Always leave people feeling loved and important. // I told you: you can make yourself love anybody. — Truman Capote, “Breakfast at Tiffany's // All we are not stares back at what we are.” // I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had.

It's the problem with fairytales. From far away, they seem so perfect. But up close, they're just as complicated as real life."

Three years later, a new girl sits cross-legged on your bed.
She tastes like a different flavor of bubblegum than you are used to.
She opens up a book that you had to read in high school, and a folded picture of us falls out of chapter three.
Now there are two unfinished stories resting in her lap.
Inevitably, she asks, and you tell her.

You say: I dated her a while back.
You don’t say: Sometimes, when I’m holding you, I imagine the smell of her vanilla perfume.

You say: She was younger than me.
You don’t say: The sixteen summers in her bones warmed so manywinters my skin had weathered.

You say: It’s nothing now.
You don’t say: But it was everything then.

#thisalwaysmakesmecry

i’m sorry for whatever i did to you to make you hurt me the way you did

"And I realized that there’s a big difference between deciding to leave and knowing where to go.”

You can call it innocence or you can call it gullibility, but Celia made the most common mistake of the good-hearted: She assumed that everyone else was just like her.

— Lionel Shriver, “We Need to Talk About Kevin”

But to fall in love does not mean to love. One can fall in love and still hate.

There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something… You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.

Just as a painter needs light in order to put the finishing touches to his picture, so I need an inner light, which I feel I never have enough of in the autumn.

I want to say something so embarrassing about September that even the leaves start blushing and turning red.(Jarod Kintz)

In his or her own way, everyone I saw before me looked happy. Whether they were really happy or just looked it, I couldn’t tell. But they did look happy on this pleasant early afternoon in late September, and because of that I felt a kind of loneliness new to me, as if I were the only one here who was not truly part of the scene.

— Haruki Murakami, “Norwegian Wood”

If you think you can grasp me, think again:
my story flows in more than one direction
a delta springing from the riverbed
with its five fingers spread.

— Adrienne Rich, ‘Delta’

Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories

I wanted to go on sitting there, not talking, not listening to the others, keeping the moment precious for all time, because we were peaceful all of us, we were content and drowsy even as the bee who droned above our heads. In a little while it would be different, there would come tomorrow, and the next day and another year. And we would be changed perhaps, never sitting quite like this again. Some of us would go away, or suffer, or die, the future stretched away in front of us, unknown, unseen, not perhaps what we wanted, not what we planned. This moment was safe though, this could not be touched.

On some nights it’s best to stop thinking about the past, and all that’s been won and lost. On nights like this, just getting into bed, crawling between the clean white sheets, is a great relief.

Maybe some people just aren’t meant to be in our lives forever. Maybe some people are just passing through. It’s like some people just come through our lives to bring us something: a gift, a blessing, a lesson we need to learn. And that’s why they’re here. You’ll have that gift forever.

The problem with doing nothing is not knowing when you are finished.

Don’t aim at success - the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run—in the long run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.

Life is stronger than you are, even when you deny it, even when you neglect it, even when you refuse to admit it.

August. We were arguing. You want love to be like this every day don’t you? 92 degrees even in the shade.

Confidence is captivating, it is powerful, and it does not fade - and that is endlessly more interesting than beauty.

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.

It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.

Not being heard is no reason for silence.

You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather.

I hated labels anyway. People didn’t fit in slots… We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.

Mad people = People who stand alone + burn.
I’m attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.

And don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens — The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.

It all means more than I can tell you. So you must not judge what I know by what I find words for.

"You never loved me, but I know that you tried to.”

I loved you so much once. I did. More than anything in the whole wide world. Imagine that. What a laugh that is now. We were so intimate once upon a time I can’t believe it now. I think that’s the strangest thing of all now. The memory of being that intimate with somebody. We were so intimate I could puke. I can’t imagine ever being that intimate with somebody else. I haven’t been.”

"I don’t remember
lighting this cigarette
and I don’t remember
if I’m here alone
or waiting for someone”

"I hope it’s love. I’m trying really hard to make it love. I said no more severity. I said it severely and slept through all my appointments. I clawed my way into the light but the light is just as scary.”

Some people believe holding on and hanging in there are signs of great strength. However, there are times when it takes much more strength to know when to let go and then do it.

 waited for you for so long. I watched my phone, every night, waiting on a phone call that somewhere in the back of my mind I knew I’d never get. I just wanted to hear you say that you were sorry for hurting me, and that maybe you wanted to get back together. I hoped an hoped that you saw me in the hallways, looking down at the floor and just know that I missed you. Because I thought you missed me too, you just didn’t know what you wanted But, I finally realized that you didn’t miss me at all, that I was definitely not what you wanted, and that I never meant that much to you anyway.

I thought of texting you
“good morning, I can’t sleep”
and then I remembered
that you are on a journey
which I am not a part of
and that’s okay
but
good morning
I can’t sleep

My world doesn’t have to stop just because yours doesn’t include me anymore.

I was never the one that you would choose over everybody else. You knew that I would always be there for you so you just left me until you needed me. I kept thinking about every little thing that could be wrong with me and it began to tear me apart inside. I worried about every little thing I did because I was so afraid that I would do something that would make me lose the little part of you I still had. I used to worry about why i wasn’t your cup of tea, but you always drank coffee.

I think a lot of art is trying to make someone love you.

What we had was so horrendously dysfunctional,”she says, “I can’t figure out why I’m dying to feel it again.

Let us forget with generosity those who cannot love us.

I am the wilderness lost in a woman.

The opposite of loneliness, it’s not togetherness. It is intimacy.

Spróbuj zapalić maleńką świeczkę, zamiast przeklinać ciemność. 

Let your dreams change your reality, don't let your reality change your dreams.

Nobody can hurt me without my permission.

I hope you will go out and let stories, that is life, happen to you,and that you will work with these stories from your life–not someone else’s life–water them with your blood and tears and your laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom. That is the work. The only work.

Well, now, 
if little by little you stop loving me 
I shall stop loving you little by little. 
If suddenly 
you forget me 
do not look for me, 
for I shall already have forgotten you.

Most people carry that pain around inside them their whole lives, until they kill the pain by other means, or until it kills them. But you, my friends, you found another way: a way to use the pain. To burn it as fuel, for light and warmth. You have learned to break the world that has tried to break you.

She generally gave herself very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it).

Rare as is true love, true friendship is rarer.

We understood one another better before ever I opened my mouth.

Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

You’re wishin’ too much, baby. You gotta stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone oughtta be.

Melancholia is, I believe, a musical problem: a dissonance, a change in rhythm. While on the outside everything happens with the vertiginous rhythm of a cataract, on the inside is the exhausted adagio pace of drops of water falling from time to tired time. For this reason the outside seen from the melancholic inside, appears absurd and unreal, and constitutes “the farce we must all play.” But for an instant - because of a wild music, or a drug, or the sexual act carried to its climax - the very slow rhythm of the melancholic soul does not only rise to that of the outside world: it overtakes it with an ineffably blissful exorbitance, and the soul then thrills animated by delirious new energies.

Zmiana zawsze kryje w sobie szansę. 

I’ll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.

— Cheryl Strayed, “Tiny Beautiful Things”

She knows who she is. She just forgot for a little while.

In a society that profits from your self doubt, liking yourself is a rebellious act

Stop telling people about your dreams. All you are doing is opening the door to criticism, which in turn might discourage you. Start working on your dreams. Keep your head down, stay focused. Show people your results. People will pay more attention to your actions than your words. 

Get to work.

If I said I was madly in love with you, I’d be lying and what’s more, you’d know it.

“The city was alive, and so was he...” 

― Kassandra Cross,

“Sometime we forget to value the small things, that inspire us more than the large! We should learn from daily than planning stupid future.” 

“There are so many simple things left unnoticed'

So if this speaks to you, don’t hold back.
For anyone.
Or anything.Just do it.

It isn’t that to have an honorable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand, everything I need to tell you. It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive, to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us.

— Adrienne Rich, “On Lies, Secrets, and Silence”

 When you are not happy in a situation, don’t stay in denial and try to make it work. The world has better plans for you, trust in the process and do your part by aligning yourself with the things you want. The rest will be history.

There are a whole lot of ways to be perfect, and not one of them is attained through punishment.

Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.

I have always been full of lust - as I am now - but I have always been placing conceptual obstacles in my own path.

Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, ‘So what’. That’s one of my favorite things to say. 'So what’.

— Andy Warhol, “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol”

If I’m sincere today, what does it matter if I regret it tomorrow?

— José Saramago, “Blindness”

You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past.

— Chuck Palahniuk, “Survivor”

I actually really love it when someone remembers small details and quirks about me or addresses me by my name at unexpected times like at the end of a sentence and I don’t know why but I just really, really do.

You ever feel like you wanna seriously fall in love? But then the song you listened to, ended and now you’re back to normal and hate dependency and commitment again?

Soon we will be like strangers. No, we can never be that. Hurting someone is an act of reluctant intimacy. We will be dangerous acquaintances with a history.

— Hanif Kureishi, “Intimacy

We face up to awful things because we can’t go around them, or forget them. The sooner you say ‘Yes, it happened, and there’s nothing I can do about it,’ the sooner you can get on with your own life.

…as long as nothing happens between them, the memory is cursed with what hasn’t happened.

Words that come from the heart are never spoken, they get caught in the throat and can only be read in ones’s eyes.

The future happens. No matter how much we scream.

— Derek Walcott, “The Odyssey”

It’s great that you can listen and be a shoulder to someone, but what about when someone doesn’t need a shoulder? What if they need the arms or something like that? You can’t just sit there and put everybody’s lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love.

— Stephen Chbosky, “The Perks of Being a Wallflower”