• "The eyes and the faces all turned themselves toward me, and guiding myself by them, as by a magical thread, I stepped into the room." - Esther Greenwood, The Bell Jar
• My goal is not to wake up at age 40 with the bitter realization that I have wasted my life on a job I hate because I was forced to deside on a career in my teens. ~ Daria
• "I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can’t be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head." The Journals of Sylvia Plath
• "And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt." Sylvia Plath
• “ If homosexuality is a disease, let’s all call in queer to work: ‘Hello. Can’t work today, still queer. ” Robin Tyler
• " I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am" - Sylvia Plath
• "The Best poets
  
  of the Romantic era created the illusion of spontaneity, seeming to be lost in their feelings or swept away by the beauty of the world when in fact they remained in total command of meter, rhyme, and imagery. Technically virtuosic yet often rebellious in spirit, they achieved broad and enduring popularity."
• "Art is for the artist is only suffering through which he releases himself for further suffering." - Franz Kafka
• "
• “Fashions fade, style is eternal.” Yves Saint Laurent (French fashion designer, 1940s
• I've forgotten your face/ In the rains of November/ I've forgotten your voice/ I don't want to remember from Rainsong by Phyllis A. Whitney
• The idea of an afterlife is simply there to give existence a meaning - to give sixty years of banality a sense of purpose. I mean, the idea of an afterlife is just as valid as the idea of a hot dinner - it all depends if you’re hungry." Robert Smith
• "I don't do drugs, I am drugs." - Salvador Dali
• "A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us." Franz Kafka
• “We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone.”  Orson Welles
• “Come sleep with me: We won’t make love, love will make us.” Julio Cortázar
• “We accept the world of reality which we are represented.” - The Truman Show
• "Constantly talking isn’t necessarily communicating." - Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind
• Even amidst flames the golden lotus can be planted
• "Ideally the work is not a manifestation of an idea, the work is the idea" - Rafael Rozendaal
• "a single dream is more powerful than a thousand realities." - Tolkien
• "What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? An idea. Resilient... highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it's almost impossible to eradicate. An idea that is fully formed - fully understood - that sticks; right in there somewhere." Inception
• "The dreamer can always remember the genesis of the idea. True inspiration is impossible to fake." Inception
• "I find I can encapsulate things in a few verses which I couldn’t do in a thousand words." - Martin Bell
• "Art is the only salvation from the horror of existence."
• "I find it so much easier to be creatively free at night. Daytime is for sleeping. Nighttime is the best time for making art. The later at night it gets, the further into another world you go." — Mark Ryden
• "We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, "O me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless... of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?" Answer: that you are here; that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?" - John Keating (Dead Poets Society)
• "I am still so naïve; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?" — Sylvia Plath
• "No matter who weaves in and out of your life, regardless of the quality of those deep friendships and familyships, I'm the only common denominator at this point who's been with me the whole time. And there's this sense of trying to make sense of that ultimate solitude. It's not a negative or even a positive. It's just a fact." - Feist
• "I am so beautiful, sometimes people weep when they see me. And it has nothing to do with what I look like really, it is just that I gave myself the power to say that I am beautiful, and if I could do that, maybe there is hope for them too. And the great divide between the beautiful and the ugly will cease to be. Because we are all what we choose.-Margaret Cho
• "People always ask me, ‘You have so much confidence. Where did that come from?’ It came from me. One day I decided that I was beautiful, and so I carried out my life as if I was a beautiful girl … It doesn’t have anything to do with how the world perceives you. What matters is what you see. Your body is your temple, it’s your home, and you must decorate it.” —Gabourey Sidibe
• "My best friend’s mother once told me something that always stuck with me. When discussing marriage, you must figure out if you see eye to eye on three things: Sex, politics, and religion. If you don’t, you probably shouldn’t be together." - Ryan O'Connell
• "I don't wanna believe, but be, in love" - Twin Shadow
• I no longer believed in the idea of soul mates, or love at first sight. But I was beginning to believe that a very few times in your life, if you were lucky, you might meet someone who was exactly right for you. Not because he was perfect, or because you were, but because your combined flaws were arranged in a way that allowed two separate beings to hinge together." - Lisa Kleypas
• "I couldn't help but wonder..." - Carrie Bradshaw
• “A writer’s duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.” — Zadie Smith
• "Art should disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed"
• ""But I think it’s intoxicating when somebody is so unapologetically who they are." - Don Cheadle
• “The first choice an artist makes is precisely to be an artist, and if he chooses to be an artist it is in consideration of what he is himself and because of a certain idea he has of art” - Albert Camus
• "...so you plant your own garden and decorate your own soul instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers." - translated by Veronica A. Shoffstall, Louis Borges “After a While
• "People of all sexes have the right to explore femininity, masculinity—and the infinite variations between—without criticism or ridicule.” - Leslie Feinburg
• 31

Journalist: Do you feel, however, that we’re making progress in this country?

Malcolm X: No, no. I will never say that progress is being made. If you stick a knife in my back 9 inches and pull it out 6 inches, that’s not progress. If you pull it all the way out, that’s not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. They won’t even admit that the knife is there!

• "

It was like a flowering. In my heart and my mind, that two-spirit side of myself—all of my feminine energy and power—flowered, and that’s a really mystical and ancient concept that’s mirrored in many cultures, both indigenous western and eastern. I shouldn’t oversimplify it and say just because I received positive sexual attention from men I continue to cross-dress—it was literally all the chakras aligning, and that sexual energy is a part of life.- Mykki Blanco on crossdressing and exploring his transgender identity "