and will never be at war with Islam." (Barak Obama)
• "Please believe that things are good with me, and even when they’re not, they will be soon enough."
• "The good times and the bad times both will pass. It will pass. It will get easier. But the fact that it will get easier does not mean that it doesn’t hurt now. And when people try to minimize your pain they are doing you a disservice. And when you try to minimize your own pain you’re doing yourself a disservice. Don’t do that. The truth is that it hurts because it’s real. It hurts because it mattered. And that’s an important thing to acknowledge to yourself. But that doesn’t mean that it won’t end, that it won’t get better. Because it will."
• "We all die. The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will."
• “If people were like rain, I was like drizzle and she was a hurricane.”
• "I am constantly torn between killing myself and killing everyone around me."
• "I like drinking coffee alone and reading alone. I like riding the bus alone and walking home alone. it gives me time to think and set my mind free. I like eating alone and listening to music alone. but when I see a mother with her child, a girl with her lover, or a friend laughing with their best friend, I realize that even though I like being alone, I don’t fancy being lonely. the sky is beautiful, but the people are sad. I just need someone who won’t run away."
• "We live in a world where we have to hide to make love, while violence is practiced in broad daylight."
• "If you wake up and you’re not in pain, you know you’re dead."
• “In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
• "I realize that, while often happy and often cheerful, I am always sad."
• “How many times have you tried to talk to someone about something that matters to you, tried to get them to see it the way you do? And how many of those times have ended with you feeling bitter, resenting them for making you feel like your pain doesn’t have any substance after all? Like when you’ve split up with someone, and you try to communicate the way you feel, because you need to say the words, need to feel that somebody understands just how pissed off and frightened you feel. The problem is, they never do. ‘Plenty more fish in the sea,’ they’ll say, or ‘You’re better off without them,’ or ‘Do you want some of these potato chips?’ They never really understand, because they haven’t been there, every day, every hour. They don’t know the way things have been, the way that it’s made you, the way it has structured your world. They’ll never realize that someone who makes you feel bad may be the person you need most in the world. They don’t understand the history, the background, don’t know the pillars of memory that hold you up. Ultimately, they don’t know you well enough, and they never can. Everyone’s alone in their world, because everybody’s life is different. You can send people letters, and show them photos, but they can never come to visit where you live. Unless you love them. And then they can burn it down.”
• "For you, I was a chapter. For me, you were the book."
• "I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.”
• “But I love your feet only because they walked upon the earth and upon the wind and upon the waters, until they found me.”
• “That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”
• "I hoped we never had to realize all the opportunities we missed in this life."
• "Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own unguarded thoughts."
• “Suicide is just a moment. This is how she described it to me. For just a moment, it doesn’t matter that you’ve got people who love you and the sun is shining and there’s a movie coming out this weekend that you’ve been dying to see. It hits you all of a sudden that nothing is ever going to be okay, ever, and you kind of dare yourself. You pick up a knife and press it gently to your skin, you look out a nineteenth-story window and you think, I could just do it. I could just do it. And most of the time, you look at the height and you get scared, or you think about the poor people on the sidewalk below - what if there are kids coming home from school and they have to spend the rest of their lives trying to forget this terrible thing you’re going to make them see? And the moment’s over. You think about how sad it would’ve been if you never got to see that movie, and you look at your dog and wonder who would’ve taken care of her if you had gone. And you go back to normal. But you keep it there in your mind. Even if you never take yourself up on it, it gives you a kind of comfort to know that the day is yours to choose. You tuck it away in your brain like sour candy tucked in your cheek, and the puckering memory it leaves behind, the rough pleasure of running your tongue over its strange terrain, is exactly the same. The day was hers to choose, and perhaps in that treetop moment when she looked down and saw the yard, the world, her life, spread out below her, perhaps she chose to plunge toward it headlong. Perhaps she saw before her a lifetime of walking on the ruined earth and chose instead a single moment in the air.”
• “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
• "That was one of the saddest things about people; their most important thoughts and feelings often went unspoken and barely understood."
• "One day, your life will flash before your eyes. Make sure it's worth watching."
• "The only reason Allah is putting you through the test is because he knows that with a little determination, you can get through it. Allah does not burden a soul beyond what it has the strength to bear. So if Allah believes in you, how can you not believe in yourself?"
• “He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.”
• “When you’re sad, you’re not sad. You are merely oblivious to the good things in your life. There is always a crack of light in the darkness. Find it.”
• "You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty."
• “At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid, and it hurts, but then it's over and you're relieved.”
• "You’re going to discover that conversations are best at 4AM. The heavier the eyelids, the sincerer the words. Those are the talks you’ll remember."
• "Isn't it funny how day by day nothing changes but when you look back everything is different?"
• "Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together."
• "You say that you love rain, but you open your umbrella when it rains. You say that you love the sun, but you find a shadow spot when the sun shines. You say that you love the wind, but you close your windows when wind blows. This is why I am afraid, you say that you love me too."
• "Allah is giving you these opportunities, these tests, these trials, to grow your personality. To strengthen you."
• "Some people are old at 18 and some are young at 90. Time is a concept that humans created."
• "Don’t ever mistake my silence for ignorance, my calmness for acceptance, or my kindness for weakness."
• "She believed a great happiness awaited her somewhere, and for this reason she remained calm as the days flew by."
• "You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget."
• “When God wounds, He wounds like a surgeon, not a criminal with a baseball bat.”
• "Don’t let your happiness depend on something you may lose."
• "So avoid using the word ‘very’ because it’s lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don’t use very sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason, boys - to woo women - and, in that endeavor, laziness will not do."
• “I don’t know what they are called, the spaces between seconds – but I think of you always in those intervals.”
• "I'm in love with cities I've never been to and people I've never met."
• "You make lists in your head about what you want in a lover, like brown hair and a sweet voice. A sharp mind and a soft heart, a sense of humor that actually makes you laugh like you mean it. This and that. And it's all bullshit. Because people aren't lists. And I've always wanted to be the person who made someone realize that. I want to come across someone with a list in their head that is nothing like the person I am, and I want to show them what they didn't even know they were looking for. People who think they know what they want are fooling themselves. Nobody really knows what they want. Not until it's right in front of them."
• "Art is an argument between what it looks like and what it means."
• "Stop ruining love by wanting it so bad."
• "I laughed and said, ‘Life is easy’. What I meant was, ‘Life is easy with you here, and when you leave, it will be hard again’."
• "In bed at 4PM, I held my pillow and thought “Oh well” in regards to my entire life."
• "I don’t want to earn my living; I want to live."
• "Just marry your conscience. Marry the one who makes you want to be a better person."
• "All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know."
• "In your life, you meet people. Some you never think about again. Some, you wonder what happened to them. There are some that you wonder if they ever think about you. And then there are some you wish you never had to think about again. But you do."
• "Silence is sometimes the best answer."
• "I would rather own little and see the world, than own the world and see little of it."
• "‘What will happen to us?’ I asked. ‘There will always be us,’ he answered."
• "I was interested in everything and committed to nothing."
• "The two most important days in your life are the day you are born, and the day you figure out why."
• "There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery."
• Little by little, one travels far."
• Sometimes you tell someone to never call you again, and then the phone rings and you hope it’s them. It’s the most twisted logic of all time."
• I cured myself of shyness when it finally occurred to me that people didn’t think about me half as much as I gave them credit for. The truth was, nobody gave a damn. Like most teenagers, I was far too self-centered. When I stopped being prisoner to what I worried was others’ opinions of me, I became more confident and free."
• "The most precious gift we can offer anyone is our attention."
• "And he hugged me. And I closed my eyes because I wanted to know nothing but his arms."
• "Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home."
• "Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, ‘Where have I gone wrong’. Then a voice says to me, ‘This is going to take more than one night."
• "One day you’ll meet a guy. And ultimately, he’s going to find out. How you chew, how you sip, how you dance, how you smell at every point in the day. The fact that most of your friends are shallow. How your face looks underneath all your makeup. How you love chocolate, how you can be hyper at times, how certain games and shows make you really happy. How cranky you can get when you’re tired, how you think you look bad in all your Facebook photos. He’s going to know everything about you. And you know what? He’s still going to love you."
• "Here’s to books, the cheapest vacation you can buy."
• "The sign of a beautiful person is that he always sees beauty in others."
• "When you develop an infatuation for someone, you always find a reason to believe that this is exactly the person for you."
• "It hurts because it mattered."
• "Your life is not an episode of Skins. Things will never look quite as good as they do in a faded, sun-drenched Polaroid; your days are not an editorial from Lula. Your life is not a Sofia Coppola movie, or a Chuck Palahniuk novel, or a Charles Bukowski poem. Grace Coddington isn’t your creative director. Bon Iver and Joy Division don’t play softly in the background at appropriate moments. Your hysterical teenage diary isn’t a work of art. Your room probably isn’t Selby material. Your life isn’t a Tumblr screencap. Every word that comes out of your mouth will not be beautiful and poignant, infinitely quotable. Your pain will not be pretty. Crying till you vomit is always shit. You cannot romanticize hurt. Or sadness. Or loneliness. You will have homework, and hangovers and bad hair days. The train being late won’t lead to any fateful encounters, it will make you late. Sometimes your work will suck. Sometimes you will suck. Far too often, everything will suck - and not in a Wes Anderson kind of way. And there is no divine consolation - only the knowledge that we will hopefully experience the full spectrum - and that sometimes, just sometimes, life will feel like a Coppola film."
• "Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply."
• "You’ll meet her, she’s very pretty, even though sometimes she’s sad for many days at a time. You’ll see, when she smiles, you’ll love her."
• "I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again."
• "We met at the wrong time. That’s what I keep telling myself anyway. Maybe one day years from now, we’ll meet in a coffee shop in a far away city somewhere and we could give it another shot."
• "Sad thing is, you can still love someone and be wrong for them."
• "But sometimes we get sad about things and we don’t like to tell other people that we are sad about them. We like to keep it a secret. Or sometimes we are sad but we don’t really know we are sad. So we say we aren’t sad. But really we are."
• "I don’t know what to tell you other than the fact that a giraffe’s heart weighs 22 pounds and that somebody once told me when flies fall in love, their entire brain is rewired to only know loving each other. When one of them dies, their memory becomes blank. I hope you never think about anything as much as i think about waking up next to you during a windstorm at 5 a.m."
• "She wanted a smile that was meant only for her."
• "What they don't understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you're eleven, you're also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one. And when you wake up on your eleventh birthday you expect to feel eleven, but you don't. You open your eyes and everything's just like yesterday, only it's today. And you don't feel eleven at all. You feel like you're still ten. And you are -- underneath the year that makes you eleven."
• "You are today where your thoughts have brought you; you will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you."
• "So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in them."
• "I think I wished for you all of my life."
• "I want to tear myself from this place, from this reality, rise up like a cloud and float away, melt into this humid summer night and dissolve somewhere far, over the hills. But I am here, my legs blocks of concrete, my lungs empty of air, my throat burning. There will be no floating away."
• "When things aren't adding up in your life, start subtracting."
• "She’s sitting right in front of me, but at the same time she’s a million miles away."
• "I’d rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not."
• "Once a poem is made available to the public, the right of interpretation belongs to the reader."
• "You can only hold a smile for so long, after that it’s just teeth."
• "The heart will rest and feel relief if it is settled with Allah and it will worry and be anxious if it is settled with people."
• "The quieter you become, the more you can hear."
• "If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she’s late?"
• "Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters."
• "If you know yourself, then you’ll not be harmed by what’s said about you."
• "The less you reveal, the more people can wonder."
• "The human heart in conflict with itself is the only thing worth writing about."
• "I felt like everyone else had gotten this instruction manual that explained life to them, but somehow I’d just missed it. They all seemed to know exactly what they were doing while I didn’t have a clue."
• “You teach people how to treat you by what you allow, what you stop, and what you reinforce.”
• "And so I am feeling numb. It’s a curious feeling, and I get it all the time. My attention to the world around me disappears, and something starts to hum inside my head. Far off, voices try to bump up against me, but I repel them. My ears fill up with water and I focus on the humming in my head."
• "We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person does not care at all."
• "I missed you every hour. And you know what the worst part was? It caught me completely by surprise. I’d catch myself just walking around to find you, not for any reason, just out of habit, because I’d seen something that I wanted to tell you about or because I wanted to hear your voice. And then I’d realize that you weren’t there anymore, and every time, every single time, it was like having the wind knocked out of me."
• "Some hearts understand each other, even in silence."
• "There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds."
• "The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly."
• "I am intrigued by the smile upon your face and the sadness within your eyes."
• "My dear, find what you love and let it kill you. Let it drain from you your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness. Let it kill you, and let it devour your remains. For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it’s much better to be killed by a lover."
• "Every once in awhile, there will come an especially powerful moment when you can actually feel that an experience has changed who you are. Embrace these, even if they are painful."
• "Sometimes a man doesn’t know what to do about things and sometimes it’s best to lie very still and try not to think at all about anything."
• "Admit it. You aren’t like them. You’re not even close. You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them, watch the same mindless television shows as they do, maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes. But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, watching the “normal people” as they go about their automatic existences. For every time you say club passwords like “Have a nice day” and “Weather’s awful today, eh?”, you yearn inside to say forbidden things like “Tell me something that makes you cry” or “What do you think deja vu is for?”. Face it, you even want to talk to that girl in the elevator. But what if that girl in the elevator (and the balding man who walks past your cubicle at work) are thinking the same thing? Who knows what you might learn from taking a chance on conversation with a stranger? Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others."
• "You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget."
• "But better to be hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie."
• "I have the deepest affection for intellectual conversations. The ability to just sit and talk. About love, about life, about anything, about everything. To sit under the moon with all the time in the world, the full-speed train that is our lives slowing to a crawl. Bound by no obligations, barred by no human limitations. To speak without regret or fear of consequence. To talk for hours and about what’s really important in life."
• “The worst loneliness is to not be comfortable with yourself.”
• "You want to take the easy way out because you’re scared. And you’re scared because if you try and fail, there’s only you to blame. Life is scary. Get used to it. There are no magical fixes, it’s all up to you. So get up off your keyster and get out of here and go start doing the work. Nothing in this world that’s worth having comes easy."
• "Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall."
• "In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you."
• "In your entire life, you can probably count your true friends on one hand. Maybe even on one finger. Those are the friends you need to cherish, and I wouldn’t trade one of them for a hundred of the other kind. I’d rather be completely alone than with a bunch of people who aren’t real. People who are just passing time."
• "You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living."
• "It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story."
• "We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken."
• "You are most powerful when you are most silent. People never expect silence. They expect words, motion, defense, offense, back and forth. They expect to leap into the fray. They are ready, fists up, words hanging leaping from their mouths. Silence? No."
• “I like flaws and feel more comfortable around people who have them. I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions.”
• "You can’t go into this world thinking you’re owed something. If you do, you’re going to be permanently unhappy."
• "Drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested."
• "I've spent hours contemplating the words to say to you, but no combination of twenty six different letters could ever accurately capture even a sliver of what this feeling is."
• "I'll try anything once, twice if I like it, three times to make sure."
• “You will know that forgiveness has begun when you recall those who hurt you and feel the power to wish them well.”
• “Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I’m never not thinking of you.”
• “It is likely I will die next to a pile of things I was meaning to read.”
• “I don’t believe in love at first sight but I do believe in seeing someone from across the room and knowing instantly that they’re going to matter to you. They’re going to play a major role in your life.”
• “Don’t dare a person who has nothing else left to lose.”
• "If you died, I'd."
• “Courage isn’t having the strength to go on - it is going on when you don’t have strength.”
• “Writing isn’t the same as speaking, I struggle with conversation.”
• “I was with book, as a woman is with child.”
• "Everyone tells me, “You are the strongest person I know.” but what kind of strength is there in taking a knife to your own skin? Or crying to the heavens to send you cancer, or a bus, anything to kill you without the responsibility of cowardice?. If I am the strongest person you know, you need more help than me."
• “It bothers me that no one has the patience to deal with someone who is just sad.”
• “Too often, the only escape is sleep.”
• “Her heart sank into her shoes as she realized at last how much she wanted him. No matter what his past was, no matter what he had done. Which was not to say that she would ever let him know, but only that he moved her chemically more than anyone she had ever met, that all other men seemed pale beside him.”
• "You’ve become so damaged, that when someone wants to give you, what you deserve, you have no idea how to respond."
• “Is it possible for home to be a person and not a place?”
• “Close some doors. Not because of pride, incapacity or arrogance, but simply because they no longer lead somewhere.”
• “Kissing is like drinking salted water. You drink, and your thirst increases.”
• “The thing about me and books is that whichever one I’m reading always reminds me of whatever’s happening in my life during that time.”
• “Directly, or indirectly, everything we write is for someone.”
• “There are some people who could hear you speak a thousand words and still not understand you. And there are others who will understand without you even speaking a word.”
• “In truth, you like the pain. You like it because you believe you deserve it.”
• “Long ago I realized that no other person would be to me what you are.”
• “Two things define you. Your patience when you have nothing, and your attitude when you have everything.”
• “Y. That perfect letter. The wishbone, fork in the road, empty wineglass. The question we ask over and over.”
• “I cannot stand small talk, because I feel like there’s an elephant standing in the room shitting all over everything and nobody is saying anything. I’m just dying to say, “Hey, do you ever feel like jumping off a bridge?” or “Do you feel an emptiness inside your chest at night that is going to swallow you?” But you can’t say that at a cocktail party.”
• “You,” he said, “are a terribly real thing in a terribly false world, and that, I believe, is why you are in so much pain.”
• “The world is not a wish-granting factory.”
• “We gotta start teaching our daughters to be somebodies instead of somebody’s.”
• “Sometimes I miss you the way someone drowning remembers the air.”
• “Someday, we’ll run into each other again, I know it. Maybe I’ll be older and smarter and just plain better. If that happens, that’s when I’ll deserve you. But now, at this moment, you can’t hook your boat to mine, because I’m liable to sink us both.”
• “We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe it’s our job to invent something better.”
• “March 4th, the only day that is also a sentence.”
• “I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life.”
• “When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply and his suffering is spilling over.”
• “People run from rain but sit in bathtubs full of water.”
• “I’m like that. Either I forget right away or I never forget.”
• “We do this because the world we live in is a house on fire and the people we love are burning.”
• “A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end...but not necessarily in that order.”
• "The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as they grow older, the awareness of death and decay begins to impinge on their consciousness and subtly erode their joie de vivre, their idealism – and their assumption of immortality. As a child matures, he sees death and pain everywhere about him, and begins to lose faith in the ultimate goodness of man. But, if he’s reasonably strong – and lucky – he can emerge from this twilight of the soul into a rebirth of life’s elan. Both because of and in spite of his awareness of the meaninglessness of life, he can forge a fresh sense of purpose and affirmation. He may not recapture the same pure sense of wonder he was born with, but he can shape something far more enduring and sustaining. The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death – however mutable man may be able to make them – our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light."
• "When sadness was the sea, you were the one that taught me to swim."
• "Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts."
• "There must be a few things that a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them."
• "We cannot soar over what is happening with philosophy’s eagle-wings. What’s happening has clipped our wings."
• "I would like to beg of you, dear friend, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question."
• "But what's the use? It's gone. He's gone. Whatever existed between us is gone. I tell myself this ten times a day."
• I sit before flowers, hoping they will train me in the art of opening up."
• "How to get over him: Maybe even though you saw him with another woman, laughing and joking in a smoky bar with their heads held close together, you still think you have a shot with him. You don’t. This way of thinking will ruin you; you need to stop looking around corners and walking on eggshells when you’re near him. Your chances are slim to none; it would be easier to win a handful of cash on a Roulette wheel than get together with him. The stars have a better chance of kissing the moon than you have a chance of even so much as brushing his hand in passing as you walk across the street. Realize this. Drill it into your head and into your brain; carve it into your bedpost instead of his initials. Smear it on your bathroom mirror in a tube of the very same Sugar Plum lipstick you bought in hopes you could wear it on a fancy dinner date with him. Scrawl it on your wrist in permanent marker; walk into a tattoo parlor and get it inked onto each hand, each finger, so that whenever you ache to hold his hand, you can look down at your hands and see the reminder instead. Memorize this thought; chant it over and over again to yourself like a mantra. Let it be your new motto. Do not let yourself regret him; do not lie in bed in a quivering heap for days at a time; do not mope or hit the snooze button simply so you can drift off to sleep and dream about him. You are not a kicked dog and your ribs are not showing. If you look in the medical dictionary, lovesickness is not a disease. Wanting someone who is already taken is not a disease. So don’t treat yourself like a victim or a hospital patient. Stop putting Band-Aids on wounds that need sunlight. Stop trying to mend your heart with a splint and bandages; give it some fresh air instead. Dress yourself up if for no other reason than making yourself feel good. Put on your tightest, tiniest little black dress and some high heels and have a dance party in your own room with the stereo blasting. Throw away his photos. Delete his texts, crumple up his notes and slot them into the paper shredder like old credit cards. Thinking about him any more than you already have is dangerous. It is a palmful of lit matches about to fall into a puddle of lighter fluid. It is a warning sign, a canyon of deceit and sadness and regret. Do not let this canyon become your new choice of vacation. Hang out at the beach instead. Step into the ocean and feel the water swirl around you; stand among the jellyfish and tilt your head to the sky. Breathe in the salty air. This is the very same air he is breathing at this moment, but he is sharing it with someone else. You deserve to have your own air now. It is yours. Breathe it in."
• "The moment you should fear, is when I stop writing about you for good."
• "Making love was never about you and me in a bed. We made love whenever we held hands."
• "One look at her and I knew I'd spend far too much time trying to write a poem as beautiful as her."
• "expect sadness like you expect rain. both, cleanse you."
• "I've waited a long time to show these flowers how pretty you are."
• "Our love came when we’d given up

on asking love to come."

• "I will write a dictionary

of all the words I have used trying to describe the way it feels to have finally, finally found you."

• “I wrote a poem about it, and then threw it away, because that’s the last thing I need right now: More words dedicated to people who will never dedicate a single thing to me.”
• "Allah tells us that when we die, all the areas in which we prayed in will weep for us. Can you imagine the mountains longing for you, the shores hugging the sand on the beach, as it howls in despair for you? Can you imagine the cement in which you bowed your head in, crack as it trembles in its loss for you? The earth is alive, it has a soul of its own. And Allah tells us that the one who submits in prayer has won the heart of the earth. And in the first night in our graves, instead of a terrifying squeeze that will shatter our every bone, those who indulged in good deeds and prayer will receive an affectionate embrace. As the earth's way of saying 'welcome back. I missed you.' "