"‘Do you think it matters how many people someone has slept with?’ No, and it particularly bothers me that women are held to a different standard on this front than men. Also, it’s such a weird thing to care about. Like, imagine if I started eating Cheerios for breakfast. Would Cheerios be like, ‘I’m the forty-eighth cereal you’ve tried eating?! I don’t feel special!’ Well then, screw you, Cheerios! I can’t go into the past and un-eat all those cereals, but that doesn’t mean I don’t genuinely enjoy your whole-grain crunch!"
"Man wants chaos. In fact, he’s got to have it. Depression, strife, riots, murder. All this dread. We’re irresistibly drawn to that almost orgiastic state created out of death and destruction. It’s in all of us. We revel in it. Sure, the media tries to put a sad face on these things, painting them up as great human tragedies; but we all know the function of the media has never been to eliminate the evils of the world, no! Their job is to persuade us to accept those evils and get used to living with them. The powers that be want us to be passive observers. Hey, you got a match? And they haven’t given us any other options outside the occasional, purely symbolic, participatory act of voting. “You want the puppet on the right, or the puppet on the left?” I feel the time has come to project my own inadequacies and dissatisfaction into the sociopolitical and scientific schemes. Let my own lack of a voice be heard."
Waking Life, 2001.
"When you don’t cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life that was lost a long time ago when humanity, instead of using thought, became possessed by thought."
Eckhart Tolle
"I’m not going to be one of those people who sits around talking about what they’re going to do or become. I’m just going to do it. Imagining the future is kind of nostalgia. You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll escape it one day, and how amazing it will be, and imagining the future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present."
John Green, Looking For Alaska
"And even if somebody else has it much worse, that doesn’t really change the fact that you have what you have."
The Perks of Being A Wallflower
"I am one of the searchers. There are, I believe, millions of us. We are not unhappy, but neither are we really content. We continue to explore life, hoping to uncover its ultimate secret. We continue to explore ourselves, hoping to understand. We like to walk along the beach, we are drawn by the ocean, taken by its power, its unceasing motion, its mystery and unspeakable beauty. We like forests and mountains deserts and hidden rivers, and the lonely cities as well. Our sadness is as much a part of our lives as is our laughter. To share our sadness with one we love is perhaps as great a joy as we can know - unless it be to share our laughter. We searchers are ambitious only for life itself, for everything beautiful it can provide. Most of all we love and want to be loved. We want to live in a relationship that will not impede our wandering, nor prevent our search, nor lock us in prison walls; that will take us for what little we have to give. We do not want to prove ourselves to another or compete for love."
James Kavanaugh
"When someone cries so hard that it hurts their throat, it is out of frustration or knowing that no matter what you can do or attempt to do can change the situation. When you feel like you need to cry, when you want to just get it out, relieve some of the pressure from the inside - that is true pain. Because no matter how hard you try or how bad you want to, you can’t. That pain just stays in place. Then, if you are lucky, one small tear may escape from those eyes that water constantly. That one tear, that tiny, salty, droplet of moisture is a means of escape. Although it’s just a small tear, it is the heaviest thing in the world. And it doesn’t do a damn thing to fix anything."
Chase Brooks
"I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’"
Kurt Vonnegut
"I believe that suffering is part of the narrative, and that nothing really good gets built when everything’s easy. I believe that loss and emptiness and confusion often give way to new fullness and wisdom."
Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet
"Avoid using the word ‘very’ because it’s lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don’t use very sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason, boys - to woo women - and, in that endeavour, laziness will not do."
Dead Poets Society
"In the end
these things matter most:
How well did you love?
How fully did you live?
How deeply did you let go?"
Siddhartha Gautama
"I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?"
Ernest Hemingway
