I must learn to love the fool in me—the one who feels too much, talks too much, takes too many chances, wins sometimes and loses often, lacks self-control, loves and hates, hurts and gets hurt, promises and breaks promises, laughs and cries. It alone protects me against that utterly self-controlled, masterful tyrant whom I also harbor and who would rob me of human aliveness, humility, and dignity but for my fool.

— Theodore Rubin

The Russian word “razbliuto” means ‘the feeling you have for someone you were once in love with but are no longer so’.

You don’t necessarily have to write to be a poet. Some people work in gas stations and they’re poets. I don’t call myself a poet because I don’t like the word. I’m a trapeze artist.

— Bob Dylan

I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited.

— Sylvia Plath

You are the skipped sentence in the book I’m reading.
You are the kitchen knife that slips into the thumb.
Memory: the autonomous twitch of an aching muscle.
You are the word that is always mistyped.
And, erased, defaces the page.

— “Still Alive,” Ruth Kluger

Right now I only want two things - you and time to write. These people out here feel sorry for me; they don’t know what I’m going to do, and they can’t understand why it doesn’t seem to worry me. It’s so sad that it makes me laugh. I feel like the man with The Secret. They tell me I need love and I laugh quietly. They tell me I need a purpose and I laugh again. I would never tell them how happy I am to know we’re going to be together again, because then they wouldn’t be able to feel sorry for me and they’d feel even worse. I really want nothing more than to be in bed with you, to stay there as long as we want, to have a roof over heads and food in our mouths and to be left alone. We already have the big thing and the rest is trivia.

— hunter s. thompson to sandy thompson

We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.

— William Somerset Maugham

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

— Albert Camus

Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking, “I am falling to the floor crying,” but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it — you knew it would happen and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well and when you’re having sex with your next lover on this very floor they will also notice that you didn’t paint it very well and they will think less of you for it. And then you think, “Is that sentence too long?” and then you have to hold the contradictions of sobbing uncontrollably and wondering about grammar in your head at the same time.

— Richard Siken

This is what I have to avoid, I must not put in strangeness where there is none. I think that is the big danger in keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything. You continually force the truth because you’re always looking for something.

— Jean Paul Sartre

I divined her life at that moment. She only believed in intimacy and proximity, in confessions born in the darkness of a bedroom, in quarrels born of alcohol, in communions born of exhausting walks through the city. She only believed in those words which came like the confessions of criminals after long exposure to hunger, to intense lights, to cross-questioning, to violent tearing away of masks.

— Anais Nin

I cannot go to the ocean
I cannot drive the streets at night
I cannot wake up in the morning
Without you on my mind
So you’re gone and I’m haunted
And I bet you are just fine

Did I make it that easy
To walk right in and out of my life?

— A Fine Frenzy, “Almost Lover”

Lots of things remind me of you, like paper-cuts, couples fighting in the supermarket, and oil spills.

When you’re a teenager and in your early twenties [love] seems desperately eternal and excruciatingly painful. Whereas as you grow older you realise that most things are excruciatingly painful and that is the human condition. Most of us continue to survive because we’re convinced that somewhere along the line, with grit and determination and perseverance, we will end up in some magical union with somebody. It’s a fallacy, of course, but it’s a form of religion. You have to believe. There is a light that never goes out and it’s called hope.

— Morrissey

"

Fuck it. You throw a dart at a map, we’ll go there and start new. Somewhere else in the world that’s not here. Somewhere where we haven’t said things to each other that we can’t unsay and done things which we can’t undo.

There we can say new things. We can do new things. And those new things we say and do will be more important than the old things. Let’s leave. Please. Leave with me." -Unknown

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

— Franz Kafka

Closing your eyes isn’t going to change anything. Nothing’s going to disappear just because you can’t see what’s going on. In fact, things will be even worse the next time you open your eyes. That’s the kind of world we live in, Mr Nakata. Keep your eyes wide open. Only a coward closes his eyes. Closing your eyes and plugging up your ears won’t make time stand still.

— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?

— Ernest Hemingway

You get a little moody sometimes but I think that’s because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up.

— Pat Conroy

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.

— from “In Blackwater Woods” by Mary Oliver

“ You may not be her first, her last, or her only. She loved before she may love again. But if she loves you now, what else matters? She’s not perfect - you aren’t either, and the two of you may never be perfect together but if she can make you laugh, cause you to think twice, and admit to being human and making mistakes, hold onto her and give her the most you can. She may not be thinking about you every second of the day, but she will give you a part of her that she knows you can break - her heart. So don’t hurt her, don’t change her, don’t analyze and don’t expect more than she can give. Smile when she makes you happy, let her know when she makes you mad, and miss her when she’s not there. — Bob Marley

"Sometimes I think I must have a Guardian Idiot. A little invisible spirit just behind my shoulder, looking out for me...only he's an imbecile."
— Spider Robinson (Off the Wall at Callahan's)

"If you can walk with the crowd and keep your virtue, or walk with Kings-nor lose the common touch; If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you; If all men count with you, but none too much; If you can fill the unforgiving minute with 60 seconds worth of distance run- Yours is the earth and everything that's in it, And-which is more-you'll be a man my son."
— Rudyard Kipling (If: A Father's Advice to His Son)

In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it's yours.

Ayn Rand

Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who has said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.

Buddha

Jackass.

Beyond watching eyes
With sweet and tender kisses
Our souls reached out to each other
In breathless wonder
And when I awoke
From a vast and smiling peace
I found you bathed in morning light
Quietly studying all the messages on my phone

'Love Poem' by Banksy

There's the fact that music is a total constant. That's why we have such a strong visceral connection to it. Because a song can take you back instantly to a moment, or a place, or even a person. No matter what else has changed in you or the world, that one song stays the same, just like that moment.

Just Listen by Sarah Dessen

Write on the water, send ripples through time
To sit and do nothing is life's lonely crime

Flyte - Write On The Water

Want gave tongue, and at her howl, Sin awakened with a growl.

James Russell Lowell

"You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen - on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become accquainted with. The stones of which the strongest London buildings are made are not more real, or more impossible to be displaced by your hands, than your presence and influence have been to me, there and everywhere, and will be. To the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil. But in this separation, I associate you only with the good, and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you must have done me far more good than harm. Let me feel now what sharp distress I may."

Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

Coffee falls into the stomach... ideas begin to move, things remembered arrive at full gallop... the shafts of wit start up like sharp-shooters, smiles arise, the paper is covered with ink...

Honore de Balzac

And if you ever tried to step in my shoes, they'd never be quite as soft as they seem.

Incubus

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering. I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. The last scud of the day holds back for me, It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow'd wilds, It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk. I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun, I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags. I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, And filter and fibre for your blood. Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you.

Walt Whitman-Leaves of Grass

You left me all alone in this darkened room, you left me with tears, and no lending ears, no one to run to, and no one to hold, I shut my eyes in despair alone again in this darkened lair.

Drath Poetry

My Image: As I sit here in the dust of wonder, And look as the years pass me by, I ask you, Where are the peices of my heart and soul? I seem to be unbroken, Yet I'm torn apart inside. They're right when they say I have problems, And it hurts me too. I'm not as bad as you may think, And your not as perfect as it seems.

Beth Mcgraa

Though we are not now at that strength which in better days moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; one equal temper of heroic hearts made weak by time and fate but not in will; To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Not all distance is absence, nor is all silence forgetfulness.

You said you didn't want to see me get hurt... So does that mean you closed your eyes when I cried?

C. Yerkes

I walked a mile with Pleasure
She chattered all the way,
But there was nothing I could learn
From all she had to say.

I walked a mile with Sorrow
And never a word said she;
But, oh, all the things I learned
When Sorrow walked with me.

Sleep. Those little slices of Death. How I loathe them.

Edgar Allan Poe

So often times it happens that we live our lives in chains and we never even know we have the key.

Don Henley

Last scene of all,
That ends this strange, eventful history,
Is second childishness, and mere oblivion,
sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Shakespeare

I'm beyond your peripheral vision so you might want to turn your head, and some day you're gonna get hungry and eat most of the words you just said.

Ani Difranco

These days are still painful to think about...

I sit alone struggling not to cry. Yesterday my life shattered before my eyes. Almost everything I hold dear. The object of my obsession over the course of time. The love of my life. The one I hold above anyone else. For now has been all but lost completely. Shattered I sit alone with only one thing on my mind. If you love something let it go. If it comes back to you it always has been and always will be yours. If it doesn't than it never has been and never will be yours. I have let you go. I pray that one day you will return. Still I sit alone trying to retrieve the pieces of my so-called life. I am crying now. Crying for what I have lost for the moment. Crying for fear that I may never love another quite like I loved you. Crying for fear that I may never find another quite like you. I sit lying in wait for a chance to regain what I have lost. Close I will stay to you. Waiting for your choice to go astray and cause you to fall. I will be waiting right there to catch you. but for now I am the sad shell of a man who once was. I feel as though a part of me has died deep inside. Sitting alone for yesterday my life as I know it was shattered.

John Main

I'm standing on the outside of your shelter looking in, While the bombs around are falling everywhere, Inside you look so warm and safe and oh so happy, Have I ever told you that I care? Have I ever told you that you're wonderful? And it hurts me so that we have grown apart. I'm standing on the outside of your shelter, dear, But I hope I'm on the inside of your heart.

Shel Silverstein

Waiting for the moon to come and light me up inside
And I am waiting for the telephone to tell me I'm alive
Well, I heard you let somebody get their fingers into you
It's getting cold in California I guess I'll be leaving soon
Daylight fading, come and waste another year
All the anger and the eloquence are bleeding into fear
Moonlight creeping around the corners of our lawn
When we see the early signs that daylight's fading
We leave just before it's gone...

-Anon

How I wish, how I wish you were here
We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl,
Year after year
Running over the same old ground
What have we found?
The same old fears
Wish you were here

"How I wish you were here" by Pink Floyd

My Relationships.

I choose to suffer for those I care; I will sacrifice myself as long as you are there.

Amy Kleer

In an age of nothing, at a time when we stand on the brink of our own destruction - strengthen your belief in yourself, in the future of humanity. in the things of this world which cannot easily be perceived, awaken that which lies dormant now within your soul, re-ignite the flame of your consciousness, and measure the strength of your conviction. Reveal the lie. Renounce your hatred. Seek, find and embrace the truths you are fortunate enough to discover. Cherish them, use them to anchor you in the sea of chaos that is the world we live in. When twilight draws near, when you are pushed to the very limits of your soul, when it seems that all you have left are the dead remnants of the fabric of your life - believe

Come to the edge He said. They said: 'We are afraid.' Come to the edge He said. They came. He pushed them, and they flew.

Guillaume Apollinaire