e. e. cummings

• "I spill my bright incalculable soul."
• "for what ever we lost (like a you or a me), it's always ourselves we find in the sea."
• “Your head is a living forest full of songbirds.”
• "You are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing."
• “It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.”

sarah williams

• though my soul may set in darkness, / it will rise in perfect light. // i have loved the stars too fondly / to be fearful of the night.

edgar allan poe

• "And all I loved, I loved alone."
• "Sometimes I’m terrified of my heart; of its constant hunger for whatever it is it wants. The way it stops and starts."
• “I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
• “Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.”

f. scott fitzgerald

• "She was dressed in a white little gown that came just below her knees, and a wreath of mignonettes clasped with blue slices of sapphire bound up her hair. Her pink bare feet scattered the dew before them as she came. She was younger than John -- not more than sixteen." // "Hello," she cried softly. "I'm Kismine." She was much more than that to John already."
• “Think how you love me,” she whispered. “I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember.” // “You’ll always be like this to me.” // “Oh no; but promise me you’ll remember." Her tears were falling. “I’ll be different, but somewhere lost inside me there’ll always be the person I am tonight.”
• "She wanted to crawl into his pocket and be safe forever."
• "I’d like to feel that you know I’m thinking of you and loving you always."
• "Angry, and half in love with you, and tremendously sorry, I turned away."
• "I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect. And it’s these things I’d believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn’t all she should be. I love her and that’s the beginning and the end of everything." (About Zelda Fitzgerald).
• "For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. 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." (To Zelda Fitzgerald).
• "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."

albert goldbarth

• The Sciences Sing a Lullaby

francesca lia block

• "Just like any woman, we weave our stories out of our bodies. Some of us through our children, or our art; some do it just by living. It's all the same."

welcome to night vale

• “Whisper a dangerous secret to someone you care about. Now they have the power to destroy you, but they won’t. This is what love is.”
• "Listeners, listeners out there, listeners out in the vacant night clinging to my voice as a simulacrum of companionship, remember: fear is just consciousness, plus life. Regret is an attempt to avoid what has already happened. Toast is bread, held under direct heat until crisp. The present tense of regret is indecision. The future tense of fear is either comedy or tragedy. And the past tense of toast is toasted."
• "We have nothing to fear except ourselves. We are unholy, awful people. Fear ourselves with silence. Look down, Night Vale, look down, and forget what you've done."

romans 5:8

• "I loved you at your darkest."

countess markievicz, 19th-century irish revolutionary

• "Dress suitably in short skirts and strong boots, leave your jewels in the bank, and buy a revolver."

adventure time

• "I look fresh to death with my new dress and purse."
• "Princess, I love you! I love you so much it hurts! The pain, it -- oh!" / "What you're feeling is called infatuation. The pain is a product of you overvaluing a projected imaginary relationship with me."
• "Dude, sucking at something is the first step to being sort of good at something."

neil gaiman

• "People think dreams aren't real just because they aren't made of matter, of particles. Dreams are real. But they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and puns and lost hopes."
• “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.”

“Be hole, be dust, be dream, be wind/Be night, be dark, be wish, be mind,/Now slip, now slide, now move unseen,/Above, beneath, betwixt, between.”

• "Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds’ eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas-abstract, invisible, gone once they’ve been spoken-and what could be more frail than that? But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created."
• "I fell for her like a suicide from a bridge."
• "Nothing’s changed. You’ll go home. You’ll be bored. You’ll be ignored. No one will listen to you, really listen to you. You’re too clever and too quiet for them to understand. They don’t even get your name right."
• “Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.”
• “I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing.”
• “There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts.”

marilyn monroe

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

greta garbo

• "I like the sea: we understand one another. It is always yearning, sighing for something it cannot have; and so am I."
• “There are many things in your heart you can never tell to another person. They are you, your private joys and sorrows, and you can never tell them. You cheapen yourself, the inside of yourself, when you tell them.”
• “Perhaps it's better if I live in your heart, where the world can't see me. If I'm dead, there will be no stain on our love.” (Camille)
• "We cannot help our nature, as God has created it. But I have always thought you and I belonged together." (in a letter to her old friend, Mimi Pollack).
• “I dream of seeing you and discovering whether you still care as much about your old bachelor. I love you, little Mimosa.” (in a letter to Mimi Pollack).
• “The letter from you has aroused a storm of longing within me.” (in a letter to Mimi Pollack).

ralph hodgson

• "Without a wish, without a will, I stood upon that silent hill, And stared into the sky until, My eyes were blind with stars and still, I stared into the sky."

j. k. rowling

• "It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live."

j. m. barrie

• "You know that place between sleeping and awake, that place where you can still remember dreaming? That's where I'll always think of you."
• "Stars are beautiful, but they may not take an active part in anything, they must just look on for ever. It is a punishment put on them for something they did so long ago that no star now knows what it was. So the older ones have become glassy-eyed and seldom speak (winking is the star language), but the little ones still wonder."
• “To die would be an awfully big adventure.”
• “Never say goodbye because goodbye means going away and going away means forgetting.”
• “Dreams do come true, if only we wish hard enough. You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it.”

pablo neruda

• "You are like the night, calm and constellated. / Your silence is starlike, as distant, as true."
• "Tonight I can write the saddest lines. / I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too."
• "You swallowed everything, like distance. Like the sea, like time. In you everything sank."
• “I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, / in secret, between the shadow and the soul.”

c. s. lewis

• "To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable."
• “Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
• "And men said that the blood of the stars flowed in her veins."

j. r. r. tolkien

• "Not all who wander are lost."
• “How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart, you begin to understand, there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep…that have taken hold.”

vincent van gogh

• "For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream."

lewis carrol

• "If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?"

vincent van gogh

• "For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream."

raymond dufayel

• "So, little Amelie. 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."

lemony snicket

• "Young writers should read books past bedtime and write things down in notebooks when they are supposed to be doing something else."
• “People aren't either wicked or noble. They're like chef's salads, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict.”
• "I will love you as..."
• "It is likely I will die next to a pile of things I was meaning to read."
• “I love no one but you, I have discovered, but you are far away and I am here alone. Then this is my life and maybe, however unlikely, I’ll find my way back there. Or maybe, one day, I’ll settle for second best. And on that same day, hell will freeze over, the sun will burn out and the stars will fall from the sky.”
• to/for beatrice --
  • "Darling, dearest, dead."
  • "My love for you shall live forever. / You, however, did not."
  • "I would much prefer it if you were alive and well."
  • "My love flew like a butterfly / Until death swooped down like a bat / As the poet Emma Montana McElroy said: / "That's the end of that."
  • "You will always be in my heart, / in my mind, / and in your grave."
  • "When we were together, I felt breathless. / Now, you are."
  • "Summer without you is as cold as winter. / Winter without you is even colder."
  • "Our love broke my heart, / and stopped yours."
  • "When we met, you were pretty, and I was lonely. / Now, I'm pretty lonely."
  • "Dead women tell no tales. / Sad men write them down."

ray bradbury

• “How do you get so empty? Who takes it out of you?”

oscar wilde

• “Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.”
• "We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell."

margaret atwood

• "I exist in two places,/ here and where you are"

peter s. beagle

• “Great heroes need great sorrows and burdens, or half their greatness goes unnoticed. It is all part of the fairy tale.”
• “We are not always what we seem, and hardly ever what we dream.”
• “Real magic can never be made by offering someone else's liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back.”
• “Your name is a golden bell hung in my heart. I would break my body to pieces to call you once by your name.”
• “I have been mortal, and some part of me is mortal yet. I am full of tears and hunger and the fear of death, although I cannot weep, and I want nothing, and I cannot die. I am not like the others now, for no unicorn was ever born who could regret, but I do. I regret.”

a. a. milne

• “If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you.”
• “Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind. "Pooh?" he whispered. / "Yes, Piglet?" / "Nothing," said Piglet, taking Pooh's hand. "I just wanted to be sure of you.”
• “If ever there is tomorrow when we're not together... there is something you must always remember. You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. But the most important thing is, even if we're apart... I'll always be with you.”
• “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”
• “Some people care too much. I think it's called love.”
• “I think we dream so we don’t have to be apart for so long. If we’re in each other’s dreams, we can be together all the time.”
• “Sometimes the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.”

jeffrey eugenides

• “Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly."
• “We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.”

anais nin

• “I’m restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.”

vladimir nabokov

• "I looked and looked at her, and I knew, as clearly as I know that I will die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth."
• "Oh, but she had been so pretty in the weaving of those delicate spells, in the dreamy performance of her enchantments…"
• "Such were the monsters that thrived on my delirium, and the only way to prevent them from crowding me out of myself was to kill them by extracting their hearts."
• "And the rest is rust and stardust."
• Intro to Lolita
• “My Lolita. Honey-limbed, golden, sparkling river nymph. Lolita.”
• "But that mimosa grove - the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since."

alice hoffman

• "The moon is always jealous of the heat of the day, just as the sun always longs for something dark and deep."

antoine de saint exupery

• "You’re beautiful, but you’re empty. No one could die for you."

leonard cohen

• "Everything depends on how near you sleep to me."

zelda fitzgerald

• "Something in me vibrates to a dusky, dreamy smell of dying moons and shadows."
• “Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.”
• “She refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn't boring.”
• “I love you, even if there isn’t any me, or any love, or even any life. I love you.”
• “I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.”
• “I remember every single spot of light that ever gouged a shadow beside your bones.”
• “My dear, I think of you always and at night I build myself a warm nest of things I remember and float in your sweetness till morning.”
• "I don’t suppose I really know you very well - but I know you smell like the delicious damp grass that grows near old walls and that your hands are beautiful opening out of your sleeves and that the back of your head is a mossy sheltered cave when there is trouble in the wind and that my cheek just fits the depression in your shoulder."

roald dahl

• “And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.”

joyce carol

• “I never change, I simply become more myself.”

ralph waldo emerson

• “When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.”

sylvia plath

• "If the moon smiled, she should resemble you. You leave the same impression, of something beautiful, but annihilating."
• "I like you, but not too much. I don’t want to like anybody too much."
• "I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me."
• “I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited.”

frances hodgson burnett

• “Everything's a story -- You are a story -- I am a story.”

george r. r. martin

• "My skin has turned to porcelain, to ivory, to steel."
• “You were made to be kissed, often and well.”
• “Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end. Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smokestacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark. Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot. Fantasy flies on the wings of Icarus, reality on Southwest Airlines. Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true? We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think. To taste strong spices and hear the songs the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La. They can keep their heaven. When I die, I’d sooner go to Middle-Earth.”

mary oliver

• "(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)/ Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. / It took me years to understand / that this, too, was a gift."

haruki murakami

• "The answer is dreams. Dreaming on and on. Entering the world of dreams and never coming out. Living in dreams for the rest of time."
• "If you remember me, I don't care if everyone else forgets."

tyler knott gregson

• "Do I haunt you there, / there in the space I don’t fill, / the hollow in you?"

rudy francisco

• "Never ever forget that you are a constellation / And I have owned a telescope since the day I was born."

charles dickens

• “She was more than human to me. She was a Fairy, a Sylph, I don’t know what she was - anything that no one ever saw, and everything that everybody ever wanted. I was swallowed up in an abyss of love in an instant. There was no pausing on the brink; no looking down, or looking back; I was gone, headlong, before I had sense to say a word to her.”

audrey niffenegger

• "Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion."

stephen king

• "Monsters are real, ghosts are real, too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win."

frankie magazine

• "There was a little girl, with a bookcase for a heart. Whose dusty, lonely shelves, longed for swan songs to impart. And came a dawn hued book, with pages stained which dwell, in worlds of wondering whimsy, which reality could not quell. With lashes softly crotched, around lyric violet eyes, the little girl looked up, to tug boats clearing skies. A night where stars would fly, instead of tarnished fall. And where a bookcase for a heart, was not a bad thing after all."

salvador plascencia

• "I don’t know what they are called, the spaces between seconds– but I think of you always in those intervals."

t. e. lawrence

• "All people dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their mind wake in the day to find out it was vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous people, for they man act their dream with open eyes to make it possible."

charles de lint

• "The moon likes secrets. And secret things. She lets mysteries bleed into her shadows and leaves us to ask whether they originated from otherworlds, or from our own imaginations."

nikos kazantzakis

• "I am a weak, ephemeral creature made of mud and dream. But I feel all the powers of the universe whirling within me."

warsan shire

• "You want me to be a tragic backdrop so that you can appear to be illuminated, so that people can say ‘Wow, isn’t he so terribly brave to love a girl who is so obviously sad?’ You think I’ll be the dark sky so you can be the star? I’ll swallow you whole."
• “You tried to change, didn’t you? Closed your mouth more, tried to be softer, prettier, less volatile, less awake…You can’t make homes out of human beings. Someone should have already told you that.”

proverbs

• "Be humble for you are made of earth. Be noble for you are made of stars." (Serbian)

king james i

• “I desire only to live in this world for your sake, and I would rather live banished in any part of the earth with you than live a sorrowful widow’s life without you.” (in a letter to his secret lover, the Duke of Birmingham).

mark twain

• “Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else.”
• “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born, and the day you figure out why.”

george orwell

• “The smell of her hair, the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have got inside him, or into the air all around him. She had become a physical necessity.”

edna st. vincent millay

• Witch-Wife

michael ondaatje

• “There was a time when mapmakers named the places they travelled through with the names of lovers rather than their own.”

roland barthes

• A Lover's Discourse

francis chappell

• Narcissus and Echo

natalie goldberg

• "Writers end up writing about their obsessions. Things that haunt them; things they can’t forget; stories they carry in their bodies waiting to be released."

linh dinh

• “I don’t know if you or I exist, but somewhere there are poems about us.”

kathleen flenniken

• “When I die, lava will flow and preserve me whole / for 50,000 years. I’ll be exhibited in a great museum, / next to the whale bones and amethyst geodes. / You’ll be pinned with the butterflies, handled with gloves, exquisitely fragile. // Isn’t it funny they’ll never connect us? / This rock woman with that paper man? / They were never in love. / She would have pounded him into dust. / He’d have been crushed by a woman like that.”

frida kahlo

• "I love you more than my own skin and even though you don’t love me the same way, you love me anyways, don’t you? And if you don’t, I’ll always have the hope that you do, and I’m satisfied with that. Love me a little. I adore you."

machado de assis:

• "To him the stars seemed like so many musical notes affixed in the sky, just waiting for someone to unfasten them. Someday the sky would be emptied, but by then the earth would be a constellation of musical scores."

charles bukowski

• “You have to die a few times before you can really live.”

unknown

• "Here in the forest, / dark and deep, / I offer you / eternal sleep."
• I Am Not Depressed
• "there are poems / sculpted under /your ribs that / i cannot touch."
• "i worry..."
• In Case I Decide to Drown Myself... , Samantha's Little Book of Potential Suicide Notes.
• Out...
• "Those who are heartless once cared too much."
• A Suicide Note
• Lolita
• The Atlas
• "Little girl, little girl, / why are you crying? / Inside your restless soul / your heart is dying."
• "your hands remind me / of shipwrecks, their sails / forever at half-mast, wooden / planks wailing as we kiss. // i am the storm, / and i promise, i will make / a seabed of you."
• “I want you to crave me. From my lips, up to my words.”
• { stars }
• Unrequited
• “Everything I love has either ruined me or watched as I ruined it instead.”
• What Girls Are Made Of
• داخل نفسي هو المكان الذي أعيش فيه وحده كل شيء. Inside myself is a place where I live all alone.
• love; to inspire
• "but here is the secret / that no one dares breathe / for fear of opening their mouths / only to have their lungs fumigated / with the coiling tongues of ghosts— // I adore you / and I only need / your gossamer skin / upon my aching chest / to feel like I’m worth / the atoms of me."
• "i hope one day you find someone who makes flowers grow in even the saddest parts of you"
• "you tell me about the little life you have left inside your body / and I want to say that even in the dark / you are the brightest soul I’ve known"
• i am jealous of the moon