“The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.”

--Albert Ellis

"We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures."

--Thornton Wilder

“The end of a trip leaves me with a sad aftertaste the same as the end of a novel… When I am returning from a trip, the best part is not going through the airport or getting home, but the taxi ride in between: you’re still traveling, but not really.”

--Édouard Levé

“I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life—and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.”

--Georgia O’Keefe

“It’s just that I feel so sad these wonderful nights. I sort of feel they’re never coming again, and I’m not really getting all I could out of them.”

--F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I have more memories than if I’d lived a thousand years.”

--Charles Baudelaire, from “Spleen (II)”, in “The Flowers of Evil”, trans. William Aggeler

“I’ve got a bad case of the 3:00 am guilts - you know, when you lie in bed awake and replay all those things you didn’t do right? Because, as we all know, nothing solves insomnia like a nice warm glass of regret, depression and self-loathing.”

--D.D. Barant, 'Dying Bites'

“If you read one book a week, starting at the age of 5, and live to be 80, you will have read a grand total of 3,900 books, a little over one-tenth of 1 percent of the books currently in print.”

--Lewis Buzbee, 'The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop'

“The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.”

--Fernando Pessoa

“Nothing is more alienating to anyone unaccustomed to it than hearing one’s own voice played back on a tape recorder. What the apparatus records - what the objectified ‘others’ hear - is not what resonates inside my head when I speak. The recording makes me conscious that I have no true voice. Instead, I have two voices that do not harmonize, that contradict each other: an interior voice and an exterior one. Others never hear me just as I hear myself. Moreover, this splitting of the voice, or opacity of voice to speaker, can never be directly represented. I can never communicate to another person the sound of my inner voice.”

--Gillian Wearing

“Home is the result of intersecting lives. It is the secondary color created by individuals in relationships… Yes, home is the landscape of people, places, and things upon which we live out life—but it is mostly about people. That is why home can be a suburban neighborhood, or a struggling farm, or a ship at sea, or a war-torn nation. After all, home is where hearts are.”

--Austin Sailsbury in Kinfolk Magazine, Volume V: In Search of Home

“Your body is the house you grew up in, how dare you try to burn it to the ground.”

--Sierra Demulder

“Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It’s like the tide going out, revealing whatever’s been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fish bodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future.”

--Margaret Atwood, 'Cat’s Eye'

“This is why it hurts the way it hurts. You have too many words in your head. There are too many ways to describe the way you feel. You will never have the luxury of a dull ache. You must suffer through the intricacy of feeling too much.”

--Iain Thomas

“If you had a person in your life treating you the way you treat yourself, you would have gotten rid of them a long time ago.”

--Cheri Huber, 'There Is Nothing Wrong With You'

“That is why it is so important to let certain things go. To release them. To cut loose. People need to understand that no one is playing with marked cards; sometimes we win and sometimes we lose. Don’t expect to get anything back, don’t expect recognition for your efforts, don’t expect your genius to be discovered or your love to be understood. Complete the circle. Not out of pride, inability or arrogance, but simply because whatever it is no longer fits in your life. Close the door, change the record, clean the house, get rid of the dust. Stop being who you were and become who you are.”

--Paulo Coehlo

“Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures.”

--Henry David Thoreau

“But sometimes you have to be brave. Sometimes you have to show people what’s important in life.”

--Sophie Kinsella, 'I’ve Got Your Number'