People weren’t perfect, ever, but sometimes moments were.” — Courtney C. Stevens, The Lies About Truth

I want to make a New Year’s prayer, not a resolution. I’m praying for courage.

Susan Sontag resolves in 1972

 I aspire to be a woman who loves to wakes up early in the morning and loves what she does for a living everyday. Travels often, spiritually secured, and financially stable.

“If by intellectual you mean somebody who works only with his head and not with his hands, then the bank clerk is an intellectual and Michelangelo is not. And today, with a computer, everybody is an intellectual. So I don’t think it has anything to do with someone’s profession or with someone’s social class. According to me, an intellectual is anyone who is creatively producing new knowledge. A peasant who understands that a new kind of graft can produce a new species of apples has at that moment produced an intellectual activity. Whereas the professor of philosophy who all his life repeats the same lecture on Heidegger doesn’t amount to an intellectual. Critical creativity—criticizing what we are doing or inventing better ways of doing it—is the only mark of the intellectual function.”

— Umberto Eco, “The Art of Fiction, No. 197”, The Paris Review (Summer 2008, No. 185)

“If you get yourself to be really happy and excited to see other people, they will react the same to you. It doesn’t always happen the first time, but it will definitely happen next time. Time and again this has always worked fine for me.”

— The Top 40 Most Fascinating Psychological Phenomena (x)

A sure sign of a mans strength is how gently he loves his wife.”

— - Unknown.

“cafuné [kah-foo-nay]”

— (verb) In our list of most romantic words, cafuné is the intimite act of gently running your fingers through your lover’s hair. This untranslatable Brazilian Portuguese word describes the affection of one of the sweetest moments, filled with pleasure and romance, in its purest form for all lovers.

“Self-care for me has become taking a step back from friendships and relationships that lack substance, reciprocity or ethics. I need you to know the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do.”

The remarkable thing about Orwell is this: he’s not a genius. He lived only 46 years; he never went to university; he never had a steady job, he never usually had a steady publisher. He will never be forgotten because he managed to disprove imperialism, Stalinism, and fascism in one lifetime. He made imperishable raids on its territory that no one’s ever going to forget, all of the time ill, all of the time poor. It shows how much a person of average integrity and intelligence and education can make, if they have a little courage and a little intellectual honesty.”

— Christopher Hitchens on George Orwell

I had this need for something a bit more quiet and intimate, something that felt a bit more like home.”

— Chelsea Wolfe, from an interview conducted by Amit Sharma c. 2019

There comes a point in life where you just want better for yourself. A better life, better people, better energies, better routine, better faith, better health, better mental progression.

please make sure that wherever you’re at in life, you don’t treat it like a transitory period. don’t waste your college years wishing to already be graduated & have a job. don’t waste your single years wishing for someone to be in love with. if/when those things come, they will come in due time and they will be good. but there is nothing like looking back and feeling empty because you wasted literal years ignoring what you had because you were hoping for something better. while it’s important to better yourself and reach for your goals, don’t neglect the present because that’s where you are now and it’s your now that determines your future

to be a star, you must burn.”

— s.g // nova

For a moment during our phone call as it was snowing, as I realized the extent of our sorrow, I knew that I loved you so much it was like I was practically crying out: Here is the location of the soul I have cared for, and here is the source of all beauty and love, but how heavy, how painful, how heavy, how painful.”

— Qiu Miaojin, from Last Words from Montmartre

When something bothered me, I didn’t talk with anyone about it. I thought it over all by myself, came to a conclusion, and took action alone. Not that I really felt lonely. I thought that’s just the way things are. Human beings, in the final analysis, have to survive on their own.”

— Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

let’s play a game called watch how distant I get

And that’s what all the great masters do. Rembrandt. Velásquez. Late Titian. They make jokes. They amuse themselves. They build up the illusion, the trick - but, step closer? it falls apart into brushstrokes. Abstract, unearthly. A different and much deeper sort of beauty altogether. The thing and yet not the thing.”

— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.”

— James Baldwin, Conversations with James Baldwin

He’s jealous of the moon, because you look at it. He’s jealous of the sun, because it warms you. I feel you, even when I’m not feeling you. I talk to you when I’m not talking to you. I love you, even when I’m not loving you.”

— Basquiat (1996) dir. Julian Schnabel

Trauma sends you letters, without warning, for the rest of your life, usually disguised as something else.”

— Brenna Twohy, from Swallowtail

let’s be enough for each other

“Things I forgot to tell you: That I love you, and that when I awake in the morning I use my intelligence to discover more ways of appreciating you. That when June comes back she will love you more because I have loved you. There are new leaves on the tip and climax of your already overrich head. That I love you. That I love you. That I love you. I have become an idiot like Gertrude Stein. That’s what love does to intelligent women. They cannot write letters anymore.”

— Anaïs Nin, A Literate Passion: Letters of Anais Nin & Henry Miller, 1932-1953

They say nothing lasts forever but they’re just scared it will last longer than they can love it.”

— Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

When Khaled Hosseini wrote “a man's heart is a wretched, wretched thing. It isn't like a mother's womb. It won't bleed. It won't stretch to make room for you.” I had to stop, put the book down and breathe because never had a sentence knocked the breath out of me like that did.

this world can be so kind. butterflies will land and stick in your hair, the smell of rain will float through your mind in the middle of the night, the water we swim in is cold and clear, the fruits we eat so sweet. this world can be so, so kind.

In Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is
the same: nhớ. Sometimes, when you ask me over the phone, Con nhớ mẹ
không? I flinch, thinking you meant, Do you remember me?

I miss you more than I remember you.”

Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel

everything will work out. maybe you won’t get what you currently want, but it will work out. there are a million possible futures for you, and they are all promising.

me, every second of my life: but is it meaningful? but is it meaningful? but is it meaningful?

“It was November - the month of crimson sunsets, parting birds, deep, sad hymns of the sea, passionate wind-songs in the pines.”

“Detachment is not that you should own nothing but that nothing should own you.”

— Ali ibn abi Talib

“Do you think I’ll bore you because I’m twenty- two and sleep all night long and am hungry all the time?” “And are the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen and wonderful and strange as hell in bed and always fun to talk to…” “All right. Stop. Why am I strange in bed?” “You are.” “I said why?” “I’m not an anatomist,” he said. “I’m just the guy that loves you.” “Don’t you like to talk about it?” “No. Do you?” “No. I’m shy about it and very frightened. Always frightened.””

— Ernest Hemingway, from The Complete Short Stories

be careful with how much you tolerate. you are teaching them how to treat you

A multitude of small delights constitute happiness

Charles Baudleaire

We often have to explain to young people why study is useful. It’s pointless telling them that it’s for the sake of knowledge, if they don’t care about knowledge. Nor is there any point in telling them that an educated person gets through life better than an ignoramus, because they can always point to some genius who, from their standpoint, leads a wretched life. And so the only answer is that the exercise of knowledge creates relationships, continuity, and emotional attachments. It introduces us to parents other than our biological ones. It allows us to live longer, because we don’t just remember our own life but also those of others. It creates an unbroken thread that runs from our adolescence (and sometimes from infancy) to the present day. And all this is very beautiful.

Umberto Eco

Afterglow

nounthe color left in the sky after the sun has set or good feelings that remain after a successful or pleasurable experience.

“Art should startle the viewer into thinking about the meaning of life.”

— Antoni Tapies

SAU·DA·DE

ecryre:

/souˈdädə/

noun

desire to be near someone or something distant; a feeling of longing, melancholy, or nostalgia

“Written words, from the days of the first Sumerian tablets, were meant to be pronounced out loud, since the signs carried implicit, as if it were their soul, a particular sound. The classic phrase scripta manet, verba volat—which has come to mean, in our time, “what is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air”—used to express the exact opposite; it was coined in praise of the word said out loud, which has wings and can fly, as compared to the silent word on the page, which is motionless, dead. Faced with a written text, the reader had a duty to lend voice to the silent letter, the scripta, and to allow them to become, in the delicate biblical distinction, verba, spoken words—spirit. The primordial languages of the Bible—Aramaic and Hebrew—do not differentiate between the act of reading and the act of speaking; they name both with the same word.”

— Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading

Life teaches us to be less harsh with ourselves and with others.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Iphigenia in Tauris

“And isn’t the whole point of things–beautiful things–that they connect you to some larger beauty? Those first images that crack your heart wide open and you spend the rest of your life chasing, or trying to recapture, in one way or another?”

— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Maybe it won’t work out. But maybe seeing if it does will be the best adventure ever.”

— Unknown 

“Be warm. Be kind. Be calming. Nothing can make a person feel healthier than having a healthy mind.”

— juansen dizon

A HEALTHY WOMAN IS MUCH LIKE A WOLF:
ROBUST, CHOCK-FULL, STRONG LIFE FORCE, LIFE-GIVING,
TERRITORIALLY AWARE, INVENTIVE, LOYAL, ROVING.” ― CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS

We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.

Louise Glück, from “Nostos” in Meadowlands

More important than asking “why doesn’t this person want me?” Is asking “why am I attracted to someone who isn’t interested in me and doesn’t value me?”

I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.

Albert Camus, The Stranger 

Always, over and over, these days and nights will come, the anxiety, the aversion, the doubt. And I will still live, and I will still love life.

Hermann Hesse, from Wandering; “Rainy Weather

Difficult things provoke all your irritations and bring your habitual patterns to the surface. And that becomes the moment of truth. You have the choice to launch into your lousy habitual patterns, or to stay with the rawness and discomfort of the situation and let it transform you.”

— Pema Chodron 

part of your twenties is shedding the idea of grandeur that your life would have and just savouring the simple joys of being

“Breathe. You’re going to be okay. Breathe and remember that you’ve been in this place before. You’ve been this uncomfortable and anxious and scared, and you’ve survived. Breathe and know that you can survive this too. These feelings can’t break you. They’re painful and debilitating, but you can sit with them and eventually, they will pass. Maybe not immediately, but sometime soon, they are going to fade and when they do, you’ll look back at this moment and laugh for having doubted your resilience. I know it feels unbearable right now, but keep breathing, again and again. This will pass. I promise it will pass.”

— Daniell Koepke

Today is a day like any other: twenty-four hours, a little sunshine, a little rain. Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from one boot to another―why don’t you get going? For there I am, in the mossy shadows, under the trees. And to tell the truth I don’t want to let go of the wrists of idleness, I don’t want to sell my life for money, I don’t even want to come in out of the rain.

– Mary Oliver, from “Black Oaks

I want you, I roam, And without shame you stood, And rose, High and higher, Like the colour of the impossible, Like the echo of the songs between mountains

Don’t sit and wait. Get out there. Feel life.”

— Rumi

Water is something you cannot hold. Like men. I have tried. Father, brother, lover, true friends, hungry ghosts and God, one by one all took themselves out of my hands.”

— Plainwater: Essays & Poetry, Anne Carson

“Why do people have to be this lonely? What’s the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?”

— Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

A relationship is not something to keep, it’s to be enjoyed out of your freshness and in your strength, you find that everything becomes more pure. Everything wants to be with you when you’re empty of intention. Too much intention creates tension. […] in your natural state of being you don’t need to be approved of.” 

– Mooji, No Need to Be Loved

I mind my business, but I do pay attention.

We tend to associate intimacy with closeness and closeness with a certain sum of shared experiences. Yet in reality total strangers, who will never say a single word to each other, can share an intimacy — an intimacy contained in the exchange of a glance, a nod of the head, a smile, a shrug of a shoulder. A closeness that lasts for minutes or for the duration of a song that is being listened to together. An agreement about life. An agreement without clauses. A conclusion spontaneously shared between the untold stories gathered around the song.”

— John Berger, Some Notes on Song (via mesogeios)

Find a soul that doesn’t lose appreciation once they are used to you.

sometimes making tea is less about drinking it and more ab it keeping you company

“A culture of hooking up also peddles a set of norms that are incredibly narcissistic. It teaches people that the only person who matters when it comes to sex is oneself, that partners are objects to be used and discarded or not thought of at all. Hookup culture assumes that participants shouldn’t care about sex or their partners, that it is normal not to care, which means if you do care, you are abnormal. This makes hookup culture self- emptying: it decenters sexual intimacy from the person and tells everyone to treat sex as meaningless. It requires a person to give up his or her own interests in sex and the self- care of the body because it is “normal” to allow another person to treat you as an object for his or her personal use,”

—

Donna Freitas, Consent on Campus

You must be prepared to work always without applause.”

— Ernest Hemingway

don’t ever let anyone make you feel ashamed for not going down a conventional path (e.g. not finishing college or starting college later in life, doing an internship in your late 20s, not having a "career” by a certain age). all of this is arbitrary. do not create a life that aims to satisfy everyone but yourself. you worked hard as fuck to get to where you are. don’t you dare let others including yourself diminish those efforts. you do not deserve that

I want to make a New Year’s prayer, not a resolution. I’m praying for courage.

Susan Sontag resolves in 1972

There is so much stubborn hope in the human heart.

Albert Camus, Absurd Creation

Of lovers whose bodies smell of each other, who think the same thoughts without need of speech.”

— T.S. Eliot

Talk, I'll listen

One thousand years ago, in the Heian period, you would build a house like it was a tree. The roof was light like the branches and the leaves. The tree trunks were the pillars, the foundation was the roots. We though of ourselves living under a great tree

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