2015 Part II

I don’t think that you can fake warmth. You can fake lust, jealousy, anger; those are all quite easy. But actual, genuine warmth? I don’t think you can fake it. 
Keira Knightley, from an interview

Freedom and love go together. Love is not a reaction. If I love you because you love me, that is mere trade, a thing to be bought in the market; it is not love. To love is not to ask anything in return, not even to feel that you are giving something- and it is only such love that can know freedom. 
Jiddu Krishnamurti 

…I’m asleep &
don’t know & the
world goes on without
me. 
Jack Kerouac, from Book Of Sketches 

Between herself and the sun,
something has ended. 
Louise Glück, from October

I move from realism to fantasy without the spectator ever noticing. 
Jean-Pierre Melville

What’s left to do? What unfinished business is left to do, before you can simply be your being, be your Self? Because the mind is not going to have a holiday. Don’t look anywhere to find ‘it’. Even your very search to find ‘it’ is already arising in ‘it’. We are missing the obvious. Don’t seek help from your mind. 
Mooji 

It’s all like a dream. Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don’t know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for three seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky way soft cloud innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect. We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere: Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes into everything is one thing. It’s a dream already ended. There’s nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. 
Jack Kerouac, from The Portable Jack Kerouac

There has to be some rupturing of the status quo or equilibrium to have the beginning of a story. A man going on a journey, somebody dying, life events or world events tend to be the components that allow you to begin a story. 
Anthony Minghella

Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But in fact they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman. 
Margaret Fuller

When you were here before
Couldn’t look you in the eye
You’re just like an angel
Your skin makes me cry

You float like a feather
In a beautiful world
I wish I was special
You’re so very special

But I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo
What the hell am I doing here?
I don’t belong here

I don’t care if it hurts
I want to have control
I want a perfect body
I want a perfect soul

I want you to notice
When I’m not around
You’re so very special
I wish I was special

But I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo
What the hell am I doing here?
I don’t belong here, oh, oh

She’s running out the door
She’s running
She run, run, run, run
Run

Whatever makes you happy
Whatever you want
You’re so very special
I wish I was special

But I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo
What the hell am I doing here?
I don’t belong here
I don’t belong here

Creep - Radiohead

It is a moment to me, not a piece of scenery. I should say the picture was in me, not out there. That is why you want to go again to a place, and I don’t care so much, because I have it with me. 
D.H. Lawrence, from The Complete Works 

I want a joy that takes simple colors, street organs, ribbons, flags, not a joy that takes one’s breath away and throws one into space. Not a joy like the mystic’s ecstasies or the poet’s ecstasies which lift one into an atmosphere others cannot breathe with you. 
Anaïs Nin, from The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944 

The aura given out by a person or object is as much a part of them as their flesh. The effect that they make in space is as bound up with them as might be their colour or smell … Therefore the painter must be as concerned with the air surrounding his subject as with the subject itself. It is through observation and perception of atmosphere that he can register the feeling that he wishes his painting to give out. 
Lucian Freud

The findings are unequivocal: Online connection decreases depression, reduces loneliness, and increases levels of perceived social support. 
The Secret to Happiness May Lie in Our Relationships

Pleasure to me is wonder—the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability. To trace the remote in the immediate; the eternal in the ephemeral; the past in the present; the infinite in the finite; these are to me the springs of delight and beauty. 
 H.P. Lovecraft 

Don’t bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid. 
Salvador Dali
Diary of a Genius (1964)

When everything you do, you do too long, and do too late, you can’t expect to find the people still there. 
Ernest Hemingway

I don’t wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work. 
Pearl S. Buck

Ne te quæsiveris extra.

(Latin) Do not search outside of yourself.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Be careful not to enter the world with any need to seduce, charm, conquer what you do not really want only for the sake of approval. This is what causes the frozen moment before people, and cuts all naturalness and trust. 
Anaïs Nin, from The Diary Of Anais Nin, Vol. 4: 1944-1947 

Moving pictures haven’t got time for sermons. Try to get in the habit of thinking in terms of pictorial action. 
From the novel ‘What Makes Sammy Run’ by screenwriter and author Budd Schulberg 

Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are. 
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince.

She is still on her balcony
green flesh, her hair green,
dreaming in the bitter sea. 
Federico Garcia Lorca

When you recognize that there is a voice in your head that pretends to be you and never stops speaking, you are awakening out of your unconscious identification with the stream of thinking. When you notice that voice, you realize that who you are is not the voice — the thinker — but the one who is aware of it. 
Eckhart Tolle

How can I accept a limited definable self, when I feel, in me, all possibilities? 
Anaïs Nin

There is nothing prettier than a city at 5 AM with its empty streets and cold wind. 

Perfectionism is very addictive because it is very seductive. It’s so great to think ‘There’s a way I can do things where I can never be held in judgment by other people, that I can totally escape criticism.’ But it doesn’t work. 
Brené Brown, The Power of Vulnerability

You have got to welcome and embrace complexity. 
Paul Singer

Someone once told me where a sentence enters us
and it’s the same place as regret. 
Alex Dimitrov, from Time Is A River 

[A person’s] honesty is only honesty, not truth…. 
Flannery O'Connor

People will often cry gross over-intellectualisation when popular culture is critically addressed, as if it is somehow exempt from serious consideration because it is itself ‘non-serious’, just a bit of fun that doesn’t require or deserve dissection. I disagree; every expression of art is a product of its environment and as such will reflect the concerns, preoccupations and neuroses of the time. Mainstream entertainment particularly, by its very nature, has to reflect the dominant modes of thinking in order to qualify as mainstream, and in that respect, mass entertainment is even more fun to pick apart. 
Simon Pegg, ‘Nerd do well’ 

You are ice and fire, 
The touch of you burns my hands like snow. 
Amy Lowell, excerpt from “Opal”

Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance. Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer. 
Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

The excellent is new forever. 
Ralph Waldo Emerson

When talented people write badly it’s generally for one of two reasons: Either they’re blinded by an idea they feel compelled to prove or they’re driven by an emotion they must express. When talented people write well, it is generally for this reason: They’re moved by a desire to touch the audience. 
Robert McKee (from his screenwriting manual ‘Story’)

Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself. 
Friedrich Nietzsche 

The goal of killing off the self-critical, judgmental part of your psyche confirms the idea that there’s something wrong with you that needs to be fixed; that there’s a perfectable “you” in the future who’s unencumbered by such conflicts. 
Dennis Palumbo

I don’t actually start writing the story itself until I know how the story ends. Typically the first part of the story that I write is the very ending, either the last paragraph of the story or a paragraph near the end. Once I have the destination in mind then I can build the rest of the story around that or build the rest of the story in such a way as to lead up to that. Usually the second thing I write is the opening of the story and then I write the rest of the story in almost random order. I just keep writing scenes until I’ve connected the beginning and the end. 
Ted Chiang

People are like, ‘You took such a big risk!’ And I am like, did I? I was already broke, so it wasn’t that scary starting out. I was already living at home and eating cereal, so… 
Amber Venz Box, Co-Founder, RewardStyle & LikeToKnow.It

You have to put up with the risk of being misunderstood if you are going to try to communicate. You have to put up with people projecting their own ideas, attitudes, misunderstanding you. But it’s worth being a public fool if that’s all you can be in order to communicate yourself. 
Edie Sedgwick

[Friendship] is a relationship that has no formal shape, there are no rules or obligations or bonds as in marriage or the family, it is held together by neither law nor property nor blood, there is no glue in it but mutual liking. It is therefore rare. 
Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

You’re incapable of loving, only fear excites you. 
Franz Kafka, from The Complete Stories 

None of us understand what we’re doing but we do beautiful things anyway. 
Allen Ginsberg 

Nobody really knows or understands and nobody has ever said the secret. The secret is that it is poetry written into prose and it is the hardest of all things to do. 
Ernest Hemingway

Study the hurtful patterns of your life. Then don’t repeat them. 
Yasmin Mogahed

I’m a recovering perfectionist and an aspiring ‘good-enoughist’. 
Brene Brown, ‘Daring Greatly’

The golden girl
bathed in the water
and the water turned gold 
Federico García Lorca, Qasida of the Golden Girl .

I read the whole novel straight through. And I got up and drank water, man. You should’ve seen me. I couldn’t move. That’s what a good writer will do to you. He’ll damn near kill you…a bad writer will too. 
Charles Bukowski, from an interview dated September 1987

Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself, do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it. 
Bruce Lee

You only love the potential and overlook the reality. 
Anaïs Nin, from The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944 

I dive into the future but I’m blinded by the sun. I’m reborn in every moment, so who knows what I’ll become… 
Selena Gomez. Revival

The notion that a human being should be constantly happy is a uniquely modern, uniquely American, uniquely destructive idea. 
Andrew Weil 

True elegance for me is the manifestation of an independent mind. 
Isabella Rossellini 

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery. 
Francis Bacon

Create a life that feels good on the inside, not one that looks good on the out side. 

The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature. 
Joseph Campbell, in “A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living”

If you are in the garden, I will dress myself in leaves.
If you are in the sea I will slide into thatsmooth blue nest, I will talk fish,I will adore salt. 
Mary Oliver

 from section 7 of “Rhapsody,” 
in The Leaf and The Cloud: A Poem 
(Da Capo Press, 2000)

Never wallow in your troubles; despair must be kept private and brief. 
Werner Herzog 

Nobody can tell you what you’re doing is good, meaningful or worthwhile. 
Hugh Macleod

Everybody’s too busy with their own lives to give a damn about your book, painting, screenplay, etc., especially if you haven’t finished it yet. 
Hugh MacLeod

this incompleteness is all we have 
Charles Bukowski

Standing on a street corner waiting for no one is Power.
Gregory Corso

Your expectation of something unique and dramatic, of some wonderful explosion, is merely hindering and delaying your Self Realization. You are not to expect an explosion, for the explosion has already happened - at the moment when you were born, when you realized yourself as Being-Knowing-Feeling. There is only one mistake you are making: you take the inner for the outer and the outer for the inner. What is in you, you take to be outside you and what is outside, you take to be in you. The mind and feelings are external, but you take them to be intimate. You believe the world to be objective, while it is entirely a projection of your psyche. That is the basic confusion and no new explosion will set it right! You have to think yourself out of it. There is no other way.
Nisargadatta Maharaj

…I oscillate between thinking I am crazy, and thinking I am not crazy enough. 
Joyce Carol Oates, from a diary entry 

I find the notion of happiness rather strange… It has never been a goal of mine; I just don’t think in those terms.

I try to give meaning to my existence through my work. That’s a simplified answer, but whether I’m happy or not really doesn’t count for much. I have always enjoyed my work. Maybe “enjoy” isn’t the right word; I love making films, and it means a lot to me that I can work in this profession. I am well aware of the many aspiring filmmakers out there with good ideas who never find a foothold. At the age of fourteen, once I realized filmmaking was an uninvited duty for me, I had no choice but to push on with my projects. Cinema has given me everything, but has also taken everything from me.

Werner Herzog, found in brainpickings

I stopped explaining myself when I realized people only understand from their level of perception. 

I am amazed at how much time I can spend apparently doing nothing, when in fact I am extremely busy with this kind of dreaming-awake that sustains me. 
May Sarton, from a journal entry 

Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve. 
Herman Hesse

Inspiration is all very well, but it’s hard work makes the difference. 
Augustus John

There are poets who sing you to sleep and poets who ready you for war and I want to be both. 
Ashe Vernon

We know so little about one another. We embrace a shadow and love a dream. 
Hjalmar Söderberg

The most successful people recognize that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation. 
Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Find someone who admires you for something less obvious. 

Honesty always gets my attention. Not particularly someone who is honest to me, but someone who is honest with themselves. 
Heath Ledger

The desire to be loved is the last illusion: 
Give it up and you will be free. 
Margaret Atwood, from Selected Poems II: 1976 - 1986

I don’t like work–no man does–but I like what is in the work–the chance to find yourself. Your own reality–for yourself not for others–what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means. 
Joseph Conrad

Do what you must,
And your friends will adjust. 
Robert Brault

The signs represent different styles of being. Each sign has its own style, its own way of being. A planet functions like a verb, and shows the kind of activity being done. 
Howard Sasportus 

An artist who maintains that he has been misunderstood is almost always a bad artist who, I’m afraid to say, has been understood. 
Quote from the Jo Nesbo novel ‘Headhunters’

Sadness is not unhealthy. It often seems to me that it prevents us from drying up. 
George Sand, from a letter to Gustave Flaubert (via violentwavesofemotion)

The concept of heaven is slightly askew - we think heaven is where all all the good halves of opposites reside, while hell is the home of bad halves. But is this true? Heaven is is the place were opposites are transcended, where dilemma posed by opposites just doesn’t exist - reminiscent of the gold sought by the alchemists via the transcendent function. All mystical traditions view the enlightened person as someone who has seen beyond the illusion of opposites 
Ken Wilber

Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are. 
Chinese Proverb

Flatter yourself critically. 
Willis Goth Regi

Sometimes not talking is effortless, and other times it’s more exhausting than lifting pianos. 
Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole 

I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me. 
Harry S. Truman

The cure for pain is in the pain. 
Rumi

Never complain. Never explain. 
Kate Moss

The intellectual ecstasy I have had access to since early childhood. But ecstasy is ecstasy. Intellectual “wanting” like sexual wanting. 
Susan Sontag, from Reborn: Journals & Notebooks (1947-1963) 

When you’re good at something, you’ll tell everyone. When you’re great at something, they’ll tell you. 
Walter Payton

It may be normal, darling; but I’d rather be natural. 
Truman Capote

Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak. 
Sun Tzu 

When one does not wish to face the darkness in one’s self, one relates to the dark person who will represent this, and then one engages in a duel with that person, in place of a duel with one’s own shadow self. I could not bear to think I contained in myself any element of destruction. I suffered from this dark self at the hands of others. I must find this dark shadow in myself and not project onto others. I have never accepted any shadows in myself. 
Anaïs Nin, from The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944 

The monstrosity of what’s happening in your mind
makes unfamiliar premises look familiar. 
Joseph Brodsky, from To Urania: Poems 

Something happens, and you forget to be afraid. When I was little, I used to picture that Paradise garden. I’d read about it in a book at school. Once you step in it, you’re no longer afraid. Wolves father at your feet, flowers dip down at you, a snake drinks water out of your hand. 
Maxine Swann, Serious Girls

Do you believe in love?”

“Yes, but only for other people.

Charles Bukowski, from More Notes Of A Dirty Old Man: The Uncollected Columns 

It is useless to mutter: “Life is meaningless; life is meaningless …” as an accompaniment to everything we do. In continuing to live and work and strive, we take ourselves seriously in action no matter what we say. 
Thomas Nagel, The Absurd

Such is the treacherous power of an artist, that sometimes even the worst ideas are made to work. 
Pauline Kael (film critic)

When you mess with one part of a person’s life, you’re not messing with just that part. Unfortunately, you can’t be that precise and selective. When you mess with one part of a person’s life, you’re messing with their entire life. 
Jay Asher

I’m not trying to do anything to you. It’s part of your egocentricity that you think everything I do is for the express purpose of getting on your nerves. But you see, it hasn’t got anything to do with you and deep down, it drives you mad. You feel the truth of this but you cannot stand it and it drives you mad. 
Joan Didion, from Run River 

Are we not like two volumes of one book? 
Marceline Desbordes-Valmore

For one thing, we have a real need to have others see us as we see ourselves. Swann (e.g., 1990) has shown that having a new acquaintance come to the same opinion of you that you hold yourself is a strong interpersonal motivation, often stronger than the need to have others have a positive opinion of you. 
Sherry Turkle 

Online, we easily find “company” but are exhausted by the pressures of performance. We enjoy continual connection but rarely have each other’s full attention. We can have instant audiences but flatten out what we say to each other in new reductive genres of abbreviation. We like it that the Web “knows” us, but this is only possible because we compromise our privacy, leaving electronic bread crumbs that can be easily exploited, both politically and commercially. We have many new encounters but may come to experience them as tentative, to be put “on hold” if better ones come along. Indeed, new encounters need not be better to get our attention. We are wired to respond positively to their simply being new. We can work from home, but our work bleeds into our private lives until we can barely discern the boundaries between them. We like being able to reach each other almost instantaneously but have to hide our phones to force ourselves to take a quiet moment. 
Sherry Turkle, Alone Together 

Underneath the self which acts are little selves which contemplate and which render possible both the action and the active subject. We speak of ‘self’ only in virtue of these thousands of little witnesses which contemplate within us: it is always a third party who says ‘me’. 
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

To make our life livable, we have to have spaces where we are fully present to each other or to ourselves, where we’re not competing with the roar of the Internet. 

Fantastic On Being conversation with MIT social scientists Sherry Turkle, founder MIT’s Initiative on Technology and Self and author of Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other.

Listen to the full episode here – it’s well worth making the time and space for – then revisit Alan Watts on how to live with presence and devour some practical insights from a contemporary cognitive scientist.

Terrified of being alone, yet afraid of intimacy, we experience widespread feelings of emptiness, of disconnection, of the unreality of self. And here the computer, a companion without emotional demands, offers a compromise. You can be a loner, but never alone. You can interact, but need never feel vulnerable to another person.
Sherry Turkle

I may not lead the most dramatic life, but in my brain it’s ‘War and Peace’ everyday.
Rufus Wainwright 

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

The Snow Man

by Wallace Stevens

The Ascendant is not “just a mask”, though, because it’s a mask we can never take off. It’s a character we’ll be playing for our whole lives, in one way or another. That character just (hopefully) grows and changes and develops throughout each new chapter of life. And while the Ascendant and anything conjunct the Ascendant do emerge most strongly in new situations and around new people, it’s not like you just stop being a Scorpio Rising around someone once they get to know you. Your Rising sign/planet is there even around people who you’ve known for forever. It’s just that they know you well enough to be able to see past it and understand the vast other sides of yourself.
Wayman Stewart

Although you sit in a room that is gray,

I know
how furiously
your heart

is beating.

Wallace Stevens, from The Gray Room 

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players. … I have 10 or so, and that’s a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.
Gore Vidal 

Clay watched her as she undressed, a slow process involving many buttons, hooks and zippers. He enjoyed the metamorphosis between woman clothed and woman nude. Clothed, she was armored and disguised, with legs lengthened by high heels, hips and breasts diminished by elastic. Naked, what had been tall and slender suddenly became short and solid and one realized not only how small she was but how powerfully she was put together, unbreakable, made of earth. Compared to woman, man was a fragile nervous instrument all fire and air, no match for earth and water. Complaining about how light the room was and why didn’t he ever draw the drapes, Dolly Perrine came to bed with him and they mixed the four elements for half an hour.
Gore Vidal - Washington D.C., Narratives of Empire 

I was far too polite to ask.
Gore Vidal, when asked whether he lost his virginity to a man or a woman

It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
Gore Vidal

I destroyed myself so you couldn’t hurt me. 

Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.
Anne Sexton 

The Saturnian element is very obvious in Aquarius. If you get into an ideological discussion, you become aware of the orderliness and discipline of Aquarius’s thinking, and even sometimes of the rigidity and conservatism, although the ideas themselves may be eclectic and innovative
Liz Greene - Outer Planets

In this world, there are things you can only do alone, and things you can only do with somebody else. It’s important to combine the two in just the right amount.
Haruki Murakami 

don’t wonder why people go crazy, wonder why they don’t
meredith grey

Friendship is a simple thing, and yet complicated; friendship is on the surface, something natural, something taken for granted, and yet underneath one could find worlds.
Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy 

[W]hen one’s young … everything is a rehearsal to be repeated ad lib, to be put right when the curtain goes up in earnest. One day you know that the curtain was up all the time. That was the performance.
Sybille Bedford 

Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, ‘This is the real me,’ and when you have found that attitude, follow it.
William James, The Principals of Psychology

I like airplanes. I like anywhere that isn’t a proper place. I like in betweens.
Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 7: Brief Lives

None of my work has met my own standards.
William Faulkner

The more easily distracted you are the more creative you can be because when you are distracted you allow other ideas to flow in. However, research suggests that in order to make use of the ideas and be creative, you have to also be able to filter out unneeded/irrelevant ideas. 

If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.
Tennessee Williams, Conversations with Tennessee Williams

You look like a winter night. I could sleep inside the cold of you.
Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless 

Do what you want to … but then pay the bill.
Peggy Ramsay

The poetry of the earth is never dead.
John Keats

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature–the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.
Rachel Carson

Can you imagine the world if we only saw souls and not bodies? 

Flirtation doesn’t have to go somewhere; it certainly doesn’t need to end up in bed. I like to think of it as a little friendlier than a handshake, a little less intimate than a kiss. It’s a way of saying hi, you look great, have a wonderful day. A tasteful flirtation, played out people who understand the rules, leave everyone feeling good and can perk up the bluest mood.
Karen Marie Moning

The glitter in the sky looks as if I could scoop it all up in my hands and let the stars swirl and touch one another, but they are so distant, so very far apart, that they cannot feel the warmth of each other, even though they are made of burning.
Beth Revis

Snow was falling,
so much like stars
filling the dark trees
that one could easily imagine
its reason for being was nothing more
than prettiness.
Mary Oliver

My scripts are in visual form … I don’t think [film’s] a literary medium anyway, so why waste work?
Satyajit Ray

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
Robert Frost

The spiritual way is not about being ‘right’; its about being at peace with whatever is real.
The Lazy Yogi 

Talk to me like the rain and let me listen, let me lie here and listen
Tennessee Williams, Talk to Me Like the Rain And Let Me Listen

It had always been a drawback to see life differently from other people … Now [in writing] I had stumbled on a profession in which it was an asset.
David Hare (in his memoir ‘The Blue Touch Paper’) 

Everyone who shares their thoughts are brave individuals. It takes guts to let anyone, and everyone see inside your heart. We should never let anyone discourage us from our right to share. 

William Chapman 

The question ‘Who am I?’ is not really meant to get an answer, the question ‘Who am I?’ is meant to dissolve the questioner.
Ramana Maharshi

The key to confidence is to believe that you are coming across exactly as you intend to. 

Plot is for those who already know the world; narrative is for those who want to discover it.
V.S. Naipaul

Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.
Ray Bradbury

The science of loving, yes, that’s the only kind of science I want. I’d barter away everything I possess to win it.
St. Therese of Lisieux

The more I think it over, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.
Vincent van Gogh

Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.
Frédéric Chopin 

Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

Through doing interviews, you find yourself in the possession of a persona, which has no use to you.
Richard Ayoade

I’m scared that I won’t be the soulmate of my soulmate.
2am thoughts

I don’t mean to write you any kind of sad or dramatic letter or anything but I just want you to know how I love you.
Martha Gellhorn, from a letter to Ernest Hemingway 

The real self is not muddy, it is pure
Dorothea Lasky, from “Whatever You Paid For That Sweater, It Was Worth It,” Awe 

You shouldn’t write for anyone, only for yourself. And one should never write a book just to write a book. Because that has no reality, it’s only a book. Everything I’ve written, I wrote to escape a sense of oppression, suffocation. It wasn’t from inspiration, as they say. It was a sort of getting free, to be able to breathe.
E.M. Cioran, Writing at Risk: Interviews in Paris with Uncommon Writers, August 1983 

She is something new, something hopeful. Like spring to my deep winter.
Pierce Brown

I go through phases. Some days I feel like the person I’m supposed to be, and then some days I turn into no one at all. There is both me and my silhouette. I hope that on the days you find me and all I am are darkened lines, you still are willing to be near me.
Mary Kate Teske

I go through phases. Some days I feel like the person I’m supposed to be, and then some days I turn into no one at all. There is both me and my silhouette. I hope that on the days you find me and all I am are darkened lines, you still are willing to be near me.
Mary Kate Teske

Don’t tell people your plans. Show them your results.
Unknown

most people don’t know how to deal with themselves, don’t expect them to know how to handle anything involving you.
Cirino

People with lower self esteem are more likely to sabotage themselves when something good happens to them because they feel that they don’t deserve it. 

You seem restless, in a kind of permanent way. 

We can change our habits if we paid attention to them. 

Do what you want to … but then pay the bill.
Peggy Ramsay

Deleuze’s personal aversion to traveling is articulated - even as he establishes the provenance of the conceptual link between nomadism and “not moving” - in his explanation of “V as Voyage” with Claire Parnet. he says that traveling, even, and perhaps especially, to meet other intellectuals, is, in fact the

“opposite of traveling. To go to the ends of the earth to talk… to see people before for talking and to see people after for talking, this is a monstrous image, Its’a a cheap rupture… A trip is not enough to create a real rupture. If you want rupture, then do something other than travel… Nothing is more immobile than a nomad. Nothing travels less than a nomad. But there are trips that are true ruptures… In a sense, I feel no need to move. All the intensities that I have are immobile intensities… There is a geo-philosophy, I mean, there are profound countries, my very own foreign lands that I don’t find by traveling.”

V as Voyage - Gilles Deleuze 

“There is only one mistake you are making: you take the inner for the outer and the outer for the inner. What is in you, you take to be outside you and what is outside, you take to be in you.”

Tenderness is not softness and softness is not goodness. - taylor ruth

Most of the time we hear “you’re self aware” as a compliment when most of the time it’s an insult. - taylor ruth

The one thing everyone tells a young writer, the holy grail of all direction, is to read more. I think this is right, but misdirected. Because when you ask what, they’ll usually try to sell on gravity’s rainbow, infinite jest, etc- as vital hurdles. What they won’t tell you: read the takeout menu. Even if you order the same thing every time. Read your cousin’s long winded Facebook posts about gun control. Read baptist church signs. Read instructions. I have found that since I began living this way, most of the prose that has changed me wasn’t trying to. - taylor ruth 

reasons to read oscar wilde: the glorification of people who slack off all the time, hate effort and obligations, and don’t want to talk to their family

I was a college drop-out with a 0.9 GPA who lost a scholarship and took seven years to graduate after going to two community colleges. It doesn’t matter how long it takes, everyone blooms differently. Setbacks are not failures and you are more than yesterday. Own your mistakes, quit the inner-loop of shaming in your head, smile big, move on.

Don’t say to a room full of people what you only want one person to hear.

You look like a winter night. I could sleep inside the cold of you.
Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

How to Make Yourself Do What You Don’t Want To Do

onlinecounsellingcollege:

1. Rather than listening to the voice in your head that is screaming “I hate this; I don’t want to do this” think about why it is a GOOD thing to do.
2. Instead of trying to pretend that you don’t feel this way, accept that you are feeling very blah and negative.
3. Don’t think about results and how well you think you’ll do, as this could raise your feelings of anxiety and fear, just think about “right now” and the first thing you can do.
4. Accept that life is tough, and is full of things that suck – but recognise that doing hard stuff is better in the end. You’ll likely have more choices and freedom, if you do.
5. Just do a little bit for now – then give yourself a proper break – then go back and do some more – and soon you’ll find you’re in the flow.
6. Don’t allow your mind to wander and think of other things. Stay focused for that short time – and then stop, and have fun.

can you feel me thinking of you?

Everyone who thinks they’re the Jim Halpert of their office is usually the Andy Bernard.

i always smile at the stars - they know all my secrets 

I am eternally, devastatingly romantic, and I thought people would see it because ‘romantic’ doesn’t mean ‘sugary.’ It’s dark and tormented — the furor of passion, the despair of an idealism that you can’t attain. 
Catherine Breillat 

I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world. 
F. Scott Fitzgerald

One can be dark without being cruel.

All women are professional weightlifters. All men are weight.

Dangerous to assume a distrustful narrator doesn’t believe in love. Dangerous to make the leap that with vigilance and wariness comes with a lack of hope. Dangerous to reason that love can only exist on the terms of passivity and complacency. My capacity for love flourishes in adversity.

Whose dream girl are you trying to be this week. Destroy her.

Eat your idols and then rebirth them as your exacting vision



I feel like I have such a heavy and impenetrable air around me and that it’s separating me from people and love - me, lol

you don’t have to talk about your emotions for them to be real and meaningful - me

I genuinely don’t understand people’s emotions/actions regarding some situations like to the point of utter confusion and it’s so annoying that people think it’s insensitive to not relate to their experiences so tbh if anyone has a problem with me telling them I can’t bring myself to care and won’t pretend to, then don’t tell me anything! It’s not like anyone is nicer than me…people say “I don’t care” in all kinds of ways beside the literal and that’s arguably more harmful - me when i was being bitter

why is it so desirable to only experience and keep those near you that feed your ego? I think people need to think beyond compatibility in relationships, romantic or not (or maybe just rethink their definition) it really isn’t the most important thing at all and in most regards it’s actually safe, unintimidating, and easy. there can be a lot to gain in challenge and some people are worth the hard and tedious work of compromise - me being bitter part 2

my only creative outlets are deception and manipulation - also me

The language you use to speak about romance is the language I use to speak about fear.

There is literally nothing in nature that blooms all year long, so do not expect yourself to do so.

friendship is powerful love too

If someone says they can’t do something, the correct response is “Let’s find something you can do that can achieve a similar desired result.” not “Yes you can.”

“Yes you can” is not motivating someone. It’s denying their personal experiences.

one of the key benefits of winter: letting life slip by

Whenever you are creating beauty around you, you are restoring your own soul.
Alice Walker

do you ever listen to music and suddenly you’re like wow I want my life to be the way this song sounds I want to live in this song

why can you only hear wind at night like .. why does night time sound entirely different to day time, i don’t mean like birds and people being awake and shit i mean it’s like we shift into another dimension with the passing of the sun. the sound of the wind at night doesn’t exist in the day time. why

You don’t say to men: ‘You played another really strong man.’ … The idea that women are inherently weak – and we’ve identified the few strong ones to tell stories about – is mad.
Carey Mulligan

False words take up too much time don’t let undefined sounds control you

i’m intuitive but i’m picky 

the older I get the more I realize the value of privacy, of cultivating your circle and only letting certain people in. You can be open, honest, and real while still understanding not everyone deserves a seat at the table of your life.

I feel like many “lasting marriages” in my culture are the result of male appeasement by women and toleration of abuse and disrespect 

it’s so fun to sense the disappointment in people when they realize i’m boring, cold, and unwilling to make friends

As soon as you think “maybe I can get up early and just finish it tomorrow” you’ve already lost

“Also, to make your ideas more accessible to others, you can try to simplify your language and use practical examples rather than theoretical models and explanations.” I’m gonna take this challenge on. 

Dangerous to assume a distrustful narrator doesn’t believe in love. Dangerous to make the leap that with vigilance and wariness comes with a lack of hope. Dangerous to reason that love can only exist on the terms of passivity and complacency. My capacity for love flourishes in adversity.

nobody’s had more shots at the moon and missed than me  -LDR

Anonymous asked: Hi! Can you share some of your mine saving habits please? Thank you!

milkandonuts1:

I’m going to assume you mean money instead of mine? If so, here are some habits I practice to save money:

1. My girl crush Chelsea advised me to split my check 50/50. One goes in a saving account, other goes to bills + fun spending. She told me she did that ever since she got her first job and it helped her a lot! Thanks Chelsea!

2. I really don’t shop anymore. I know it sounds weird but I never hang out in the mall like I used to. If I ever absolutely need anything like socks or a water bottle, I will go to Walmart. Get and go, no lingering around the makeup department.

3. I always pack a lunch for school/work. I think this was the biggest money saver. I use to go to noodles and company every day for work and 5 work days + 7 dollar meals..every week. That’s 140 a month on food and that’s just my lunch. Didn’t even include breakfast or dinner.

4. Create a budget. Make a spreadsheet. Calculate your income every month. Write down all the bills you owe every month. Then write out all the fun money you spend every month. Some people become very modest here so your best bet is to look at your bank statement from last month and REALLY see how much you spend on movies/dinner outings/getting mani anything that isn’t a bill. Now does your bills and fun spending equal your income every month? If not, cut some stuff out. If you are under,HEY! That’s money you can save! 

5. I take the bus to work, if I didn’t have a friend drop and pick me up from school, I would take the bus (that’s what I did before anyway).

6. I don’t buy Starbucks anymore.

7. I have long terms goals (getting my own place and a car) and this is what drives me to save and say no to a lot of things (basically every makeup item ever).

Does anyone else have amazing money saving tips? Put it here!

makeupsuggestion:

Do you ever feel like broken eyeshadow?

I hate Art, Artists, Musicians, basically all people that think they are doing us all a favor doing their “creative work” i hate everyone that values creative work more than the people doing normal shit like Idk cleaning your toilet, driving you fucking bus. i hate that people who do creative work are more appreciated, respected, that people Who created something that touched someone, is saved from hell, bless those rockstars!!! Bless those film directors I can’t hear anything they say cause they are portraying Such beautiful colors for me to enjoy, The entire world is selfish Based on beauty and people would defend the people bringing Them beauty forever. It makes me so tired

from 5soil2pesci