• "And I’d choose you; in a hundred lifetimes, in a hundred worlds, in any version of reality, I’d find you and I’d choose you."

— The Chaos of Stars

• "I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it."

— Ernest Hemingway

• "Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence."

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

• "Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for."

— Ray Bradbury

• "You’re still going to get criticized, so you might as well do whatever the fuck you want."

— Kathleen Hanna

• "If anyone else were to kiss me, all they would taste is your name."

— Clementine von Radics

• "I no longer know If I wish to drown myself in love, vodka or the sea."
• "Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly."

— Franz Kafka

• "Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum."

— Vincent van Gogh

• "I’m not brave any more, darling. I’m all broken. They’ve broken me."

— Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

• "You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star."

— Friedrich Nietzsche

• "Sometimes you have to give up on people. Not because you don’t care, but because they don’t."
• "The fact that I’m silent doesn’t mean I have nothing to say."

— Jonathan Carroll

• "You are, at once, both the quiet and the confusion of my heart."

— Franz Kafka

• "She says nothing at all, but simply stares upward into the dark sky and watches, with sad eyes, the slow dance of the infinite stars."

— Neil Gaiman, Stardust

• "The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink."

— T. S. Eliot

• "I like art, and by art I mean music, poetry, sex, paintings, the human body, literature.. All of this is art to me."

— Hunter Reveu

• "You can never cross the ocean until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore."

— Christopher Columbus

• "Nothing in the world can bother you as much as your own mind, I tell you. In fact, others seem to be bothering you, but it is not others, it is your own mind."

— Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

• "'And did I pass?' The face of the old woman on my right was unreadable in the gathering dusk. On my left the younger woman said, 'You don't pass or fail at a being a person, dear.'"

— The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

• "The sea only drowns its lovers."
• "Berlin is a skeleton which aches in the cold: it is my own skeleton aching. I feel in my bones the sharp ache of the frost in the girders of the overhead railway, in the iron-work of balconies, in bridges, tramlines, lamp-standards, latrines. The iron throbs and shrinks, the stone and the bricks ache dully, the plaster is numb."

— Christopher Isherwood - Goodbye to Berlin

• "Don’t you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything."

— David Bowie

• "My brain has no heart, and my heart has no brain. That’s why when I speak my mind, I appear heartless and when I do what’s in my heart I seem thoughtless."
• "I hope you will go out and let stories happen to you."

— Clarissa Pinkola Estés

• "Real life is absurd, so we write fiction to make sense of it."

— Terri Edda Miller

• "I fall in love with everything. I also hate everything. It’s very hard to be a misanthrope and a romantic."
• "One of my philosophy professors lectured wildly about love once, yelling: “When you’re in love with someone, that person is the lighthouse of your universe.” (I scrawled it inside Science and Poetry in pencil—lighthouse of your universe—as if I would ever forget that phrase.) He was a delightful caricature of his position. I could swear he literally tore his hair out while howling at us. He went on, “Nothing means as much without that person.” One of the men in the class repeated, incredulous, half-laughing, “So you’re saying you can’t enjoy, like, a vacation, without someone if you’re really in love with them?” “Of course not.” the professor replied. “Not completely. You recognize beauty, but beauty means less if they don’t witness it with you. Beauty is less. You see something sublime and your first thought is that they should be there with you. It’s not as good without them. They illuminate. They make everything more."
• "People do not seem to realise that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character."

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

• "I want to taste dark water and see crackling trees and wild winds."

— Egon Schiele

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

— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

• "To hell with them. Nothing hurts if you don’t let it."

— Ernest Hemingway

• "Don’t fight your demons. Your demons are here to teach you lessons. Sit down with your demons and have a drink and a chat and learn their names and talk about the burns on their fingers and scratches on their ankles. Some of them are very nice."
• "Poetry is what happens when nothing else can."

— Charles Bukowski, Writing

• "If you find someone who makes you smile, who checks up on you often to see if you’re okay. Who watches out or you and wants the best for you. Who loves and respects you. Don’t let them go. People like that are hard to find."
• "Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly."

— Franz Kafka

• "I am alone again and I want to be so; alone with the pure sky and open sea."

— Friedrich Nietzsche

• "I am a lover without a lover. I am lovely and lonely and I belong deeply to myself."

— Warsan Shire

• "I do not want to be human. I want to be myself. They think I am a lion, that I will chase them. I will not deny I have lions in me. I am the monster in the wood. I have wonders in my house of sugar. I have parts of myself I do not yet understand."

— Silently and Very Fast, Catherynne M. Valente

• "I want to be like water. I want to slip through fingers, but hold up a ship."

— Michelle Williams

• "Opinions are like orgasms … mine matters most and I really don’t care if you have one."

— Sylvia Plath

• "I am a reader. I am a writer. People assume I do these things to escape. You couldn’t be more right. I’m escaping a world I don’t like. A world I have no control in. In this world, I am nothing. I am a color, a height, a weight, a number. But in the world of books and writing, I am amazing. I am powerful. I am different. People are better. Worlds are endless. Change is possible. Life is manageable."
• "For each person there is a sentence — a series of words — which has the power to destroy them."

— Philip K. Dick

• "Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal."

— Albert Camus

• "She exhaled her darkness like constellations."
• "You look like a winter night. I could sleep inside the cold of you."

— Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

• "There will always be a reason why you meet people. Either you need them to change your life or you’re the one that will change theirs."

— Angel Flonis Harefa

• "I’d say go to hell, but I never want to see you again."

— Sylvia Plath

• "You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame. How could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?"

— Friedrich Nietzsche

• "I will love you as a thief loves a gallery and as a crow loves a murder, as a cloud loves bats and as a range loves braes. I will love you as misfortune loves orphans, as fire loves innocence, and as justice loves to sit and watch while everything goes wrong."

— Lemony Snicket, The Beatrice Letters

• "Poetry is sane because it floats so easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion … To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits."

— G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

• "Nothing in the world can bother you as much as your own mind, I tell you. In fact, others seem to be bothering you, but it is not others, it is your own mind."

— Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

• "A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity."

— Franz Kafka

• "I’ve stopped stealing pages out of poetry books, but last week I pocketed a thesaurus and looked for synonyms for you but could only find rain and more rain and a thunderstorm that sounded like glass, like crystal, like an orchestra."

— Shinji Moon

• "There is magic in long-distance friendships. They let you relate to other human beings in a way that goes beyond being physically together and is often more profound."

— Diana Cortes

• "Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring."

— Marilyn Monroe

• "At fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon."

— F.Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (1920)

• "And men said that the blood of the stars flowed in her veins."

— The Silver Chair, by C. S. Lewis

• "When I first met you, I felt a kind of contradiction in you. You’re seeking something, but at the same time, you are running away for all you’re worth."

— Haruki Murakami

• "She stuck a bookmark in my heart and walked away."

— Saul Williams

• "I feel all shadows of the universe multiplied deep inside my skin."

— Virginia Woolf

• "I want you. I want your sleepy confused look when you wake up. I want to be the warmth that fills the space in your bed. I want to be the sheets your fingers crave at night; the blanket that wraps around you all night. I want to drink tea with you, share some records we find. I want to talk about everything in the newspapers. I want to discuss with you, to be stubborn and quick-witted with you. I want to have differences between us. I want your flaws. All of them. I want to go into the deepest corners of your mind and never get bored of you. I want to be surprised by the new all the time. I want to look at you like a movie, a living piece of art; always trying to chase what you crave … and capture you."

— Elay Neal Moses

• I’m sorry you were not truly loved and that it made you cruel."

— Warsan Shire

• "He loved her in a subtle kind of way. It wasn’t the kind of love you see in movies, with swelling music and giant gestures and running through the streets to catch a departing train. It wasn’t the kind of love that Byron or Shakespeare wrote about, with flowery language and hyperbole and iambic pentameter. It was still and deep, like water that you might mistake for shallow if you just watched the surface. It was entirely his, not dependent on her own feelings for him, and it would still be there whether she, or him, or everyone else on the world disappeared. It was a subtle kind of love, but it was true."

— Jake Christie, Small Stories

• "Violence does not always take visible form, and not all wounds gush blood."

— Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 ch. 19, p. 303

• "We are so used to releasing words, we don’t know what to do with them if they stay. No matter how many times we let them go, they come back. The words that matter always stay."

— David Levithan, The Realms of Possibility

• "Don’t lose yourself just because you found somebody."
• "I’m always in a state of trance, I’m not very often in the real world."

— Emma Hewitt

• "Shoulder blades sticking out as if she was trying to grow wings through her skin."

— Charles Bukowski

• "And men said that the blood of the stars flowed in her veins."

— C. S. Lewis

• "We all romanticize the people we adore."

— John Green

• "One of the most amazing things that can happen is finding someone who sees everything you are and won’t let you be anything less. They see the potential of you. They see endless possibilities. And through their eyes, you start to see yourself the same way as someone who matters. As someone who can make a difference in the world."

— Susane Colosanti

• "You are always ticking inside of me and I dream of you more often than I don’t. My body is a dead language and you pronounce each word perfectly."

— Sierra DeMulder, Unrequited Love Poem

• "If something burns your soul with purpose and desire, it’s your duty to be reduced to ashes by it. Any other form of existence will be yet another dull book in the library of life."

— Charles Bukowski

• "For breakfast, she ate her darkness."