"Gracious, soft-voiced girls, who were brought up on memories instead of money.”

--F Scott Fitzgerald, 'The Ice Palace'

“Sometimes you’ve got to be able to listen to yourself and be okay with no one else understanding.”

--Christopher Barzak

“That’s what people do who love you. They put their arms around you and love you when you’re not so lovable.”

--Deb Caletti

“I’m the kind of person who likes to be by himself. To put a finer point on it, I’m the type of person who doesn’t find it painful to be alone. I find spending an hour or two every day running alone, not speaking to anyone, as well as four or five hours alone at my desk, to be neither difficult nor boring. I’ve had this tendency ever since I was young, when, given a choice, I much preferred reading books on my own or concentrating on listening to music over being with someone else. I could always think of things to do by myself.”

--Haruki Murakami, 'What I Talk About When I Talk About Running'

“Lately I’ve been thinking about who I want to love, and how I want to love, and why I want to love the way I want to love, and what I need to learn to love that way, and who I need to become to become the kind of love I want to be…and when I break it all down, when I whittle it into a single breath, it essentially comes out like this: Before I die, I want to be somebody’s favorite hiding place, the place they can put everything they know they need to survive, every secret, every solitude, every nervous prayer, and be absolutely certain I will keep it safe. I will keep it safe.”

--Andrea Gibson

"Now: I believe that you've had most of your important memories by the time you're thirty. After that, memory becomes water overflowing into an already full cup. New experiences just don't register in the same way or with the same impact. I could be shooting heroin with the Princess of Wales, naked in a crashing jet, and the experience still couldn't compare to the time the cops chased us after we threw the Taylors' patio furniture into their pool in the eleventh grade. You know what I mean."

--Douglas Coupland, 'Life After God'

You listen to me. I've been alive a bit longer than you. And dead a lot longer than that. I've seen things you couldn't imagine. And done things I prefer you didn't. Don't exactly have a reputation for being a thinker. I follow my blood, which doesn't exactly rush in the direction of my brain. So I make a lot of mistakes. A lot of wrong bloody calls. A hundred-plus years. And there's only one thing I've ever been sure of. You. Hey, look at me. I'm not asking you for anything. When I say I love you, it's not because I want you. Or because I can't have you. It has nothin' to do with me. I love what you are. What you do. How you try. I've seen your kindness, and your strength. I've seen the best and the worst of you. And I understand, with perfect clarity, exactly what you are. You're a hell of a woman. You're the one.

"You can’t expect to find the right someone until you know who you are, what matters to you, and what makes your heart happy."

--Nicholas Jonas

With hearts... the best thing you can do is invite someone in, make them some tea, and secretly hope they don't break anything.

"What they say is, life goes on, and that is mostly true. The mail is delivered and the Christmas lights go up and down from the houses and the ladders get put away and you open yet another box of cereal. In time, the volume of my feelings would be turned down in gentle increments to near quiet, and yet the record would still spin, always spin."

--'Honey, Baby, Sweetheart'

"Sometimes love is a surprise, an instant of recognition, a sudden gift at a sudden moment that makes everything different from then on. Some people will say that's not love, that you can't really love someone you don't know. But, I'm not so sure. Love doesn't seem to follow a plan; it's not a series of steps. It can hit with the force of nature--an earthquake, a tidal wave, a storm of wild relentless energy that is beyond your simple attempts at control."

"We are all a volume on a shelf of a library, a story unto ourselves, never possibly described with one word or even very accurately with thousands. A person is never as quiet or unrestrained as they seem, or as bad or good, as vulnerable or as strong, as sweet or as fiesty; we are thickly layered, page upon lying page, behind simple covers. And love - it is not the book itself, but the binding. It can rip us apart or hold us together."

--'Honey, Baby, Sweetheart'

"I put the guitar back in the case. I can't even look at it anymore. Instead, I want to make brownies. I want an end result there's a recipe for. I want to combine eggs and water and oil and chocolate and flour and sugar and vanilla and get something fulfilling."

--'The Fortunes of Indigo Skye'

"Maybe love, too, is beautiful because it has a wildness that cannot be tamed. I don't know. All I know is that passion can take you up like a house of cards in a tornado, leaving destruction in its wake. Or it can let you alone because you've built a stone wall against it, set out the armed guards to keep it from touching you. The real trick is not to let it in, but to hold on. To understand that the heart is as wide and vast as the universe, but that we come to know it best from here, this place is gravity and stability, where our feet can still touch ground."

"It was more work than it seemed, looking through a telescope, as the Earth was continually moving and you had to move along with it. You don't realize how fast this actually happens, and it's kind of both creepy and wonderful when you stop to think about it. And it makes you realize there's absolutely no way to avoid change. You can sit there and cross your arms and refuse it, but underneath you, things are still spinning away."

--'Wild Roses'

“I’m not saying that at some point love isn’t staying up until 2 am phone calls or stealing kisses when you least expect it, or instantly falling for each other’s favorite songs because it is, or at least that’s what the lead up to it feels like, but real love, is so much more. It’s going out at 12 am to get something to eat for your wife who can’t get out of bed, it’s listening to them as they explode with vulnerability on your living room couch talking about how they were only so young when their parents passed on. It’s remembering how someone likes their coffee in the morning without asking—without ever asking, it’s visiting someone in the hospital knowing the last thing you want to do is see them in that condition, it’s wanting to be with that person despite everything, the future, the past, and everything in between, it’s the intimate things that you don’t even realize involve such intimacy, but they do, in secret, like the pinky promises you two made behind your back, to love one another for always, in the time you thought you were in love, when you were actually just on your way to it.”

Take only what you need

Beautiful things take dirty work

There is order in disorder

There are dances (and art) in the day-to-day

You can survive on work and flowers alone

Help others

Hurting others only hurts yourself

Likewise hurting yourself only hurts others

And of course productivity is the key to happiness - and staying alive

“I have always been a wretched speaker. My vocabulary dwells deep in my mind and needs paper to wriggle out into the physical zone. Spontaneous eloquence seems to me a miracle. I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasures.”

--Vladimir Nabokov

“Novels shouldn’t aspire to answer questions, and I wouldn’t presume to offer advice about love or marriage in any case. What’s fascinating to me about marriage as a subject for fiction—a subject that fiction has taken on with gusto since the 19th century—is how unknowable other people’s relationships are. Even the marriages of your parents, your siblings, your closest friends always remain something of a mystery. Only in fiction can you pretend to know people completely.”

--Nell Freudenberger as told to RL Magazine

“I want to be in a relationship where you telling me you love me is just a ceremonious validation of what you already show me.” 

--Steve Maraboli, 'Life, the Truth, and Being Free'

“As I look back on my life, I realize that every time I thought I was being rejected from something good, I was actually being re-directed to something better.”

--Steve Maraboli

“…Imagining it was a mountain, a distant mountain, my goal. As long as I kept walking towards the mountain, I would be alright. And when I truly was not sure what to do I could stop and think about whether it was taking me towards or away from the mountain.”

— Neil Gaiman commencement address

“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.”

--Zelda Fitzgerald

“I don’t think I was homesick. If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.”

--Willa Cather's 'My Antonia'

The shoulder blades

sticking out as if they

wanted to grow wings through

that skin. Little blades,

she was helpless.

--Charles Bukowski

“I came to tell you that you’re beautiful, I think you’re lovely, I think that you’re made for more than you settled for.”

--Levi the Poet

“One day, a long time from now, you’ll cease to care any more whom you please or what anybody has to say about you. That’s when you’ll finally produce the work you’re capable of.”

--J.D. Salinger

“Actually that’s my secret — I can’t even talk about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful you are.”

--F. Scott Fitzgerald, 'Tender Is the Night'

“I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires.” 

--F. Scott Fitzgerald, 'The Great Gatsby'

"Admit it. You aren’t like them. You’re not even close. You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them, watch the same mindless television shows as they do, maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes. But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, watching the “normal people” as they go about their automatic existences. For every time you say club passwords like “Have a nice day” and “Weather’s awful today, eh?”, you yearn inside to say forbidden things like “Tell me something that makes you cry” or “What do you think deja vu is for?”. Face it, you even want to talk to that girl in the elevator. But what if that girl in the elevator (and the balding man who walks past your cubicle at work) are thinking the same thing? Who knows what you might learn from taking a chance on conversation with a stranger? Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others…”

--Timothy Leary

“Fear is the cheapest room in the house

I would like to see you living

in better conditions.”

--Hafiz

“Why did he write to her,

“I can’t live without you”?

And why did she write to him,

“I can’t live without you”?

For he went west, she went east,

And they both lived.”

--Carl Sandburg

“The simple lack of her is more to me than others’ presence.”

--Edward Thomas

“She writes like she’s starving and reads like she’s feasting.”

--R.D. Larson

“The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life — and one is as good as the other.”

--Ernest Hemingway

“The goal for all women should be to make her own living and to support herself, to be self-sufficient. That is the philosophy of her clothes. They are working for modern women, women who do not need to assure their happiness by looking sexy to men, by emphasising their figures, but who attract them with their minds.”

--Rei Kawakubo (in an interview with Nicolas Coleridge in 1988)

“I’ve started my new meaningful life today and I bought a whole new meaningful wardrobe to go with it.”

--Phyllis Nefler, 'Troop Beverly Hills'

“Remember to look up at the stars, and not down to your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don’t just give up.”

--Stephen Hawking

“Food, fire, walks, dreams, cold, sleep, love, slowness, time, quiet, books, seasons – all these things, which are not really things, but moments of life – take on a different quality at night-time, where the moon reflects the light of the sun, and we have time to reflect what life is to us, knowing that it passes, and that every bit of it, in its change and its difference, is the here and now of what we have. Life is too short to be all daylight. Night is not less; it’s more.”

--Jeanette Winterson, Why I adore the night

“Loners, if you catch them, are well worth the trouble. Not dulled by excess human contact, nor blasé or focused on your crotch while jabbering about themselves, loners are curious, vigilant, full of surprises. They do not cling. Separate wherever they go, awake or asleep, they shimmer with the iridescence of hidden things seldom seen.”

--Anneli Rufus, 'Party of One: The Loners’ Manifesto'

“Your 20’s are your ‘selfish’ years. It’s a decade to immerse yourself in every single thing possible. Be selfish with your time, and all the aspects of you. Tinker with shit, travel, explore, love a lot, love a little, and never touch the ground.”

--Kyoko Escamilla

“It’s a sad day when you find out that it’s not accident or time or fortune, but just yourself that kept things from you.”

--Lillian Hellman

“My name is Russell Greene. Maybe you passed me and my family out on the highway. Maybe you were driving some fancy sports car or an old beat up four-door. Maybe you had someplace to be. Or maybe like us you’re living out your dream with your house hitched up behind you, and America the Beautiful up ahead. But whoever you are you be sure to give us a wave the next time you drive by. Cause we’re your neighbors, and we’re all on the road together.”

--Opening credits narration of 'Promised Land'