Art is a lie that makes us realize truth. PABLO PICASSO In love, the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two. ERICH FROMM I’ve been thinking a lot lately about taking chances, and how it’s really just about overcoming your fears. Because the truth is, every time you take a big risk in your life, no matter how it ends up, you’re always glad you took it. ZACH BRAFF, SCRUBS You can go a long way with a smile. You can go a lot farther with a smile and a gun. AL CAPONE If you kiss someone with feeling, they know it. And you know it. It’s like everything else goes gray and you’re the only two people left in the whole world. MARC ST. JAMES - UGLY BETTY Do not think that love in order to be genuine has to be extraordinary. What we need is to love without getting tired. Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies. MOTHER TERESA Do what you feel in your heart to be right, for you’ll be criticized anyway. You’ll be damned if you do and damned if you don’t. ELEANOR ROOSEVELT If you wind up with a boring, miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on tv telling you how to do your shit, then you deserve it. FRANK ZAPPA It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities. ALBUS DUMBLEDORE, J. K. ROWLING For myself I know not how to express my devotion to so fair a form: I want a brighter word than bright, a fairer word than fair. I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer day — three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain. JOHN KEATS To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded. RALPH WALDO EMERSON The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. ELIE WIESEL Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it. Mahatma Gandhi And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh. Friedrich Nietzsche None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone. Ralph Waldo Emerson I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. T.S. ELIOT Keep away from those who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you believe that you too can become great. MARK TWAIN If you can’t razzle them with dazzle, baffle them with bullshit. W.C. FIELDS What if a demon were to creep after you one night, in your loneliest loneliness, and say, ‘This life which you live must be lived by you once again and innumerable times more; and every pain and joy and thought and sigh must come again to you, all in the same sequence. The eternal hourglass will again and again be turned and you with it, dust of the dust!’ Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse that demon? Or would you answer, ‘Never have I heard anything more divine'? FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE I like to see people reunited, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can’t tell fast enough, the ears that aren’t big enough, the eyes that can’t take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone. EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE, JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe. A GAME OF YOU, NEIL GAIMAN Not everything that counts can be counted, and not
everything that can be counted counts.(Sign hanging in Einstein's office at Princeton) And it’s not “clever lonely”(like Morrissey) or “interesting Lonely”(like Radiohead); it’s “lonely, lonely,” like the way it feels when you’re being hugged by someone and it somehow makes you sadder. Chuck Klosterman Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly. Franz Kafka If you are a student you should always get a good nights sleep unless you have come to the good part of your book, and then you should stay up all night and let your schoolwork fall by the wayside, a phrase which means ‘flunk." Lemony Snicket Oftentimes, when people are miserable, they will want to make other people miserable, too. But it never helps. Lemony Snicket, The Blank Book Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die. Mel Brooks
Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known. Winnie the Pooh I walk around the school hallways and look at the people. I look at the teachers and wonder why they’re here. If they like their jobs. Or us. And I wonder how smart they were when they were fifteen. Not in a mean way. In a curious way. It’s like looking at all the students and wondering who’s had their heart broken that day, and how they are able to cope with having three quizzes and a book report due on top of that. Or wondering who did the heart breaking. And wondering why. The Perks of Being A Wallflower …don’t tell me I’m not sensitive to beauty. that’s my achilles’ heel, and don’t you forget it. to me, everything is beautiful. show me a pink sunset and i’m limp, by god. anything. ‘peter pan.’ even before the curtain goes up i’m a goddam puddle of tears… j.d. salinger, franny and zooey If you take a book with you on a journey,…an odd thing happens: The book begins collecting your memories. And forever after you have only to open that book to be back where you first read it. It will all come into your mind with the very first words: the sights you saw in that place, what it smelled like, the ice cream you ate while you were reading it…yes, books are like flypaper—memories cling to the printed page better than anything else. Cornelia Funke And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter — they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Sylvia Plath A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never entirely recover. Charles Bukowski Write hard and clear about what hurts. Ernest Hemingway I’m telling you a lie in a vicious effort that you will repeat my lie over and over until it becomes true. Lady Gaga Nothing in the world is more common than unsuccessful people with talent, leave the house before you find something worth staying in for. Banksy Let us toast to animal pleasures, to escapism, to rain on the roof and instant coffee, to unemployment insurance and library cards, to absinthe and good-hearted landlords, to music and warm bodies and contraceptives…and to the ‘good life,’ whatever it is and wherever it happens to be. Hunter S. Thompson You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation. Plato Never love anybody who treats you like you’re ordinary. Oscar Wilde Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. Alls of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all got through this. And if you are just staring out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through. Ira Glass The Blue album, there’s hardly a dishonest note in the vocals. At that period of my life, I had no personal defenses. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes. I felt like I had absolutely no secrets from the world and I couldn’t pretend in my life to be strong. Or to be happy. But the advantage of it in the music was that there were no defenses there either. Joni Mitchell, on the creation of her 1971 album, Blue I hope that you will have a wonderful year, that you’ll dream dangerously and outrageously, that you’ll make something that didn’t exist before you made it, that you will be loved and that you will be liked, and that you will have people to love and to like in return. And, most importantly (because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now), that you will, when you need to be, be wise, and that you will always be kind. Neil Gaiman Work like you don’t need the money. Love like you’ve never been hurt. Dance like no one is watching. a tin sign in a Chicago Jimmy John’s
XOXO
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