Victoria Moran

To the people who love you, you are beautiful already. This is not because they’re blind to your shortcomings but because they so clearly see your soul. Your shortcomings then dim by comparison. The people who care about you are willing to let you be imperfect and beautiful, too. 

If you celebrate your differentness, the world will, too. It believes exactly what you tell it—through the words you use to describe yourself, the actions you take to care for yourself, and the choices you make to express yourself. Tell the world you are one-of-a-kind creation who came here to experience wonder and spread joy. Expect to be accommodated.

A simple life is not seeing how little we can get by with—that’s poverty—but how efficiently we can put first things first. . . . When you’re clear about your purpose and your priorities, you can painlessly discard whatever does not support these, whether it’s clutter in your cabinets or commitments on your calendar.

In this moment, there is plenty of time. In this moment, you are precisely as you should be. In this moment, there is infinite possibility. 

Donald Miller

When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you can like them for who they are.

Everybody has to leave, everybody has to leave their home and come back so they can love it again for all new reasons.

Fear is a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life.

Believing in God is as much like falling in love as it is making a decision. Love is both something that happens to you and something you decide upon.

I once listened to an Indian on television say that God was in the wind and the water, and I wondered at how beautiful that was because it meant you could swim in Him or have Him brush your face in a breeze.

It occurs to me it is not so much the aim of the devil to lure me with evil as it is to preoccupy me with the meaningless.

There is something beautiful about a billion stars held steady by a God who knows what He is doing. (They hang there, the stars, like notes on a page of music, free-form verse, silent mysteries swirling in the blue like jazz.) And as I lay there, it occurred to me that God is up there somewhere. Of course, I had always known He was, but this time I felt it, I realized it, the way a person realizes they are hungry or thirsty. The knowledge of God seeped out of my brain and into my heart. I imagined Him looking down on this earth, half angry because His beloved mankind had cheated on Him, had committed adultery, and yet hopelessly in love with her, drunk with love for her.

Rupi Kaur

Loneliness is a sign you are in desperate need of yourself.

I didn't leave because 
I stopped loving you, 
I left because the longer 
I stayed the less I loved myself.

i am a museum full of art
but you had your eyes shut

You tell me to quiet down cause my opinions make me less beautiful but i was not made with a fire in my belly so i could be put out i was not made with a lightness on my tongue so i could be easy to swallow i was made heavy half blade and half silk difficult to forget and not easy for the mind to follow.

i want to apologize to all the women i have called beautiful
before i’ve called them intelligent or brave
i am sorry i made it sound as though
something as simple as what you’re born with
is all you have to be proud of
when you have broken mountains with your wit 
from now on i will say things like
you are resilient, or you are extraordinary
not because i don’t think you’re beautiful
but because i need you to know
you are more than that

Patti Smith

No one expected me. Everything awaited me.

Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These were our young questions, and young answers were revealed. It leads to each other. We become ourselves.

Everything distracted me, but most of all myself.

Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don't abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.

Well I haven't fucked much with the past,
But I've fucked plenty with the future.

I learned from him that often contradiction is the clearest way to truth.

I imagined myself as Frida to Diego, both muse and maker. I dreamed of meeting an artist to love and support and work with side by side.

I refuse to believe that Hendrix had the last possessed hand,
that Joplin had the last drunken throat,
that Morrison had the last enlightened mind.

I have loved books all my life. There is nothing more beautiful in our material world than the book.

Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine.

Nicole Richie

It's hard to tell who has your back, from who has it long enough just to stab you in it....

True friends are like diamonds – bright, beautiful, valuable, and always in style.

You just have to go after what you want and if it doesn't want you back then so be it; it doesn't deserve you anyways.

The older you get, the more you realize you need a handful of good, close, tight friends.

Everything good in life is either immoral, illegal or fattening

Life is about doing the things that make you happy, not the things that please other people. If you can please other people, that's a plus, but as long as you're not hurting anyone, you're golden.

I was like a trashcan. I took everything.

I’ve just gone through so much in my life that pulling my top up just doesn’t seem like that big of a deal.

I believe there are only one or two people in the world with whom one can have a true connection. When you've been fortunate enough to marry one of those people, you are reluctant to settle for less. One can have lovers, those are easily found, but true love rarely strikes twice.

James Frey

Sometimes skulls are thick. Sometimes hearts are vacant. Sometimes words don't work. 

Be strong. Live honorably and with dignity. When you don't think you can, hold on.

When I see you, the World stops. It stops and all that exists for me is you and my eyes staring at you. There's nothing else. No noise, no other people, no thoughts or worries, no yesterday, no tomorrow. The World just stops, and it is a beautiful place, and there is only you.

The wounds that never heal can only be mourned alone.

Pain is the feeling. Suffering is the effect the pain inflicts. If one can endure pain, one can live without suffering. If one can withstand pain, one can withstand anything. If one can learn to control pain, one can learn to control oneself. 

There is emotion in the hug, and there is respect and a form of love. Emotion that comes from honesty, respect that comes from challenge, and the form of love that exists between people whose minds have touched, whose hearts have touched, whose souls have touched. Our minds touched. Our hearts touched. Our souls touched. We separate.

If there was a God. I would spit in his face for subjecting me to this. If there was a Devil, I would sell my soul to make it end. If there was something Higher that controlled out f***ing fates, I would tell it to take my fate and shove it up its fucking ass. Shove it hard and far, you motherf***er. Please end. Please end. Please end.

E. Lockhart

Be a little kinder than you have to.

Do not accept an evil you can change.

Always do what you're afraid to do.

There is not even a Scrabble word for how bad I feel.

We are liars. We are beautiful and privileged. We are cracked and broken.

She is sugar, curiosity, and rain.

He was contemplation and enthusiasm. Ambition and strong coffee. I could have looked at him forever.

What if we could stop being different colors, different backgrounds, and just be in love?

The universe is seeming really huge right now. I need something to hold on to.

Silence is a protective coating over pain.

If you want to live where people are not afraid of mice, you must give up living in palaces.

Someone once wrote that a novel should deliver a series of small astonishments. I get the same thing spending an hour with you.

Jennifer Niven

You are all the colors in one, at full brightness.

The thing I realize is, that it's not what you take, it's what you leave.

We do not remember days, we remember moments.

The great thing about this life of ours is that you can be someone different to everybody.

The problem with people is they forget that most of the time it's the small things that count.

It's my experience that people are a lot more sympathetic if they can see you hurting, and for the millionth time in my life I wish for measles or smallpox or some other easily understood disease just to make it easier on me and also on them.

You make me lovely, and it’s so lovely to be lovely to the one I love.…

You have been in every way all that anyone could be.… If anybody could have saved me it would have been you.

I learned that there is good in this world, if you look hard enough for it. I learned that not everyone is disappointing, including me, and that a 1,257-foot bump in the ground can feel higher than a bell tower if you’re standing next to the right person.

Madeline Miller

I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world

And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone.

In the darkness, two shadows, reaching through the hopeless, heavy dusk. Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood like a hundred golden urns pouring out of the sun.

When he died, all things soft and beautiful and bright would be buried with him.

We were like gods at the dawning of the world, & our joy was so bright we could see nothing else but the other.

There are no bargains between lion and men. I will kill you and eat you raw.

He is a weapon, a killer. Do not forget it. You can use a spear as a walking stick, but that will not change its nature.

He smiled, and his face was like the sun.

I am made of memories.

Sarah Kay

Because there’s nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline, no matter how many times it’s sent away.

I have seen the best of you, and the worst of you, and I choose both.

Life will hit you hard in the face, wait for you to get back up just so it can kick you in the stomach. But getting the wind knocked out of you is the only way to remind your lungs how much they like the taste of air.

You can only fit so many words in a postcard, only so many in a phone call, only so many into space before you forget that words are sometimes used for things other than filling emptiness.

Still now I send letters into space
Hoping that some mailman somewhere will track you down
And recognise you from the descriptions in my poems
That he will place the stack of them in your hands and tell you,
There is a girl who still writes you, she doesn't know how not to

You are a woman. Skin and bones, veins and nerves, hair and sweat. You are not made of metaphors. Not apologies, not excuses.

Forgive yourself for the decisions you have made, the ones you still call mistakes when you tuck them in at night.