- “Most people think happiness is about gaining something, but it’s not. It’s all about getting rid of the darkness you accumulate.” -Carolyn Crane
- "The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it." -Salman Rushdie
- "Home is in my hair, my lips, my arms, my thighs, my feet and my hands. I am my own home. And when I wake up crying in the morning, thinking of how lonely I am, I pinch my skin, tug at my hair, remind myself that I am alive. Remind myself to step outside and greet the morning. Remind myself that it’s all about forward motion. It’s all about change. It’s all about that elusive state. Freedom." -Diriye Osman, Fairytales for Lost Children
- “We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.” -Maya Angelou
- "And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth." -Raymond Carver
- "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" -Warsan Shire
- "So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it’s the hardest to do anything with. That’s about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what." — Margaret Atwood
- "How do you lose a word? Does it vanish into your memory, like an old toy in a cupboard, and lie hidden in the cobwebs and dust, waiting to be cleaned out or rediscovered?" -Amitav Ghosh
- "Some souls one will never discover, unless one invents them first." -Friedrich Nietzsche, from Thus Spoke Zarathustra
- "And yet it disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional." -Margaret Atwood
- "It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it’s called Life." —Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent
- "I’m not doing anything that is going to destroy me. Still, there is something quiet left behind. Like sediment in a bottle of wine." — Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
- "There are always flowers for those who want to see them." — Henri Matisse
- "It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about." —Albert Camus, A Happy Death
- “At first the solitude charmed me like a prelude, but so much music wounded me.” — Rainer Maria Rilke, from Music
- "That’s what really scares me. Falling in love is easy. Having sex is easier. But bumping into someone that can spark your soul - that shit is rare. You could fuck four, five, all the people in a god damned room and you’d only feel a connection with one. Or none at all. And what sucks is despite the undeniable real magnetic pull between the two of you, more often than not, you don’t end up together. I’m afraid I won’t meet anyone else I can connect with. I’m scared it’ll be just you." — Sade Andria Zabala (surfandwrite) | Connection
- "A lot of being a poet consists of willed ignorance. If you woke up from your trance and realized the nature of the life-threatening and dignity-destroying precipice you were walking along, you would switch into actuarial sciences immediately." — Margaret Atwood
- "I remember wishing I could be boiled like water and made pure again." — Jeffrey McDaniel
- "I felt as though I was partly unlearning what I had never learned and yet knew so well: I mean, how to live." — Albert Camus, The Fall
- "I must wash myself clean with abstract thoughts, transparent as water." — Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
- "How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words." — David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
- "You are personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the society you grew up in." — Eliezer Yudkowsky
- "Don’t ever put your happiness in someone else’s hands. They’ll drop it. They’ll drop it everytime." — One For Sorrow, C.Barzak
- "Why do we always choose the opposite of what we want? I think, because we don’t want to be dependent. When two people love each other, they don’t love in the same way. One of them is strong, the other is weaker. And the weaker is always the one who loves without reckoning, without reservation. It feels now as if I’ve awakened from some kind of dream after some other kind of life. For some reason, I always offered resistance. I fought against something. I defended myself, just as though I’d had someone else inside me saying: don’t give into anything, don’t go along with anything or you’ll die." — The Sacrifice, dir. by Andrei Tarkovsky, 1986
- "When I give, I give myself." — Walt Whitman
- "I am finding quieter ways to love you." — Maza-Dohta
- "Be committed, not attached. But more importantly, know the difference." — Kai, Lessons in Life #21
- "I am a lover without a lover. I am lovely and lonely and I belong deeply to myself." — Warsan Shire
- "Compassion hurts. When you feel connected to everything, you also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away. Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others. You must either learn to carry the Universe or be crushed by it. You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors." — Andrew Boyd, Daily Afflictions: The Agony of Being Connected to Everything in the Universe
- "Vincent van Gogh used to eat yellow paint because he thought it would get the happiness inside him. Many people thought he was mad and stupid for doing so because the paint was toxic, never mind that it was obvious that eating paint couldn’t possibly have any direct correlation to one’s happiness, but I never saw that. If you were so unhappy that even the maddest ideas could possible work, like painting the walls of your internal organs yellow, then you are going to do it. It’s really no different than falling in love or taking drugs. There is a greater risk of getting your heart broken or overdosing, but people still do it everyday because there was always that chance it could make things better. Everyone has their yellow paint."
- "Be like the flower
who even gives its fragrance to the hand that crushes it" — Imam Ali
- "How you vibrate is what the universe echoes back to you." — Panache
- "Nothing is real; does red mean stop or have you been taught that?" — Gordanna Duric
- "Everybody’s chest is a living room wall with awkwardly placed photographs hiding fist-shaped holes." — Andrea Gibson, The Madness Vase
- "I don’t know what they are called, the spaces between sounds—but I think of you always in those intervals." — Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper
- "I don’t pay attention to the world ending. It has ended for me many times and began again in the morning." — Nayyirah Waheed
- "She waited for the train to pass. Then she said, “I sometimes think that people’s hearts are like deep wells. Nobody knows what’s at the bottom. All you can do is imagine by what comes floating to the surface every once in a while.” -Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
- "Her sentences were icebergs, with just the tip of her thought coming out of her mouth, and the rest kept up in her head, which I was starting to think was more and more beautiful the longer I looked at her." — Gregory Galloway
- "And every day, the world will drag you by the hand, yelling, “This is important! And this is important! And this is important! You need to worry about this! And this! And this!” And each day, it’s up to you to yank your hand back, put it on your heart and say, “No. This is what’s important." — Iain S. Thomas, I Wrote This for You
- "I have noticed that when all the lights are on, people tend to talk about what they are doing – their outer lives. Sitting round in candlelight or firelight, people start to talk about how they are feeling – their inner lives. They speak subjectively, they argue less, there are longer pauses. To sit alone without any electric light is curiously creative. I have my best ideas at dawn or at nightfall, but not if I switch on the lights – then I start thinking about projects, deadlines, demands, and the shadows and shapes of the house become objects, not suggestions, things that need to done, not a background to thought." — Jeanette Winterson
- "At a certain point, I just have to try not to think too much about certain things, or else they’ll break my heart." — Jonathan Franzen
- "Time has a funny way of collapsing when you go back to a place you once loved. You find yourself thinking, I was kissed in that building, I climbed up that tree." — Ann Patchett
apr 5 2014 ∞
jul 10 2014 +