August 2011
“It pays to be nice to the people you meet on the way up, for they are the same people you meet on the way down.”
—Walter Winchell
Art should disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed.
“I once had a thousand desires,
But in my one desire to know you
all else melted away.” —Rumi (via loveyourchaos)
But in my one desire to know you
all else melted away.” —Rumi (via loveyourchaos)
“So he tries to pacify her, but whats inside her never dies.”
—Amy Winehouse
“I want a soul mate who can sit me down, shut me up, tell me ten things I don’t already know, and make me laugh. I don’t care what you look like, just turn me on. And if you can do that, I will follow you on bloody stumps through the snow. I will nibble your mukluks with my own teeth. I will do your windows. I will care about your feelings. Just have something in there.”
—Henry Rollins (via hardlygolden)
“When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don’t seem to matter very much, do they?”
—Virginia Woolf (via misswallflower)
“You do care. You care so much you feel as though you will bleed to death with the pain of it.”
—Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling (via quote-book)
“I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close.”
—Jeanette Winterson (via misswallflower)
“The deepest kind of love you can have for somebody is the ability to let them disappear when they need to.”
—Andrew McMahon (via rainbowsleeves)
“I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.”
—Gerry Spence (via justbesplendid)
“I often hear people say that they read to escape reality, but I believe that what they’re really doing is reading to find reason for hope, to find strength. While a bad book leaves readers with a sense of hopelessness and despair, a good novel, through stories of values realized, of wrongs righted, can bring to readers a connection to the wonder of life. A good novel shows how life can and ought to be lived. It not only entertains but energizes and uplifts readers.”
—Terry Goodkind (via myquotelibrary)
“Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled “This could change your life.”
—Helen Exley (via a-bibliophiles-blog)
“In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.”
—John Steinbeck (via abrutalkind)
“But I think it’s very healthy to spend time alone. You need to know how to be alone and not be defined by another person.”
—Olivia Wilde (via nonelikejesus)
“We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.”
—E.E. Cummings (via owl8lily)
“Language is a skin. I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.”
—Roland Barthes
“Fashion is a trend, style is within a person.”
—Oscar de la Renta (via oscarprgirl)
“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”
—Zora Neale Hurston
“While our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.”
—Ray Bradbury (via withnailrules)
“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
—Virginia Woolf; A Room of One’s Own (via winterlungs)
“Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”
—George Orwell, 1984 (via philphys)
“Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”
—T.S. Eliot
“Nothing limits achievement like small thinking; nothing expands possibilities like unleashed imagination.”
—William Arthur Ward
“It’s not so important who starts the game but who finishes it.”
—John Wooden
“A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.”
—George R. R. Martin (via writingaces)
“Nostalgia - it’s delicate, but potent. Teddy told me that in Greek, ‘nostalgia’ literally means ‘the pain from an old wound.’ It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards… it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the wheel, it’s called the carousel. It let’s us travel the way a child travels - around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved.”
—Mad Men (via wearethedigitalkids) (via quote-book)
“America is afraid of its past. Whether it’s how it treated Native Americans, women or black people, it is constantly trying to reframe, color or flat-out ignore major aspects of our history. America, in its constant obsession with being seen as “awesome,” will actively try to Photoshop its own historical portrait. The fear is that to acknowledge the past is to take the blame for it. If we take the word “nigger” out of the classic “Huckleberry Finn” then our kids won’t see it and then we don’t have to talk about it.”
—Elon James White (via meloukhia)
“You don’t need a man to wear a beautiful dress”
—She’s the Man (via shensations)
lover, n.
Oh, how I hated this word. So pretentious, like it was always being translated from the French. The tint and taint of illicit, illegitimate affections. Dictionary meaning: a person having a love affair. Impermanent. Unfamilial. Inextricably linked to sex.
I have never wanted a lover. In order to have a lover I must go back to the root of the word. For I have never wanted a lover, but I have always wanted to love, and to be loved.
there is no word for the recipient of the love. There is only a word for the giver. There is the assumption that lovers come in pairs.
When I say, Be my lover, I don’t mean, Let’s have an affair. I don’t mean, Sleep with me. I don’t mean, Be my secret.
I want us to go back down to that root.
I want you to be the one who loves me.
I want to be the one who loves you.David Levithan
“Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings —always darker, emptier, simpler.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche
“I think we live in a culture that makes you think ‘oh, I’m a little bit too fat, or I’m too thin, or I’m not right, and I don’t fit in’, and I think like, you know, increasingly I’ve realized as I’ve tried to change and tried to adapt and amend and pursue these ambitions, that ultimately, everybody has a beauty within themselves, and if you find this, and accept this, then you will be happy regardless of external attributes or material things.”
—Russell Brand
“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind.”
—A Midsummer Night’s Dream, William Shakespeare
“It isn’t the mountains ahead to climb that wear you out; it’s the pebble in your shoe.”
—Muhammad Ali (via justbesplendid)
“Love is like the sea. It’s a moving thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from the shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore. ”
—Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
“As long as the world is turning and spinning, we’re gonna be dizzy and we’re gonna make mistakes.”
—Mel Brooks
“The greatest danger to our future is apathy.”
—Jane Goodall
“It appeared to Dorian Gray that the true nature of the senses had never been understood, and that they remained savage and animal merely because the world sought to starve them into submission or kill them by pain, instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality, of which a fine instinct for beauty was to be the dominant characteristic.”
—The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
