Tennessee Williams II

I've got the guts to die. What I want to know is, have you got the guts to live.

Time is the longest distance between two places.

Make voyages. Attempt them. There's nothing else.

What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it's curved like a road through mountains.

The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.

There comes a time when you look into the mirror and you realize that what you see is all that you will ever be. And then you accept it. Or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking in mirrors.

If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.

Time doesn't take away from friendship, nor does separation.

Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see ...each other in life. Vanity, fear, desire, competition-- all such distortions within our own egos-- condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions to our own egos the corresponding distortions in the egos of others, and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other. That's how it is in all living relationships except when there is that rare case of two people who love intensely enough to burn through all those layers of opacity and see each other's naked hearts.

When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.

I don't want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don't tell the truth, I tell what ought to be the truth. And it that's sinful, then let me be damned for it!

Gayle Forman

Sometimes you make choices in life and sometimes choices make you.

I realize now that dying is easy. Living is hard.

Love, it never dies. It never goes away, it never fades, so long as you hang on to it. Love can make you immortal.

I'm not sure this is a world I belong in anymore. I'm not sure that I want to wake up.

But still, I find the need to remind myself of the temporariness of a day, to reassure myself that I got through yesterday, I'll get through today.

Sometimes the best way to find out what you’re supposed to do is by doing the thing you’re not supposed to do.

People believe what they want to believe.

You have to fall in love to be in love, but falling in love isn't the same as being in love.

It's quiet now. So quiet that can almost hear other people's dreams.

A day might just be twenty-four hours but sometimes getting through one seems as impossible as scaling Everest.

I've become to realize there's a world of difference between knowing something happened, even knowing why it happened, and believing it.

Jhumpa Lahiri

That's the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.

Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.

They were things for which it was impossible to prepare but which one spent a lifetime looking back at, trying to accept, interpret, comprehend. Things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and wrong, these were what prevailed, what endured, in the end.

You are still young, free.. Do yourself a favor. Before it's too late, without thinking too much about it first, pack a pillow and a blanket and see as much of the world as you can. You will not regret it. One day it will be too late.

In a world of diminishing mystery, the unknown persists.

Remember that you and I made this journey together to a place where there was nowhere left to go.

She has the gift of accepting her life

She watched his lips forming the words, at the same time she heard them under her skin, under her winter coat, so near and full of warmth that she felt herself go hot.

Anne Lamott

Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.

Joy is the best makeup.

You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a better past.

You can either practice being right or practice being kind.

Your problem is how you are going to spend this one and precious life you have been issued. Whether you're going to spend it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it and find out the truth about who you are.

I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish.

Not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.

A good marriage is where both people feel like they're getting the better end of the deal.

When God is going to do something wonderful, He or She always starts with a hardship; when God is going to do something amazing, He or She starts with an impossibility.

"No" is a complete sentence.

You don't always have to chop with the sword of truth. You can point with it too.

Henry Rollins

Scar tissue is stronger than regular tissue. Realize the strength, move on.

I'll never forget how the depression and loneliness felt good and bad at the same time. Still does.

Somewhere someone is thinking of you. Someone is calling you an angel.

Loneliness adds beauty to life. It puts a special burn on sunsets and makes night air smell better.

Girls aren't beautiful, they're pretty. Beautiful is too heavy a word to assign to a girl. Women are beautiful because their faces show that they know they have lost something and picked up something else.

Half of life is fucking up, the other half is dealing with it.

Don't do anything by half. If you love someone, love them with all your soul. When you go to work, work your ass off. When you hate someone, hate them until it hurts.

I am ready for whatever's coming. I expect nothing but to be let down or turned away. I am alone. Goddamn. The shit hurts sometimes, but I realize what I am, what I have become.

I think about the meaning of pain. Pain is personal. It really belongs to the one feeling it. Probably the only thing that is your own. I like mine.

I definitely learned a lesson this time. I know that I can be broken. I am not as tough as I thought. I see it now. At this point, it's the only thing good that came out of all of this. I know myself better now and know what I have to do.

My optimism wears heavy boots and is loud.

Do it or don't. It's amazing how many things in life are that easy.

Yes, I guess you could say I am a loner but I feel more lonely in a crowed room with boring people than I feel on my own.

Gustave Flaubert II

Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.

Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it.

It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.

One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.

Doubt … is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness.

An infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.

To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.

It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return. Such are the melancolies du voyage: perhaps they are one of the most rewarding things about traveling.

I go dreaming into the future, where I see nothing, nothing. I have no plans, no idea, no project, and, what is worse, no ambition. Something – the eternal ‘what’s the use?’ – sets its bronze barrier across every avenue that I open up in the realm of hypothesis.

Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.

As you get older, the heart shed its leaves like a tree. You cannot hold out against certain winds. Each day tears away a few more leaves; and then there are the storms that break off several branches at one go. And while nature’s greenery grows back again in the spring, that of the heart never grows back.

J. R. R. Tolkien II

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.

Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.

The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.

If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.

It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.

And he took her in his arms and kissed her under the sunlit sky, and he cared not that they stood high upon the walls in the sight of many.

Still round the corner there may wait
A new road or a secret gate
And though I oft have passed them by
A day will come at last when I
Shall take the hidden paths that run
West of the Moon, East of the Sun.

Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?

Courage is found in unlikely places.

Brian Andreas

I read once that the ancient Egyptians had fifty words for sand & the Eskimos had a hundred words for snow. I wish I had a thousand words for love, but all that comes to mind is the way you move against me while you sleep and there are no words for that.

She said she usually cried at least once each day not because she was sad, but because the world was so beautiful and life was so short.

I was waiting for the longest time, she said. I thought you forgot.
It is hard to forget, I said, when there is such an empty space when you are gone.

You may not remember the time you let me go first. 
Or the time you dropped back to tell me it wasn't that far to go. 
Or the time you waited at the crossroads for me to catch up. 
You may not remember any of those, but I do and this is what I have to say to you: 
Today, no matter what it takes, 
we ride home together.

Anyone can slay a dragon ...but try waking up every morning and loving the world all over again. That's what takes a real hero.

Wanting him to come back before anyone notices part of the world has not moved since he left.

She left pieces of her life behind her everywhere she went. It's easier to feel the sunlight without them, she said.

Time stands still best in moments that look suspiciously like ordinary life.

Everything changed the day she figured out there was exactly enough time for the important things in her life.

Ralph Waldo Emerson II

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

Always do what you are afraid to do.

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air.

When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.

Dare to live the life you have dreamed for yourself. Go forward and make your dreams come true.

It is not the length of life, but the depth.

The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.

Charles Dickens II

There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.

Never close your lips to those whom you have already opened your heart.

Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape.

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.

And O there are days in this life, worth life and worth death.

Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried, than before--more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle.

Ask no questions, and you'll be told no lies.

There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

The pain of parting is nothing to the joy of meeting again.

Love her, love her, love her! If she favours you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to pieces – and as it gets older and stronger, it will tear deeper – love her, love her, love her!

I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in the world.

A loving heart is the truest wisdom.