“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
-Anaïs Nin
“The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.”
-Ayn Rand
“A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it.”
-Albert Einstein
“Some people care too much. I think it’s called love.”
-A.A. Milne
“what matters most is how well you walk through the fire”
-Charles Bukowski
“We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”
-Charles Bukowski
“But luxury has never appealed to me, I like simple things, books, being alone, or with somebody who understands.”
-Daphne du Maurier
“Some people feel the rain. Others just get wet.”
-Bob Marley
“My ambition is handicapped by laziness”
-Charles Bukowski
“You have to die a few times before you can really
live.”
-Charles Bukowski
“None of us really changes over time. We only become more fully what we are.”
-Anne Rice
“Sometimes you make choices in life and sometimes choices make you.”
-Gayle Forman
“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”
-Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Everything is possible. The impossible just takes longer.”
-Dan Brown
“I read so I can live more than one life in more than one place.”
-Anne Tyler
“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”
-Charles Bukowski
“Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.”
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Weeds are flowers, too, once you get to know them.”
-A.A. Milne
“People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.”
-Harper Lee
“You know, one of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music.”
-Annie Proulx
“Books. Cats. Life is Good.”
-Edward Gorey
“I wanted the whole world or nothing.”
-Charles Bukowski
“Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche
“My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?”
-David Mitchell
“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”
-David Foster Wallace
“there is a loneliness in this world so great
that you can see it in the slow movement of
the hands of a clock.people so tired
mutilated
either by love or no love.people just are not good to each other
one on one.the rich are not good to the rich
the poor are not good to the poor.we are afraid.
our educational system tells us
that we can all be
big-ass winners.it hasn’t told us
about the gutters
or the suicides.or the terror of one person
aching in one place
aloneuntouched
unspoken towatering a plant.”
-Charles Bukowski
“We all have our time machines, don’t we. Those that take us back are memories…And those that carry us forward, are dreams.”
-H.G. Wells
“No, I’m just a very naughty boy. I do all sorts of bad things. I kick kittens. I make rude gestures at nuns.”
-Cassandra Clare
“An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.”
-Charles Bukowski
“there are worse things
than being alone
but it often takes
decades to realize this
and most often when you do
it’s too late
and there’s nothing worse
than too late”
-Charles Bukowski
“There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.”
-C.S. Lewis
“Money can’t buy happiness, but it can make you awfully comfortable while you’re being miserable.”
-Clare Boothe Luce
“If you’re losing your soul and you know it, then you’ve still got a soul left to lose”
-Charles Bukowski
“I realize now that dying is easy. Living is hard.”
-Gayle Forman
“If you don’t like someone’s story, write your own.”
-Chinua Achebe
“Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don’t.”
-Bill Nye
“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.”
-Ernest Hemingway
“I knew when I met you an adventure was going to happen.”
-A.A. Milne
“Sometimes,’ said Pooh, ‘the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.”
-A.A. Milne
“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end.”
-Gilda Radner
“You’re alive only once, as far as we know, and what could be worse than getting to the end of your life and realizing you hadn’t lived it?”
-Edward Albee
“Some lose all mind and become soul,insane.
some lose all soul and become mind, intellectual.
some lose both and become accepted”
-Charles Bukowski
“Where there is love, there is often also hate. They can exist side by side.”
-Cassandra Clare
“The beauty of a woman is not in the clothes she wears, the figure that she carries, or the way she combs her hair. The beauty of a woman is seen in her eyes, because that is the doorway to her heart, the place where love resides. True beauty in a woman is reflected in her soul. It’s the caring that she lovingly gives, the passion that she shows & the beauty of a woman only grows with passing years.”
-Audrey Hepburn
“And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on.”
-George Gordon Byron
“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.”
-Danielle Steel
“The helpful thought for which you look
Is written somewhere in a book.”
-Edward Gorey
“We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.”
-D.H. Lawrence
“Creativity is intelligence having fun.”
-Albert Einstein
“Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue, and the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.”
-E.Y. Harburg
“Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.”
-Alan W. Watts
“Every time you are tempted to react in the same old way, ask if you want to be a prisoner of the past or a pioneer of the future.”
-Deepak Chopra
“Time is the coin of your life. You spend it. Do not allow others to spend it for you.”
-Carl Sandburg
“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad.”
-Aldous Huxley
“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.”
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
“If you work really hard, and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.”
-Conan O–39;Brien
“Wheresoever you go, go with all your heart.”
-Confucius
“No book can be appreciated until it has been slept with and dreamed over.”
-Eugene Field
“Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.”
-Doris Lessing
“The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.”
-H.P. Lovecraft
“Even the strongest and bravest must sometimes weep. It shows they have a great heart, one that can feel compassion for others.”
-Brian Jacques
“Remember if people talk behind your back, it only means you are two steps ahead.”
-Fannie Flagg
“It is never too late to be wise.”
-Daniel Defoe
“Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live.”
-Gustave Flaubert
“Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there’s no room for the present at all.”
-Evelyn Waugh
“I get a warm feeling among my books.”
-Anthony Powell
“When you play a game of thrones you win or you die.”
-George R.R. Martin
“I will remember the kisses
our lips raw with love
and how you gave me
everything you had
and how I
offered you what was left of
me,
and I will remember your small room
the feel of you
the light in the window
your records
your books
our morning coffee
our noons our nights
our bodies spilled together
sleeping
the tiny flowing currents
immediate and forever
your leg my leg
your arm my arm
your smile and the warmth
of you
who made me laugh
again.”
-Charles Bukowski
“A library is infinity under a roof.”
-Gail Carson Levine
“As it has been said:
Love and a cough
cannot be concealed.
Even a small cough.
Even a small love.”
-Anne Sexton
“I felt like crying but nothing came out. it was just a sort of sad sickness, sick sad, when you can’t feel any worse. I think you know it. I think everybody knows it now and then. but I think I have known it pretty often, too often.”
-Charles Bukowski
“Nothing great in the world was accomplished without passion.”
-Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
“No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche
“Open a book this minute and start reading. Don’t move until you’ve reached page fifty. Until you’ve buried your thoughts in print. Cover yourself with words. Wash yourself away. Dissolve.”
-Carol Shields
“Either you deal with what is the reality, or you can be sure that the reality is going to deal with you.”
-Alex Haley
“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
-Albert Camus
“If everybody is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.”
-George S. Patton Jr.
“Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.”
-Charles Bukowski
“No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn.”
-Hal Borland
“You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.”
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
“I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my darling. Only a fool would give out such a vital organ”
-Anaïs Nin
“My life has a superb cast, but I cannot figure out the plot.”
-Ashleigh Brilliant
“the free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it – basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.”
-Charles Bukowski
“Very few of us are what we seem.”
-Agatha Christie
“those who escape hell
however
never talk about
it
and nothing much
bothers them
after
that.”
-Charles Bukowski
“Nobody gets everything in this life. You decide your priorities and you make your choices. I’d decided long ago that any cake I had would be eaten.”
-Donald E. Westlake
“Only you can control your future.”
-Dr. Seuss
“I wish I were a girl again, half-savage and hardy, and free.”
-Emily Brontë
“For to know a man’s library is, in some measure, to know his mind.”
-Geraldine Brooks
“You’ll miss the best things if you keep your eyes shut.”
-Dr. Seuss
“There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls. ”
-George Carlin
“In the world I am
Always a stranger
I do not understand its language
It does not understand my silence”
-Bei Dao
“Be glad. Be good. Be brave.”
-Eleanor H. Porter
“There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that receives it.”
-Edith Wharton
“I have for the first time found what I can truly love–I have found you. You are my sympathy–my better self–my good angel–I am bound to you with a strong attachment. I think you good, gifted, lovely: a fervent, a solemn passion is conceived in my heart; it leans to you, draws you to my centre and spring of life, wrap my existence about you–and, kindling in pure, powerful flame, fuses you and me in one.”
-Charlotte Brontë
“To die, it’s easy. But you have to struggle for life.”
-Art Spiegelman
“The unfed mind devours itself.”
-Gore Vidal
“You have everything needed for the extravagant journey that is your life.”
-Carlos Castañeda
“She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity.”
-Flannery O–39;Connor
“At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can.”
-Frida Kahlo
“A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never entirely recover.”
-Charles Bukowski
“One must dare to be happy. ”
-Gertrude Stein
“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”
-Donna Tartt
“There are three questions every woman should be able to answer yes to before they commit to a man. If you answer no to any of the three questions, run like hell.”
[…]
“Does he treat you with respect at all times? That’s the first question. The second question is, if he is the exact same person twenty years from now that he is today, would you still want to marry him? And finally, does he inspire to be a better person? You find someone you can answer yes to all three, then you’ve found a good man.”
-Colleen Hoover
“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view.”
-Edward Abbey
“We are surrounded by story.”
-Alice McDermott
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: We all want everything to be okay. We don’t even wish so much for fantastic or marvelous or outstanding. We will happily settle for okay, because most of the time, okay is enough.”
-David Levithan
“Ignorance killed the cat; curiosity was framed!”
-C.J. Cherryh
“I’m afraid that sometimes you’ll play lonely games too. Games you can’t win ’cause you’ll play against you.”
-Dr. Seuss
“What is right is not always popular and what is popular is not always right.”
-Albert Einstein
“Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.”
-Ernest Hemingway
“Life is a beautiful magnificent thing, even to a jellyfish.”
-Charlie Chaplin
“People do not change, they are merely revealed.”
-Anne Enright
“Remember this: Nothing is written in the stars. Not these stars, nor any others. No one controls your destiny.”
-Gregory Maguire
“I think you should be a child for as long as you can. I have been successful for 74 years being able to do that.”
-Bob Newhart
“Love the world and yourself in it, move through it as though it offers no resistance, as though the world is your natural element.”
-Audrey Niffenegger
“Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.”
-David Mitchell
“The finest of pleasures are always the unexpected ones.”
-Erin Morgenstern
“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.”
-Emily Dickinson
“Whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.”
-E.E. Cummings
“You will hear thunder and remember me,
and think: she wanted storms…”
-Anna Akhmatova
“I will take the sun in my mouth
and leap into the ripe air
Alive
with closed eyes
to dash against darkness”
-E.E. Cummings
“There’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I’m not going to let anybody see you.”
-Charles Bukowski
“I don’t think there is any truth. There are only points of view. ”
-Allen Ginsberg
“I am not interested in being original. I am interested in being true.”
-Agostinho da Silva
“When I look at my life and its secret colours, I feel like bursting into tears.”
-Albert Camus
“That was enterprising,” Will sounded nearly impressed.
Nate smiled. Tess shot him a furious look. “Don’t look pleased with yourself. When Will says ‘enterprising’ he means ‘morally deficient.'”
“No, I mean enterprising,” said Will. “When I mean morally deficient, I say, ‘Now, that’s something I would have done’.”
-Cassandra Clare
“I suspect the most we can hope for, and it’s no small hope, is that we never give up, that we never stop giving ourselves permission to try to love and receive love.”
-Elizabeth Strout
“If the person you are talking to doesn’t appear to be listening, be patient. It may simply be that he has a small piece of fluff in his ear.”
-A.A. Milne
“I was born with an enormous need for affection, and a terrible need to give it.”
-Audrey Hepburn
“Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone.”
-Czesław Miłosz
“You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.”
-Cormac McCarthy
“Question everything. Your love, your religion, your passion. If you don’t have questions, you’ll never find answers.”
-Colleen Hoover
“Please believe that one single positive dream is more important than a thousand negative realities.”
-Adeline Yen Mah
“And O there are days in this life, worth life and worth death.”
-Charles Dickens
“Even when you have doubts, take that step. Take chances. Mistakes are never a failure—they can be turned into wisdom.”
-Cat Cora
“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.
And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.”
-Albert Camus
“In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity”
-Albert Einstein
“There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest.”
-Anaïs Nin
“Laugh all you want and cry all you want and whistle at pretty men in the street and to hell with anybody who thinks you’re a damned fool!”
-Armistead Maupin
“In secret we met
In silence I grieve,
That thy heart could forget,
Thy spirit deceive.”
-George Gordon Byron
“Laugh loudly, laugh often, and most important, laugh at yourself.”
-Chelsea Handler
“I’m not lost for I know where I am. But however, where I am may be lost.”
-A.A. Milne
“What I’ve come to learn is that the world is never saved in grand messianic gestures, but in the simple accumulation of gentle, soft, almost invisible acts of compassion.”
-Chris Abani
“Books fall open, you fall in.”
-David T.W. McCord
“I’m glad we had the times together just to laugh and sing a song, seems like we just got started and then before you know it, the times we had together were gone.”
-Dr. Seuss
“There’s something ugly about the flawless.”
-Dennis Lehane
“Adventure is worthwhile in itself.”
-Amelia Earhart
“I used to believe in forever, but forever’s too good to be true”
-A.A. Milne
“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”
-E.B. White
“How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.”
-Gore Vidal
