"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.”