i have this strange feeling that i’m not myself anymore. it’s hard to put it into words, but i guess it’s like i was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. … my eyes tell me i’m the same old me, but something’s different from usual. not that i can clearly recall what “usual” was. — haruki murakami, sputnik sweetheart

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she mistook my despair for selfishness. my longing for irritation. my honesty for cruelty. and my tenderness for fraud. — and that’s why we never made it

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when you planted flowers inside of me i thought you were going to water them too. — silly me, they died

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men fear witches because they take their power from the earth without poisoning the soil.

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“whoever kills an innocent human being, it shall be as if he has killed all mankind, and whosoever saves the life of one, it shall be as if he saved the life of all mankind.” — qu’ran 5:32

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in the world i am always a stranger i do not understand its language it does not understand my silence. — bei dao

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no matter how much you feed the wolf, he keeps looking at the forest. — ilse lehiste

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i’m not used to being loved. i wouldn’t know what to do. — f. scott fitzgerald, more than just a house

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nobody wants a girl like me: too much blood, too much heartbreak too easy to leave. — “i wonder what he’s going to think after i tell him i’m feeling more unstable than ever.”

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i’m still learning to love the parts of me that no one claps for. — rudy francisco

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i am so tired. i feel myself drifting, away, a little by little. i am overcome by the sensation that i am crumbling, parts of my being drifting away. — murakami haruki, hard boiled wonderland and the end of the world

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i’m so fucking sick of saying i’m sorry when i’m the one collapsed on the ground.

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then the feeling moves on. it does not collapse; it is not whisked away. it simply moves on, like a train that stops at a small country station, stands for a while, and then continues out of sight. — michael cunningham, the hours

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raise your words, not voice. it is rain that grows flowers, not thunder. — rumi

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the cure for anything is salt water - tears, sweat, or the sea. — isak dinesen, seven gothic tales

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i’m not totally mad at you. i’m just sad. you’re all locked up in that little world of yours, and when i try knocking on the door, you just sort of look up for a second and go right back inside. — haruki murakami, norwegian wood

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but who prays for satan? who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it the most? — mark twain

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the more you love me, the more i will ruin you. i will take my darkness and i will push it inside you. — david levithan

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the thing i’m most afraid of is me. of not knowing what i’m going to do. of not knowing what i’m doing right now. — haruki murakami, 1q84

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i said i wanted to die but honestly i just wanted to feel alright.

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my feet will tread soft as a deer in the forest. my mind will be clear as water from the sacred well. my heart will be strong as a great oak. my spirit will spread an eagle’s wings and fly forth. — juliet marillier

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i wish i could do whatever i liked behind the curtain of “madness”. then: i’d arrange flowers, all day long, i’d paint; pain, love and tenderness, i would laugh as much as i feel like at the stupidity of others, and they would all say: “poor thing, she’s crazy!” (above all, i would laugh at my own stupidity.) i would build my world which while i lived, would be in agreement with all the worlds. the day, or the hour, or the minute that i lived would be mine and everyone else’s — my madness would not be an escape from “reality”. — frida kahlo, from the diary of frida kahlo: an intimate self-portrait

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do you know what i need? to escape into the mountains, surrounded by tall trees, i will lay on the moss, and breath in the scent of mushrooms, flowers and wet soil. — les discrets, l’échappée

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how beautiful the world was when one looked at it without searching, just looked, simply and innocently. — hermann hesse, siddhartha

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i think about dying but i don’t want to die. not even close. in fact my problem is the complete opposite. i want to live, i want to escape. i feel trapped and bored and claustrophobic. there’s so much to see and so much to do but i somehow still find myself doing nothing at all. i’m still here in this metaphorical bubble of existence and i can’t quite figure out what the hell i’m doing or how to get out of it. — matty healy

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when god became lonely he created man, or was it when man became lonely he created god. — melanie exler

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hard to sit here and be close to you, and not kiss you. — f. scott fitzgerald, tender is the night

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it’s a marvelous thing, the ocean. for some reason when two people sit together looking out at it, they stop caring whether they talk or stay silent. you never get tired of watching it. and no matter how rough the waves get, you’re never bothered by the noise the water makes by the commotion of the surface - it never seems too loud, or too wild. — banana yoshimoto, goodbye tsugumi

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this, this is about my own some-day daughter. when you approach me, already stung-stayed with insecurity, begging, “mom, will i be pretty? will i be pretty?” i will wipe that question from your mouth like cheap lipstick and answer, “no! the word pretty is unworthy of everything you will be, and no child of mine will be contained in five letters. “you will be pretty intelligent, pretty creative, pretty amazing. but you, will never be merely ‘pretty’. — kate makkai, “pretty”

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when you look upon another human being and feel great love toward them, or when you contemplate beauty in nature and something within you responds deeply to it, close your eyes for a moment and feel the essence of that love or that beauty within you, inseparable from who you are, your true nature. the outer form is a temporary reflection of what you are within, in your essence. that is why love and beauty can never leave you, although all outer forms will. — eckhart tolle

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the prince fought valiantly. he slayed the dragon. the princess cried for days. she loved that dragon. — the stories fairytales don’t tell

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screw stardust; be iron instead. be the element that creates stardust. be the element that causes the largest stars to explode. be the element that is strong enough to collapse an entire universe.

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don’t educate your children to be rich. educate them to be happy. so when they grow up, they will know the value of things, not the price.

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the buddhists say if you meet somebody and your heart pounds, your hands shake, your knees go weak, that’s not the one. when you meet your ‘soul mate’ you’ll feel calm. no anxiety, no agitation

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she was always wishing that she could have a man look at her at least once with eyes saying ‘i love you’ instead of ‘you love me.’ — yukio mishima, the sound of waves

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this is the part where a properly poetic undergrad would draw up some grand metaphor about stardust and cigarettes, saltwater and blood, maybe reference the greeks or get cynical about god. i’m sorry sweetie, but all i have to say is how good ten pm in april feels with your fingers laced through my bottle-dyed hair and moonlight splashing across my shoulders. all i’ve got is how beautiful we idiots are moseying towards the dorms with laundry in hand, laughing about wizards and werewolves in love. — s.t.gibson

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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. — david benioff, city of thieves.

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forgive the trees for the way they can’t stop shaking even after all these years of practice. forgive yourself for the days you don’t even want to try. — y.z, a dying art

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war does not determine who is right - only who is left. — bertrand russell

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i want something else. i’m not even sure what to call it anymore except i know it feels roomy and it’s drenched in sunlight and it’s weightless and i know it’s not cheap. it’s probably not even real. — mark z. danielewski, house of leaves

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i used to think i was tough, but then i realized i wasn’t. i was fragile and i wore thick fucking armor. and i hurt people so they couldn’t hurt me. and i thought that was what being tough was, but it isn’t. — james frey

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you should not have to rip yourself into pieces to keep others whole. — i am seeing less and less of you

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i should feel the air move against me, and feel the things i touched, instead of having only to look at them. i’m sure life is all wrong because it has become much too visual - we can neither hear nor feel nor understand, we can only see. i’m sure that is entirely wrong. — d.h. lawrence, women in love

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we say we waste time, but that’s impossible. we waste ourselves. — alice bloch

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i do not trust people who don’t love themselves and yet tell me, ‘i love you.’ there is an african saying which is: be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt. — maya angelou

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i don’t think people love me. they love versions of me i have spun for them, versions of me they have construed in their minds. the easy versions of me, the easy parts of me to love.

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the sun is perfect and you woke this morning. you have enough language in your mouth to be understood. you have a name, and someone wants to call it. five fingers on your hand and someone wants to hold it. if we just start there, every beautiful thing that has and will ever exist is possible. if we start there, everything, for a moment, is right in the world. — warsan shire

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beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. and, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard. — haruki murakami, kafka on the shore

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if flowers can teach themselves how to bloom after winter passes, so can you. — noor shirazie, springtime

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if i told you that a flower bloomed in a dark room, would you trust it? — kendrick lamar this line encapsulates other concept of a good kid in a bad city, and it cuts into one of the most moral questions in human existence: can good come from evil? the best part about the line, as is true of the best poetry, is that it doesn’t answer the question it asks. for kendrick’s immediate purposes, he’s the flower and the city is the dark room. the question is: can you trust him?

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after a while you learn the subtle difference between holding a hand and chaining a soul, and you learn that love doesn’t mean leaning and company doesn’t mean security. and you begin to learn that kisses aren’t contracts and presents aren’t promises … after a while you learn… that even sunshine burns if you get too much. so you plant your garden and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers. — jorge luis borges

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my darling, you are allowed to fail without being a failure. you are allowed to make mistakes without becoming one. more opportunities will present themselves, you will find hope again.

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give yourself over to the wolf. let it eat the parts of you that are sick, that are damaged beyond salvage. let the wolf in and let it clean house, and let it leave again. the wolf knows which parts must be swallowed. you do not need what it takes, and where it bites you the wounds will heal. let the wolf in and let it eat you, and let it leave again.

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so yes i will gladly take on your ocean just to swim beneath you so i can kiss the bends of your knees in appreciation for the work they do keeping your head above water — mike mcgee

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we cling to music, to poems, to quotes, to writing, to art because we desperately do not want to be alone. we want to know we aren’t going crazy and someone else out there knows exactly how you’re feeling. we want someone to explain the things we can’t.

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oh my god, what if you wake up some day, and you’re 65, or 75, and you never got your memoir or novel written; or you didn’t go swimming in warm pools and oceans all those years because your thighs were jiggly and you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life, of imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space like when you were a kid? it’s going to break your heart. don’t let this happen. — anne lamott

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my father broke my heart long before any boy had the chance to.

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i want to explain how exhausted i am. even in my dreams. how i wake up tired. how i’m being drowned by some kind of black wave. — elizabeth wurtzel, prozac nation

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maybe the wolf is in love with the moon, and each month it cries for a love it will never touch.

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how cruel, your veins are full of ice-water and mine are boiling. — emily brontë, wuthering heights

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one day someone is going to hug you so tight that all of your broken pieces will stick back together — alia

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i don’t need someone that sees what’s good about me. i need someone that sees the bad and still wants me.

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i’m not used to being wanted — 6 word poem

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i wonder what it’s like to build a home inside a person and not have it crumble? — m.v., all i know is ruin.

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“every now and then i would feel a violent stab of loneliness. the very water i drank, the very air i breathed, would feel like long, sharp needles. the pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. i could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o’clock in the morning.” — haruki murakami, the wind-up bird chronicle

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"eventually something you love is going to be taken away. and then you will fall to the floor crying. and then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking, ‘i am falling to the floor crying,’ but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it — you knew it would happen and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well." — richard siken

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"i wasn’t safe. i wasn’t permanent. my life was a fiction i had created, like an alien who comes to earth and tries to pass as human. the affections of my friends meant nothing to me, directed, as they were, toward a person who wasn’t there. there was nobody home." — robert goolrick, the end of the world as we know it: scenes from a life

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"the type of boy to tuck the girl’s hair behind her ear just so she can hear her heart shattering a little more clearly." — though you made it sound so sweet

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“…and besides, you were the one who always had my heart, you know? you were the one. you were the only one” — gia (1998)

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"so, little amélie, your bones aren’t made of glass. you can take life’s knocks. if you let this chance go by, eventually, your heart will become as dry and brittle as my skeleton." — raymond dufayel, amélie (2001)

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here is the skin that you said you loved draped over the back of the chair in the kitchen. here are the teeth. here is the sternum, the clavicle, the fibula. here are the angel bones laid out on top of the dresser like antique jewelry. here are the earlobes, the knobbly elbows, the beauty mark near my temple that always got a moan out of you. here are my thighs, my femur. all ten toes, all ten fingers. my pubic bone, preserved and wrapped in a velvet bag. your name on the tag. your name on everything. here is the body that loved you. here is the heart, bloodied and wanting. here are those drunk voice mails, the sober texts. here is your promise of staying. here is the lonely hum in my brain where your name used to be. here is my spine. here is all the hollow. here is all the longing. here is the heavy tongue, the scratchy vocal chords. here are all of the i love you’s. here is the shocking wreck of it all. here is how you were closer to me than my bones, my skin. here is the quiet city, your empty side of the bed. here is the empty. here is not knowing whether you loved me or not. here is the poem that can’t save us. here. — kristina h., “on missing you”