"Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

--

• "Isn't it funny how day by day nothing changes but when you look back everything is different?" - C.S. Lewis
• “Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one!'” - C.S. Lewis
• "Work hard and be nice to people" - Anthony Burrill
• How to Ruin Your Life by Mila Jaroniec
  • Stay in one place your whole life. Always order vanilla even though the menu is four pages long. Become the type of person who sends back lattes. Save up your money for a plasma TV instead of a plane ticket. Talk a lot about things you know nothing about. Have an affair with someone you don’t even find attractive.
  • Refuse to forget your ex. Make it impossible for yourself to do anything without remembering that you used to do it with them. Hug your knees under the sheets and think about how safe you felt when they held you at night. Remind yourself daily of how empty you feel. Find new ways to make yourself sad.
  • Get drunk all the time. Consider no Saturday night, national holiday or extended happy hour complete without a vodka-induced breakdown. Graduate college but keep drinking like you’re still in it. Notice that cheap beer tastes watery and stale when you drink it alone but drink it anyway. Look at old Facebook photos wasted and wonder where everyone went.
  • Never drink. Never do anything that could potentially be “bad” for you. Treat your body like the temple it is and say no to carbs, yes to wheatgrass, go to bed at ten sharp and turn down cake on your birthday. Take fifteen different dietary supplements. Monitor carefully. Succumb to nothing. Miss out on everything.
  • Compare yourself constantly, to everyone. Allow the standards of image-obsessed, age-obsessed culture to make you feel decrepit at 25. Scroll through skinny girls on Tumblr feeling wistful and inadequate. Pull at the skin on your hipbones, stomach, and underarms in the mirror. Sigh a lot. Sigh all the time.
  • Don’t fall in love with anyone or anything. Put an impenetrable wall between yourself and other people. Add a fire-breathing dragon and eight yards of barbed wire. Be suspicious of everyone’s motives. Hold grudges long after you’ve forgotten what for.
  • Fall in love with everyone and everything. Run after the next best thing like it’s a bus you’re perpetually late for. Throw your heart into every other stranger’s hands and be genuinely surprised to be hurt. Refuse to learn. Refuse to ever learn.
• Good Advice:
  • Dream in soft colors
  • Eat well and enjoy it
  • Don't argue without purpose
  • Tell the truth
  • Have age appropriate habits
  • Read
  • Keep a journal
  • Don't judge
  • Don't worry
• Symptoms of Inner Peace: A tendency to think and act spontaneously rather than on fears based on past experiences. An unmistakable ability to enjoy each moment. A loss of interest in judging other people. A loss of interest in interpreting the actions of other people. A loss of interest in conflict. A loss of the ability to worry. Frequent, overwhelming episodes of appreciation. Contended feelings of connectedness with others and nature. An increasing tendency to let things happen rather than make them happen.
• "Instead of Killing Yourself" by Derrick C. Brown
  • Wait until a year from now where you say, “Holy fuck, I can’t believe I was going to kill myself before I etcetera’d… before I went skinny dipping in Tennessee, made my own IPA, tried out for a game show, rode a camel drunk, skydived alone, learned to waltz with clumsy old people, photographed electric jellyfish, built a sailboat from trash, taught someone how to read, etc. etc. etc.” The red washing down the bathtub can’t change the color of the sea at all.
• "Boys are made of hard things and stubble and sometimes suede and brick. Girls are soft. Like mushy fruit." - http://williammillersyndrome.tumblr.com/
• “I’ll leave you with one final thought: no one ever lay on their deathbed and thought, “Damn, what a waste of a life. If only I’d been a size zero.” Believe.” - Hadley Freeman, The Guardian UK
• “When the right person comes you won’t need space.” - Rachel
• Top Five Regrets of the Dying, Susie Steiner, Guardian UK
  • I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
  • I wish I hadn't worked so hard.
  • I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.
  • I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
  • I wish that I had let myself be happier.
• "Things don't need to last forever to be perfect" - Daydream Nation (2010)
• "What really matters is what you like. Not what you are like. Books, records, films. These things matter. Call me shallow, its the fuckin' truth" - High Fidelity
• "Dear Mr. Vernon, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong. What we did *was* wrong. But we think you're crazy to make an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us... In the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal. Does that answer your question? Sincerely yours, The Breakfast Club" - The Breakfast Club (1985)
• “Adolescence is best enjoyed without self-consciousness, but self-consciousness, unfortunately, is its leading symptom. Even when something important happens to you, even when your heart’s getting crushed or exalted, even when you’re absorbed in building the foundations of a personality, there comes these moments when you’re aware that what’s happening is not the real story. Unless you actually die, the real story is still ahead of you. This alone, this cruel mixture of consciousness and irrelevance, this built-in hollowness, is enough to account for how pissed off you are.” ― Jonathan Franzen, The Discomfort Zone
• “I want to hear raucous music, to see faces, to brush against bodies, to drink fiery Bénédictine. Beautiful women and handsome men arouse fierce desires in me. I want to dance. I want drugs. I want to know perverse people, to be intimate with them. I never look at naïve faces. I want to bite into life, and to be torn by it.” - Anaïs Nin
• “Be happy for no reason, like a child. If you are happy for a reason, you’re in trouble, because that reason can be taken from you.” - Deepak Chopra
• "You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don’t owe it to your mother, you don’t owe it to your children, you don’t owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked “female”." - http://www.dressaday.com/2006/10/you-dont-have-to-be-pretty.html
• "You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got. And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever. And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives. And you’ll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they’ll be comforted to know your energy’s still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly. Amen." - Aaron Freeman
• "But I’m not gonna sit around and waste my precious divine energy, trying to explain and be ashamed of things you think are wrong with me." - Esperanza Spalding