“There are two sorts of affection - the love of a woman you respect, and the love for the woman you love.”
—Arthur Wing Pinero
June 2010
“You do the right thing even if it makes you feel bad. The purpose of life is not to be happy but to be worthy of happiness.”
—Tracy Kidder (via justbesplendid)
“I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.”
—Agatha Christie (via bastardette)
May 2010
“Sometimes when we think we are keeping a secret, that secret is actually keeping us.”
—Frank Warren
“We sing because we can’t speak anymore.”
—Kristin Chenoweth
“Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.”
—Oscar Wilde (via misswallflower)
“Anyone who is in love is making love the whole time, even when they’re not. When two bodies meet, it is just the cup overflowing. They can stay together for hours, even days. They begin the dance one day and finish it the next, or - such is the pleasure they experience - they may never finish it. No eleven minutes for them.”
—Eleven Minute by Paulo Coelho (via eunichick) (via quote-book)
“You think you know a story, but you only know how it ends. To get to the heart of a story, you have to go back to the beginning.”
—The Tudors
“Poets and women are always free with their hearts, are they not?”
—The Tudors
“Maybe not everything is supposed to last forever. Certain things are like… like… skywriting. Like, a really beautiful thing that lasts for a couple moments and then… You know?”
—Little Manhattan (via kari-shma)
“The thing is, I really like saying yes. I like new things, projects, plans, getting people together and doing something, trying something, even when it’s corny or stupid. I am not good at saying no. And I do not get along with people who say no. When you die, and it really could be this afternoon, under the same bus wheels I’ll stick my head if need be, you will not be happy about having said no. You will be kicking your ass about all the no’s you’ve said. No to that opportunity, or no to that trip to Nova Scotia or no to that night out, or no to that project or no to that person who wants to be naked with you but you worry about what your friends will say. No is for wimps. No is for pussies. No is to live small and embittered, cherishing the opportunities you missed because they might have sent the wrong message. What matters is saying yes.”
—Dave Eggers, presented without comment and filed under “stuff to think about.” (via wine-loving-vagabond)
“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature more,” —Lord Byron (via wine-loving-vagabond)
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature more,” —Lord Byron (via wine-loving-vagabond)
“There are a lot of things about me that aren’t what you thought. But if you love me, you have to love all things about me.”
—Dirty Dancing
“There are always flowers for those who want to see them.”
—Henri Matisse (via quote-book)
“
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
“I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air” —“Darkness” by Lord Byron (via rowanboat) (via commanderspock)
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air” —“Darkness” by Lord Byron (via rowanboat) (via commanderspock)
“If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practising an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
—Kurt Vonnegut (via fuckyeahnarcissismandnostalgia)
“Who they were was what interested me. Broken people attract broken people.”
—Nikki Sixx (via rachelxrampaage) (via nikkisixx)
“Beautiful is not what is beautiful, but what one likes.”
—Yiddish Proverb (via kari-shma) (via quote-book)
“An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.”
—Bill Vaughn
“Every time you suppress some part of yourself or allow others to play you small, you are in essence ignoring the owner’s manual your creator gave you and destroying your design.”
—Oprah Winfrey
“What other dungeon is so dark as one’s own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one’s self!”
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Courage is very important. Like a muscle, it is strengthened by use.”
—Ruth Gordon
“Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second generation full of courage issue forth; let a people loving freedom come to growth.”
—Margaret Walker
“You are the only real obstacle in your path to a fulfilling life.”
—Les Brown
“Certain things, they should just stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and leave them alone.”
—JD Salinger
“If it makes you less sad, I’ll take your pictures all down. Every picture you paint, I will paint myself out.”
—Brand New
“Choose your pleasures for yourself, and do not let them be imposed upon you.”
—Lord Chesterfield
“I don’t want to be a passenger in my own life.”
—Diane Ackerman
“When life pokes and prods you, it is not punishment or abuse. You are being pushed out of the nest. Spread your wings and take flight. See how well you can fly.”
—Melody Beattie
“Thinking, boy, is something you should get in the habit of making use of more often—it helps in everything. Everything but love, that is. Love is a sort of seventh day, so that thinking can rest.”
—Merlin (from the 1967 film, Camelot)
“The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope.”
—Barbara Kingsolver
“The less you can live on, the more chance your idea will succeed. This is true even after you’ve ‘made it’.”
—Hugh Macleod
“Only solitary men know the full joys of frienship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.”
—Willa Cather
“Live as you would have wished to live when you are dying.”
—Christian Furchtegott Gellert
“Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world which yields most painfully to change.”
—Robert F. Kennedy
“Friendship is like money, easier made than kept.”
—Samuel Butler
“To be in love is to touch with a lighter hand. In yourself, you stretch; you are well.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks
“The stars don’t look bigger, but they do look brighter.”
—Sally Ride
“If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.”
—Honore de Balzac
“Doubt can only be removed by action.”
—Johann Wolfgang
“Don’t criticize what you can’t understand.”
—Bob Dylan (via followandreblog)
“I invent nothing, I rediscover.”
—Auguste Rodin
“Something dies when you grow older, but you do the best you can.”
—Unknown
“Why be afraid of tomorrow when today is all we have?”
—Elizabeth: The Golden Age
“I’m partly somebody else trying to fit in and say the right things and do the right thing and be in the right place and wear what everybody else is wearing. Sometimes I think we’re all trying to be shadows of each other, trying to buy the same records and everything even if we don’t like them. Kids are like robots, off an assembly line, and I don’t want to be a robot!”
—Go Ask Alice
“Freedom is just chaos, with better lighting.”
—Alan Dean Foster
“I’m not lost, just undiscovered.”
—Unknown
