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