“I am a part of all that I have met.”- Lord Tennyson, Ulysses

“Everyone who terrifies you is sixty-five percent water. And everyone you love is made of stardust, and I know sometimes you cannot even breathe deeply, and the night sky is no home, and you have cried yourself to sleep enough times that you are down to your last two percent, but nothing is infinite, not even loss. You are made of the sea and the stars, and one day you are going to find yourself again.” - Finn Butler

“If they don’t need you, it’s okay. You do not live for other people.” - Kyo

“That wasn’t sex, that was naked poetry.” - Hank Moody, Californication

“They tell us that the people we love are 72.8% water. There is no such thing as crying, we are only trying to turn ourselves inside out, and that is a noble pursuit.” - Lewis Mundt, Water (x)

“It’s okay to lock yourself in the medicine cabinet, to drink all the wine, to do what it takes to stay, without staying. It’s okay to hate God today, to change his name to yours, to want to ruin all that ruined you. It’s okay to feel like only a photograph of yourself, to need a stranger to pull your hair and pin you down. It’s okay to want your mother as you lie alone in bed. It’s okay to break, to fuck, to flame, to church, to crush, to knife, to rock, and rock, and rock, and rock, and rock, and rock. It’s okay to wave goodbye to yourself in the mirror. To write, ‘I don’t want anything.’ It’s okay to despise what you have inherited, to feel dead in a city of pulses.” - Rachel McKibbens, Letters From My Heart to my Brain (x)

“Inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are.” - Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.” - Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“Your sacred space is where you can find yourself over and over again.” - Joseph Campbell

“Who the hell said you no longer had it in you?” - Charles Bukowski

“You’ll need coffee shops and sunsets and road trips. Airplanes and passports and new songs and old songs, but people more than anything else. You will need other people and you will need to be that other person to someone else, a living breathing screaming invitation to believe better things.” - Jamie Tworkowski

“"I want to write a novel about Silence,” he said; “the things people don’t say.”“ - Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out

"My goofiest-sounding secret is that I also believe in magic. Sometimes I call it God and sometimes I call it light, and I believe in it because every now and then I read a really good book or hear a really good song or have a really good conversation with a friend and they seem to have some kind of shine to them. The list I keep of these moments in the back of my journal is comprised less of times when I was laughing or smiling and more of times when I felt like I could feel the colors in my eyes deepening from the display before me. Times in which I felt I was witnessing an all-encompassing representation of life driven by an understanding that, coincidence or not, our existence is a peculiar thing, and perhaps the greatest way to honor it is to just be human. To be happy AND sad, and everything else. And yeah, living is a pain, and I say I hate everyone and everything, and I don’t exude much enthusiasm when sandwiched between fluorescent lighting and vinyl flooring for six hours straight, and I will probably mumble a bunch about how much I wish I could sleep forever the next time I have to wake up at 6 AM. But make no mistake about it: I really do like living. I really, truly do.” - Tavi Gevinson (x)

“You want the truth? Well, here it is. Eventually, you forget it all. First you forget everything you learned – the dates of wars and the Pythagorean Theorem. You especially forget everything you didn’t really learn, but just memorized the night before. You forget the names of all but one or two of your favorite teachers, and eventually you forget those, too. You forget your junior year class schedule and where you used to sit and your best friend’s home phone number and the lyrics to that song you must have played a million times. And eventually, but slowly, you forget your humiliations – even the ones that seemed indelible, just fade away. You forget who was cool and who was not, who was pretty, smart, athletic, and not. Who went to a good college. Who threw the best parties. Who had the most friends. You forget all of them. Even the ones you said you loved, and the ones you actually did. They’re the last to go. And then once you’ve forgotten enough, you love someone else.” - Gabrielle Zevin, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

“And that is how change happens. One gesture. One person. One moment at a time.” - Libba Bray, The Sweet Far Thing

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” - Kurt Vonnegut

“I’m the crazy one who thinks that words reach people.” - Anne Sexton, A Self-Portrait in Letters

“Wasn’t that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted.” - Abraham Verghese, Cutting of the Stone

“We are more than the worst thing that’s ever happened to us. All of us need to stop apologizing for having been to hell and come back breathing.” -Clementine Von Radics, Broken

“How long has it been since someone touched part of you other than your body?” -Laurel Hoodwrit

“Get scared. It will do you good. Smoke a bit, stare blankly at some ceilings, beat your head against some walls, refuse to see some people, paint and write. Get scared some more. Allow your little mind to do nothing but function. Stay inside, go out - I don’t care what you’ll do; but stay scared as hell. You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetical justice to your soul and simply experience yourself.” - Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959

“Don’t google your name. Ever. Don’t “search” for yourself on anything that glows in the dark. Don’t let your beauty be something anyone can turn off. Don’t edit your ugly out of your bio. Let your light come from the fire. Let your pain be the spark, but not the timber. Remember, you didn’t come here to write your heart out. You came to write it in.” - Andrea Gibson

"Be yourself. You’re okay - Yohji yamamoto

"The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.” - ‘Sugar’, Dear Sugar, The Rumpus Advice Column #64: Tiny Beautiful Things (x)

“No matter how good things are, there will always be solitary nights you spend in your bedroom, in a car, or in a party full of your closest friends when it feels like the walls are caving in.” - Dan Campbell

“And I know fuck is a bad word/but it sounds so good/Good like flipping off the preacher whenever he forgets that Eve was Adam’s teacher/‘Cause apples are fucking healthy, you patriarchial piece of shit.” - Andrea Gibson, Slip Your Mind (x)

“Write to write. Write because you need to write. Write to settle the rage within you. Write with an internal purpose. Write about something or someone that means so much to you, that you don’t care what others think.” - Nick Miller, Isn’t It Pretty To Think So?

“You want to kiss all kinds of different people, you want to wake up in a stranger’s bed maybe once or twice just to see if it feels good to feel nothing, you want to have a group of friends that feels like a tribe, a bonafide family. You want to go from one place to the next constantly and have your weekends feel like one long epic day. You want to dance to stupid music in your stupid room and have a nice job that doesn’t get in the way of living your life too much. You want to be less scared, less anxious, and more willing. Because if you’re closed off now, you can only imagine what you’ll be like later.” - Ryan O’Connell, You’re Not Making The Most Out Of Your Twenties (x)

“It’s all easier said than done, and it isn’t even easy to say.” - Jeffrey Lewis, If Life Exists

“Confidence is being able to say ‘Fuck you, I’m the shit’ without opening your mouth, say it with your walk, with your smile, say it with your entire being.” - Tati-Ana Mercedes

“I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life.” - Voltaire, Candide: or, Optimism

“(exists no miracle mightier than this: to feel)” - e.e cummings “Sometimes suffering is just suffering. It doesn’t make you stronger. It doesn’t build character. It only hurts.” - Kate Jacobs, Comfort Food

“Once upon a time there was a girl who wanted to put her fist through a mirror. She would tell everyone it was so that she could see what was on the other side, but really, it was so that she wouldn’t have to look at herself. That, and because she thought she might be able to steal a piece of glass when no one was looking, and use it to carve her heart out of her chest.” - Jodi Picoult, Handle With Care

“And the rest is rust and stardust.” - Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“We’d said we’d keep in touch. But touch is not something you can keep; as soon as it’s gone, it’s gone. We should have said we’d keep in words, because they are all we can string between us—words on a telephone line, words appearing on a screen.” - David Levithan

“Leonardo’s Mona Lisa is just a thousand thousand smears of paint. Michelangelo’s David is just a million hits with a hammer. We’re all of us a million bits put together the right way.” - Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“I told her once I wasn’t good at anything. She told me survival is a talent.” - Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“It’s 4:30 in the morning, it’s always 4:30 in the morning.” - Charles Bukowski

“Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don’t.” - Bill Nye “People change and forget to tell each other.” - Lillian Hellman

“The whole world is you. Yet you keep thinking there is something else.” - Hsueh-Feng

"Building a library is the sanest form of hoarding.” - whatrachelreads’ Mother

“It’s funny, they named Mars after the God of War Have a look at Earth.” - Benedict Smith

“Somedays I pack all of my clothes into a suitcase just to remind myself that I am portable and disposable. Others, I write the names of my past lovers in the space between my breasts and marvel at how tough my heart is.” - Kait Rokowski

“I’m not much but I’m all I have.” - Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip

“Get in the shower if it all goes wrong.” - The 1975 (band), The City

“Whenever I’m in a crowded place, I always fall in lust with the face of a beautiful stranger I see. That same night I find myself laying in bed dreaming about the person I saw earlier and, by the time I wake up in the morning, they disappear from my mind. It’s an endless cycle.” - Alex Kazemi, Yours Truly, Brad Sela

"Isolation is not safety, it is death. If no one knows you’re alive, you aren’t. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, it does make a sound but then that sound is gone. I’m not saying you will find you meaning of life in other people, I’m saying other people are the life to which you provide with meaning. See, we’re wrong when we say I think therefore I am. the more we say it the more it sounds like I think therefore I will be. You cannot think yourself into a full table. You cannot think and make walls and a roof appear around you. I have thought and thought myself into corners made of words and nightmares and what has it gotten me but more thoughts; A currency that only buy me more currency. So please if you want to continue existing, do something. Learn to make clouds using only your breath, build a house even if every wall leans to the left. Love it anyway, just like a season, just like a child. Love how you hate yourself sometimes because god damn, at least there’s still something to hate.” - Neil Hilborn, This Is Not The End Of The World (x)

“Don’t let anyone, even your parents, break you. Find good people who care about you and surround yourself with just them. If you can’t find them at first, find good music and fall into it and let it hold you until they come.” - Davey Havok

“ ‘I want to touch people but if I touch them in real life they’ll slap me.’ That’s what writing is…it’s a gross person getting a hug.” - Dan Harmon

“come with every wound and every woman you’ve ever loved every lie you’ve ever told and whatever it is that keeps you up at night every mouth you’ve ever punched in all the blood you’ve ever tasted come with every enemy you’ve ever made and all the family you’ve ever buried and every dirty thing you’ve ever done every drink that’s burnt your throat and every morning you’ve woken with nothing and no one come with all your loss your regrets, sins memories black outs secrets come with all the rot in your mouth and that voice like needle hitting record come with your kind eyes and weeping knuckles come with all your shame come with your swollen heart i’ve never seen anything more beautiful than you.” - Warsan Shire, First Thought After Seeing You Smile

“Write beautifully what people don’t want to hear.” - Frederick Siedel

“Keep two pieces of paper in your pocket at all times. One that says ‘I am a speck of dust.’ And the other, ‘The world was created for me.’ - Rabbi Bunim of P’shiskha

"But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the sinner that needed it most?” - Mark Twain, Autobiography of Mark Twain

“As human beings, we have a natural compulsion to fill empty spaces.” - Will Shortz

“You deserve to take up space.” - Chimamamda Ngozi Adiche

“write how you want. what you want. the way you want. just make sure the words taste like you.” - Nayyirah Waheed

“We are not here to love just one person, we are here to love everything in existence.” - Ralph Smart

“Today I saw cancer, cigarettes, and shortness of breath. This is why I walk to the ocean. Swim with sharks and jellyfish. I may never get this chance again. This is why if you want to kiss, you should kiss. If you want to cry, you should cry. And if you want to live, you should live. You don’t have to love me. You already did.” - Ryan Ross

“No matter how often I think I can’t stand it anymore, I always do. There is no alternative. I don’t fall, I don’t foam at the mouth, faint, collapse or die. It’s the same for all of us. You can’t get out of the inside of your own head. Something keeps you going. Something always does.” -Janice Galloway, The Trick Is to Keep Breathing

“You asked me if I believed in magic, and I said yes, and that’s how. You just step out, start pulling your life out of the air. You make friends, you find work you really like doing, you find places. You find diners and Laundromats. You find beaches. You find a junk car and drive it for a month, then lave it beside the road. You find someone to fall in love with you. You make it all up as you go. Or, you know, maybe it makes you up.” - Brad Barkley, Dream Factory

“We are all mortal until the first kiss and the second glass of wine.” - Eduardo Galeano