β
How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.
β
β
Anne Frank (Anne Frank's Tales from the Secret Annex: A Collection of Her Short Stories, Fables, and Lesser-Known Writings)
β
Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it.
β
β
Jeanette Winterson
β
There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There's .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I'm likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn't trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful.
β
β
John Green (The Fault in Our Stars)
β
Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.
β
β
Ralph Waldo Emerson
β
It's no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently or if your favorite films wouldn't even speak to each other if they met at a party.
β
β
Nick Hornby
β
Life is for the living.
Death is for the dead.
Let life be like music.
And death a note unsaid.
β
β
Langston Hughes (The Collected Poems)
β
I went to collect the few personal belongings which...I held to be invaluable: my cat, my resolve to travel, and my solitude.
β
β
Colette Gauthier-Villars
β
Have you ever lost someone you love and wanted one more conversation, one more chance to make up for the time when you thought they would be here forever? If so, then you know you can go your whole life collecting days, and none will outweigh the one you wish you had back.
β
β
Mitch Albom (For One More Day)
β
She refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn't boring.
β
β
Zelda Fitzgerald (The Collected Writings)
β
Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it. Those who do not do it, think of it as a cousin of stamp collecting, a sister of the trophy cabinet, bastard of a sound bank account and a weak mind.
β
β
Jeanette Winterson
β
Itβs a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters.
β
β
Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl)
β
But collective thinking is usually short-lived. We're fickle, stupid beings with poor memories and a great gift for self-destruction.
β
β
Suzanne Collins (Mockingjay (The Hunger Games, #3))
β
She leaned down and looked at his lifeless face and Leisel kissed her best friend, Rudy Steiner, soft and true on his lips. He tasted dusty and sweet. He tasted like regret in the shadows of trees and in the glow of the anarchist's suit collection. She kissed him long and soft, and when she pulled herself away, she touched his mouth with her fingers...She did not say goodbye. She was incapable, and after a few more minutes at his side, she was able to tear herself from the ground. It amazes me what humans can do, even when streams are flowing down their faces and they stagger on...
β
β
Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)
β
Tonightβs December thirty-first,
Something is about to burst.
The clock is crouching, dark and small,
Like a time bomb in the hall.
Hark, it's midnight, children dear.
Duck! Here comes another year!
β
β
Ogden Nash (Collected Verse from 1929 On)
β
When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.
When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.
β
β
WisΕawa Szymborska (Poems New And Collected)
β
Authenticity is a collection of choices that we have to make every day. It's about the choice to show up and be real. The choice to be honest. The choice to let our true selves be seen.
β
β
BrenΓ© Brown (The Gifts of Imperfection)
β
Do not fall in love with people like me.
I will take you to museums, and parks, and monuments, and kiss you in every beautiful place, so that you can never go back to them without tasting me like blood in your mouth.
I will destroy you in the most beautiful way possible. And when I leave you will finally understand, why storms are named after people.
β
β
Caitlyn Siehl (Literary Sexts: A Collection of Short & Sexy Love Poems (Volume 1))
β
There are two kinds of people I don't trust: people who don't drink and people who collect stickers.
β
β
Chelsea Handler (My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands)
β
If you take a book with you on a journey," Mo had said when he put the first one in her box, "an odd thing happens: The book begins collecting your memories. And forever after you have only to open that book to be back where you first read it. It will all come into your mind with the very first words: the sights you saw in that place, what it smelled like, the ice cream you ate while you were reading it... yes, books are like flypaperβmemories cling to the printed page better than anything else.
β
β
Cornelia Funke (Inkheart (Inkworld, #1))
β
We can only die in the future, I thought; right now we are always alive.
β
β
Amy Hempel (The Collected Stories)
β
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
β
β
W.B. Yeats (The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats)
β
And I learned what is obvious to a child. That life is simply a collection of little lives, each lived one day at a time. That each day should be spent finding beauty in flowers and poetry and talking to animals. That a day spent with dreaming and sunsets and refreshing breezes cannot be bettered. But most of all, I learned that life is about sitting on benches next to ancient creeks with my hand on her knee and sometimes, on good days, for falling in love.
β
β
Nicholas Sparks
β
Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
β
β
Albert Einstein
β
I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I'm under the table,
after four I'm under my host.
β
β
Dorothy Parker (The Collected Dorothy Parker)
β
Relax, having kids is years away. But can you imagine? Your brains, my charm, our collective good looks... then add in the usual physical abilities dhampirs get.
It's really not even fair to everyone else.
β
β
Richelle Mead (The Fiery Heart (Bloodlines, #4))
β
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
β
β
George Orwell (In Front of Your Nose: 1945-1950 (The Collected Essays, Journalism & Letters, Vol. 4))
β
In my next life I want to live my life backwards. You start out dead and get that out of the way. Then you wake up in an old people's home feeling better every day. You get kicked out for being too healthy, go collect your pension, and then when you start work, you get a gold watch and a party on your first day. You work for 40 years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You party, drink alcohol, and are generally promiscuous, then you are ready for high school. You then go to primary school, you become a kid, you play. You have no responsibilities, you become a baby until you are born. And then you spend your last 9 months floating in luxurious spa-like conditions with central heating and room service on tap, larger quarters every day and then Voila! You finish off as an orgasm!
β
β
Woody Allen
β
Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers,
but to be fearless in facing them.
Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain, but
for the heart to conquer it.
β
β
Rabindranath Tagore (Collected Poems and Plays of Rabindranath Tagore)
β
Radar threw his books into his locker and shut it. Then the din of conversation around us quieted just a bit as he turned his eyes toward the heavens and shouted, "IT IS NOT MY FAULT THAT MY PARENTS OWN THE WORLD'S LARGEST COLLECTION OF BLACK SANTAS.
β
β
John Green (Paper Towns)
β
I am a collection of dismantled almosts.
β
β
Anne Sexton (Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters)
β
I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love's not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time...
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)
β
Perhaps bravery is simply the face humanity wraps around its collective madness.
β
β
Amie Kaufman (Illuminae (The Illuminae Files, #1))
β
There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.
β
β
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Collected Works)
β
Stephen kissed me in the spring,
Robin in the fall,
But Colin only looked at me
And never kissed at all.
Stephenβs kiss was lost in jest,
Robinβs lost in play,
But the kiss in Colinβs eyes
Haunts me night and day.
β
β
Sara Teasdale (The Collected Poems)
β
When is a monster not a monster? Oh, when you love it.
β
β
Caitlyn Siehl (Literary Sexts: A Collection of Short & Sexy Love Poems (Volume 1))
β
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.
β
β
Aldous Huxley (Collected Essays)
β
You collect scars because you want proof that you are paying for whatever sins you've committed. And I know this because I've been doing the same damn thing for two hundred years. Tell me, do you think you will go to some blessed Afterworld, or do you expect a burning hell? You're hoping for hell--because how could you face them in the Afterworld? Better to suffer, to be damned for eternity and--
β
β
Sarah J. Maas (Heir of Fire (Throne of Glass, #3))
β
We shouldnβt,β protested Isabelle. βThe Clave has a plan.β
βThe Clave has the collective intelligence of a pineapple,β said Jace.
Alec blinked up at them. βJace is right.β
Isabelle turned on her brother. βWhat do you know? You werenβt even paying attention.β
βI was,β Alec said, injured. βI said Jace was right.β
βYeah, but thereβs like a 90% chance of me being right most of the time, so thatβs not proof you were listening,β said Jace. βThatβs just a good guess.
β
β
Cassandra Clare (City of Heavenly Fire (The Mortal Instruments, #6))
β
People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.
β
β
C.G. Jung (Psychology and Alchemy (Collected Works 12))
β
Collect books, even if you don't plan on reading them right away. Nothing is more important than an unread library.
β
β
John Waters
β
Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.
β
β
Bertrand Russell (Unpopular Essays)
β
We arenβt the things we collect, acquire, read. We are, for as long as we are here, only love. The things we loved. The people we loved. And these, I think these really do live on
β
β
Gabrielle Zevin (The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry)
β
Grown-ups love figures... When you tell them you've made a new friend they never ask you any questions about essential matters. They never say to you "What does his voice sound like? What games does he love best? Does he collect butterflies? " Instead they demand "How old is he? How much does he weigh? How much money does his father make? " Only from these figures do they think they have learned anything about him.
β
β
Antoine de Saint-ExupΓ©ry (The Little Prince)
β
Aziraphale collected books. If he were totally honest with himself he would have to have admitted that his bookshop was simply somewhere to store them. He was not unusual in this. In order to maintain his cover as a typical second-hand book seller, he used every means short of actual physical violence to prevent customers from making a purchase. Unpleasant damp smells, glowering looks, erratic opening hours - he was incredibly good at it.
β
β
Terry Pratchett (Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch)
β
I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Collected Poems)
β
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
β
β
W.H. Auden (Collected Poems)
β
He doesnβt have to love your CD collection. He doesnβt have to love your shoes. But any good, mature guy better make an attempt to love your friends and familyβespecially when theyβre great.
β
β
Greg Behrendt (He's Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys)
β
I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Collected Poems)
β
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
β
β
Ralph Waldo Emerson (Self-Reliance: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series)
β
Eternity bores me,
I never wanted it.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Collected Poems)
β
Friendship is always a sweet responsibility, never an opportunity.
β
β
Kahlil Gibran (Kahlil Gibran, The Collected Works)
β
It is strange how often a heart must be broken
Before the years can make it wise.
β
β
Sara Teasdale (The Collected Poems)
β
I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.
β
β
Virginia Woolf (Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing)
β
Magnus glanced at Alec and raised his eyebrows "Boo", he said. Jace was grinning. "Come on,surely you've got a phobia or two. What scares you?" Alec thought for a moment. "Spiders," he said. Clary turned to Luke. "Have you got a spider anywhere?"
Luke looked exasperated. "Why would I have a spider? Do I look like someone who would collect them?"
No offense," Jace said, "but you kind of do.
β
β
Cassandra Clare
β
You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.
β
β
Flannery O'Connor (Collected Works: Wise Blood / A Good Man Is Hard to Find / The Violent Bear It Away / Everything That Rises Must Converge / Essays and Letters)
β
It is good to be a cynic β it is better to be a contented cat β and it is best not to exist at all.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (Collected Essays 5: Philosophy, Autobiography and Miscellany)
β
Quand tu veux construire un bateau, ne commence pas par rassembler du bois, couper des planches et distribuer du travail, mais reveille au sein des hommes le desir de la mer grande et large.
If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
β
β
Antoine de Saint-ExupΓ©ry
β
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.
Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.
β
β
Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)
β
I took a wrong turn on the way to the bathroom and found myself in a beautifully proportioned room I had never seen before, containing a really rather magnificent collection of chamberpots. When I went back to investigate more closely, I discovered that the room had vanished. But I must keep an eye out for it. Possibly it is only accessible at five thirty in the morning. Or it may only appear at the quarter moon - or when the seeker has an exceptionally full bladder.
β
β
J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Harry Potter, #4))
β
The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead peopleβs diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.
β
β
Cheryl Strayed (Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar)
β
The word 'God' is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can (for me) change this.
β
β
Albert Einstein
β
If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.
β
β
Rudyard Kipling (The Collected Works)
β
What did my fingers do before they held him?
What did my heart do, with its love?
From " Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices", 1962
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Collected Poems)
β
Write it on your heart
that every day is the best day in the year.
He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day
who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.
Finish every 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;
begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit
to be cumbered with your old nonsense.
This new day is too dear,
with its hopes and invitations,
to waste a moment on the yesterdays.
β
β
Ralph Waldo Emerson (Collected Poems and Translations)
β
It took many years of vomiting up all the filth Iβd been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.
β
β
James Baldwin (Collected Essays: Notes of a Native Son / Nobody Knows My Name / The Fire Next Time / No Name in the Street / The Devil Finds Work / Other Essays)
β
Ever wonder about those people who spend $2 apiece on those little bottles of Evian water? Try spelling Evian backward.
β
β
George Carlin (George Carlin Reads to You: An Audio Collection Including Recent Grammy Winners Braindroppings and Napalm & Silly Putty)
β
After all, my erstwhile dear,
My no longer cherished,
Need we say it was not love,
Just because it perished?
β
β
Edna St. Vincent Millay (Collected Poems)
β
The words you canβt find, you borrow.
We read to know weβre not alone. We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone. We are not alone.
My life is in these books, he wants to tell her. Read these and know my heart.
We are not quite novels.
The analogy he is looking for is almost there.
We are not quite short stories. At this point, his life is seeming closest to that.
In the end, we are collected works.
β
β
Gabrielle Zevin (The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry)
β
We men and women are all in the same boat, upon a stormy sea. We owe to each other a terrible and tragic loyalty.
β
β
G.K. Chesterton (The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton Volume 28: The Illustrated London News, 1908-1910)
β
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
β
β
Ralph Waldo Emerson (Self-Reliance: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series)
β
I want a life that sizzles and pops and makes me laugh out loud. And I don't want to get to the end, or to tomorrow, even, and realize that my life is a collection of meetings and pop cans and errands and receipts and dirty dishes. I want to eat cold tangerines and sing out loud in the car with the windows open and wear pink shoes and stay up all night laughing and paint my walls the exact color of the sky right now. I want to sleep hard on clean white sheets and throw parties and eat ripe tomatoes and read books so good they make me jump up and down, and I want my everyday to make God belly laugh, glad that he gave life to someone who loves the gift.
β
β
Shauna Niequist (Cold Tangerines: Celebrating the Extraordinary Nature of Everyday Life)
β
My name is Hazel. Augustus Waters was the great sat-crossed love of my life. Ours was an epic love story, and I won't be able to get more than a sentence into it without disappearing into a puddle of tears. Gus knew. Gus knows. I will not tell you our love story, because-like all real love stories-it will die with us, as it should. I'd hoped that he'd be eulogizing me, because there's no one I'd rather have..." I started crying. "Okay, how not to cry. How am I-okay. Okay."
I took a few deep breaths and went back to the page. "I can't talk about our love story, so I will talk about math. I am not a mathematician, but I know this: There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There's .1 and .12 and .112 and infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a Bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I'm likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn't trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful.
β
β
John Green (The Fault in Our Stars)
β
I am too pure for you or anyone.
From the poem "Fever 103Β°", 20 October 1962
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Collected Poems)
β
Maybe we're just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn't it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine? Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world's resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it's the very reason I root for us to survive - because we are so stupid about each other.
β
β
Sally Rooney (Beautiful World, Where Are You)
β
Senior year. And then life. Maybe that's the way it worked. High school was just a prologue to the real novel. Everybody got to write you -- but when you graduated, you got to write yourself. At graduation you got to collect your teacher's pens and your parents' pens and you got your own pen. And you could do all the writing. Yeah. Wouldn't that be sweet?
β
β
Benjamin Alire SΓ‘enz (Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (Aristotle and Dante, #1))
β
Of all the liars in the world, sometimes the worst are our own fears.
β
β
Rudyard Kipling (The Collected Works)
β
Well I haven't fucked much with the past,
But I've fucked plenty with the future.
- Babelogue
β
β
Patti Smith (Patti Smith Collected Lyrics, 1970-2015)
β
Once upon a time, there was a boy. He lived in a village that no longer exists, in a house that no longer exists, on the edge of a field that no longer exists, where everything was discovered, and everything was possible. A stick could be a sword, a pebble could be a diamond, a tree, a castle. Once upon a time, there was a boy who lived in a house across the field, from a girl who no longer exists. They made up a thousand games. She was queen and he was king. In the autumn light her hair shone like a crown. They collected the world in small handfuls, and when the sky grew dark, they parted with leaves in their hair.
Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.
β
β
Nicole Krauss (The History of Love)
β
Choking with dry tears and raging, raging, raging at the absolute indifference of nature and the world to the death of love, the death of hope and the death of beauty, I remember sitting on the end of my bed, collecting these pills and capsules together and wondering why, why when I felt I had so much to offer, so much love, such outpourings of love and energy to spend on the world, I was incapable of being offered love, giving it or summoning the energy with which I knew I could transform myself and everything around me.
β
β
Stephen Fry (Moab Is My Washpot (Memoir, #1))
β
1. Accept everything just the way it is.
2. Do not seek pleasure for its own sake.
3. Do not, under any circumstances, depend on a partial feeling.
4. Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world.
5. Be detached from desire your whole life long.
6. Do not regret what you have done.
7. Never be jealous.
8. Never let yourself be saddened by a separation.
9. Resentment and complaint are appropriate neither for oneself nor others.
10. Do not let yourself be guided by the feeling of lust or love.
11. In all things have no preferences.
12. Be indifferent to where you live.
13. Do not pursue the taste of good food.
14. Do not hold on to possessions you no longer need.
15. Do not act following customary beliefs.
16. Do not collect weapons or practice with weapons beyond what is useful.
17. Do not fear death.
18. Do not seek to possess either goods or fiefs for your old age.
19. Respect Buddha and the gods without counting on their help.
20. You may abandon your own body but you must preserve your honour.
21. Never stray from the Way.
β
β
Miyamoto Musashi
β
Jace threw his hands up. "So it doesn't work."
"Not necessarily," Luke said. "There might simply be nothing going on that might activate it. Perhaps there isn't anything here that Alec is afraid of."
Magnus glanced at Alec and raised his eyebrows. "Boo," he said.
Jace was grinning. "Come on, surely you've got a phobia or two. What scares
you?"
Alec thought for a moment. "Spiders," he said.
Clary turned to Luke. "Have you got a spider anywhere?"
Luke looked exasperated. "Why would I have a spider? Do I look like someone who would collect them?"
"No offense," Jace said, "but you kind of do.
β
β
Cassandra Clare (City of Ashes (The Mortal Instruments, #2))
β
Inside the snow globe on my father's desk, there was a penguin wearing a red-and-white-striped scarf. When I was little my father would pull me into his lap and reach for the snow globe. He would turn it over, letting all the snow collect on the top, then quickly invert it. The two of us watched the snow fall gently around the penguin. The penguin was alone in there, I thought, and I worried for him. When I told my father this, he said, "Don't worry, Susie; he has a nice life. He's trapped in a perfect world.
β
β
Alice Sebold (The Lovely Bones)
β
Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.
β
β
Carl Sagan (Cosmos)
β
Harlem
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
β
β
Langston Hughes (The Collected Poems)
β
Remember He is the artist and you are only the picture. You can't see it. So quietly submit to be painted---i.e., keep fulfilling all the obvious duties of your station (you really know quite well enough what they are!), asking forgiveness for each failure and then leaving it alone.You are in the right way. Walk---don't keep on looking at it.
β
β
C.S. Lewis (The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 3: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy, 1950 - 1963)
β
The days aren't discarded or collected, they are bees
that burned with sweetness or maddened
the sting: the struggle continues,
the journeys go and come between honey and pain.
No, the net of years doesn't unweave: there is no net.
They don't fall drop by drop from a river: there is no river.
Sleep doesn't divide life into halves,
or action, or silence, or honor:
life is like a stone, a single motion,
a lonesome bonfire reflected on the leaves,
an arrow, only one, slow or swift, a metal
that climbs or descends burning in your bones.
β
β
Pablo Neruda (Still Another Day)
β
Time Does Not Bring Relief
Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last yearβs leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last yearβs bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,βso with his memory they brim.
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, βThere is no memory of him here!β
And so stand stricken, so remembering him.
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Edna St. Vincent Millay (Collected Poems)
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A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. β 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' β Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
β
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Ralph Waldo Emerson (Self-Reliance: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series)
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Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
β
β
W.B. Yeats (The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats)
β
I Am Vertical
But I would rather be horizontal.
I am not a tree with my root in the soil
Sucking up minerals and motherly love
So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
Unknowing I must soon unpetal.
Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Collected Poems)
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At some point during almost every romantic comedy, the female lead suddenly trips and falls, stumbling helplessly over something ridiculous like a leaf, and then some Matthew McConaughey type either whips around the corner just in the nick of time to save her or is clumsily pulled down along with her. That event predictably leads to the magical moment of their first kiss. Please. I fall ALL the time. You know who comes and gets me? The bouncer.
β
β
Chelsea Handler (My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands)
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It's impossible to be the Mockingjay. Impossible to complete even this one sentence. Because now I know that everything I say will be directly taken out on Peeta. Result in his torture. But not his death, no, nothing so merciful as that. Snow will ensure that his life is much more worse than death.
"Cut," I hear Cressida say quietly.
"What's wrong with her?" Plutarch says under his breath.
"She's figured out how Snow's using Peeta," says Finnick.
There's something like a collective sigh of regret from that semicircle of people spread out before me. Because I know this now. Because there will never be a way for me to not know this again. Because, beyond the military disadvantage losing a entails, I am broken.
Several sets of arms would embrace me. But in the end, the only person I truly want to comfort me is Haymitch, because he loves Peeta, too. I reach out for him and say something like his name and he's there, holding me and patting my back. "It's okay. It'll be okay, sweetheart." He sits me on a length of broken marble pillar and keeps an arm around me while I sob.
"I can't do this anymore," I say.
"I know," he says.
β
β
Suzanne Collins (Mockingjay (The Hunger Games, #3))
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Love After Love
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
β
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Derek Walcott (Collected Poems, 1948-1984)
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The More Loving One
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
β
β
W.H. Auden (Collected Shorter Poems, 1927-1957)
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To my babies,
Merry Christmas. I'm sorry if these letters have caught you both by surprise. There is just so much more I have to say. I know you thought I was done giving advice, but I couldn't leave without reiterating a few things in writing. You may not relate to these things now, but someday you will. I wasn't able to be around forever, but I hope that my words can be.
-Don't stop making basagna. Basagna is good. Wait until a day when there is no bad news, and bake a damn basagna.
-Find a balance between head and heart. Hopefully you've found that Lake, and you can help Kel sort it out when he gets to that point.
-Push your boundaries, that's what they're there for.
-I'm stealing this snippet from your favorite band, Lake. "Always remember there is nothing worth sharing, like the love that let us share our name."
-Don't take life too seriously. Punch it in the face when it needs a good hit. Laugh at it.
-And Laugh a lot. Never go a day without laughing at least once.
-Never judge others. You both know good and well how unexpected events can change who a person is. Always keep that in mind. You never know what someone else is experiencing within their own life.
-Question everything. Your love, your religion, your passions. If you don't have questions, you'll never find answers.
-Be accepting. Of everything. People's differences, their similarities, their choices, their personalities. Sometimes it takes a variety to make a good collection. The same goes for people.
-Choose your battles, but don't choose very many.
-Keep an open mind; it's the only way new things can get in.
-And last but not least, not the tiniest bit least. Never regret.
Thank you both for giving me the best years of my life.
Especially the last one.
Love,
Mom
β
β
Colleen Hoover (Slammed (Slammed, #1))
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For several years, I had been bored. Not a whining, restless child's boredom (although I was not above that) but a dense, blanketing malaise. It seemed to me that there was nothing new to be discovered ever again. Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative (although the word derivative as a criticism is itself derivative). We were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can't recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn't immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A fucking commercial. You know the awful singsong of the blasΓ©: Seeeen it. I've literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can't anymore. I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script.
It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters.
And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don't have genuine souls.
It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I'm not a real person and neither is anyone else.
I would have done anything to feel real again.
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Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl)
β
The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with βWow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have ! How many of these books have you read?β and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you donβt know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menancingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable)
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THAT crazed girl improvising her music.
Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,
Her soul in division from itself
Climbing, falling She knew not where,
Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship,
Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare
A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing
Heroically lost, heroically found.
No matter what disaster occurred
She stood in desperate music wound,
Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph
Where the bales and the baskets lay
No common intelligible sound
But sang, 'O sea-starved, hungry sea
β
β
W.B. Yeats (The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats)
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I have always, essentially, been waiting. Waiting to become something else, waiting to be that person I always thought I was on the verge of becoming, waiting for that life I thought I would have. In my head, I was always one step away. In high school, I was biding my time until I could become the college version of myself, the one my mind could see so clearly. In college, the post-college βadultβ person was always looming in front of me, smarter, stronger, more organized. Then the married person, then the person Iβd become when we have kids. For twenty years, literally, I have waited to become the thin version of myself, because thatβs when life will really begin.
And through all that waiting, here I am. My life is passing, day by day, and I am waiting for it to start. I am waiting for that time, that person, that event when my life will finally begin.
I love movies about βThe Big Momentβ β the game or the performance or the wedding day or the record deal, the stories that split time with that key event, and everything is reframed, before it and after it, because it has changed everything. I have always wanted this movie-worthy event, something that will change everything and grab me out of this waiting game into the whirlwind in front of me. I cry and cry at these movies, because I am still waiting for my own big moment. I had visions of life as an adventure, a thing to be celebrated and experienced, but all I was doing was going to work and coming home, and that wasnβt what it looked like in the movies.
John Lennon once said, βLife is what happens when youβre busy making other plans.β For me, life is what was happening while I was busy waiting for my big moment. I was ready for it and believed that the rest of my life would fade into the background, and that my big moment would carry me through life like a lifeboat.
The Big Moment, unfortunately, is an urban myth. Some people have them, in a sense, when they win the Heisman or become the next American Idol. But even that football player or that singer is living a life made up of more than that one moment. Life is a collection of a million, billion moments, tiny little moments and choices, like a handful of luminous, glowing pearl. It takes so much time, and so much work, and those beads and moments are so small, and so much less fabulous and dramatic than the movies.
But this is what Iβm finding, in glimpses and flashes: this is it. This is it, in the best possible way. That thing Iβm waiting for, that adventure, that move-score-worthy experience unfolding gracefully. This is it. Normal, daily life ticking by on our streets and sidewalks, in our houses and apartments, in our beds and at our dinner tables, in our dreams and prayers and fights and secrets β this pedestrian life is the most precious thing any of use will ever experience.
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β
Shauna Niequist (Cold Tangerines: Celebrating the Extraordinary Nature of Everyday Life)
β
Caged Bird
A free bird leaps on the back of the wind
and floats downstream till the current ends
and dips his wing in the orange suns rays and dares to claim the sky.
But a bird that stalks down his narrow cage
can seldom see through his bars of rage
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied so he opens his throat to sing.
The caged bird sings with a fearful trill
of things unknown but longed for still
and his tune is heard on the distant hill
for the caged bird sings of freedom.
The free bird thinks of another breeze
and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees
and the fat worms waiting on a dawn-bright lawn and he names the sky his own.
But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams
his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied so he opens his throat to sing.
The caged bird sings with a fearful trill
of things unknown but longed for still
and his tune is heard on the distant hill
for the caged bird sings of freedom.
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β
Maya Angelou (The Complete Collected Poems)