Erickson Quotes

Vital lives are about action. You can't feel warmth unless you create it, can't feel delight until you play, can't know serendipity unless you risk.

Just because you are soft doesn't mean you are not a force. Honey and wildfire are both the colour gold.

Life will bring you pain all by itself. Your responsibility is to create joy." Milton Erickson

Soulmates aren't the ones who make you happiest, no. They're instead the ones who make you feel the most. Burning edges and scars and stars. Old pangs, captivation and beauty. Strain and shadows and worry and yearning. Sweetness and madness and dreamlike surrender. They hurl you into the abyss. They taste like hope.

Half of me is filled with bursting words and half of me is painfully shy. I crave solitude yet also crave people. I want to pour life and love into everything yet also nurture my self-care and go gently. I want to live within the rush of primal, intuitive decision, yet also wish to sit and contemplate. This is the messiness of life - that we all carry multitudes, so must sit with the shifts. We are complicated creatures, and ultimately, the balance comes from this understanding. Be water. Flowing, flexible and soft. Subtly powerful and open. Wild and serene. Able to accept all changes, yet still led by the pull of steady tides. It is enough.

Although I deeply love oceans, deserts and other wild landscapes, it is only mountains that beckon me with that sort of painful magnetic pull to walk deeper and deeper into their beauty. They keep me continuously wanting to know more, feel more, see more.

Rather than fearfully shutting down your sensitivity, dive in deeper into all possible feeling. As you expand, keep only those who are not afraid of oceans

Promise to stay wild with me. We'll seek and return and stay to find beauty and the extraordinary in all the spaces we can claim. We'll know how to live. How to breathe magic into the mundane.

Change will lead to insight more often than insight will lead to change.

I wanted to ask you about your vision of perfection in an imperfect world, or what side of the earth calls out to you when you touch a physical globe, or maybe about your greatest heartache and how you still go on as your world continues turning, or what you do with a memory once lodged inside your bones that;s still breathing, and burning. But you're still a stranger, and I'm overly polite, so I'll ask all about your day when I'd rather know about your life.

To be fully human is to be wild. Wild is the strange pull and whispering wisdom. It’s the gentle nudge and the forceful ache. It is your truth, passed down from the ancients, and the very stream of life in your blood. Wild is the soul where passion and creativity reside, and the quickening of your heart. Wild is what is real, and wild is your home.

Solitude isn’t loneliness. Solitude is when the entire serene universe seems to surround and hold you quietly.

If you inherently long for something, become it first. If you want gardens, become the gardener. If you want love, embody love. If you want mental stimulation, change the conversation. If you want peace, exude calmness. If you want to fill your world with artists, begin to paint. If you want to be valued, respect your own time. If you want to live ecstatically, find the ecstasy within yourself. This is how to draw it in, day by day, inch by inch.

It is really amazing what people can do. Only they don't know what they can do.

Like most sensitive souls, you already know you’re sensitive. You soak up others’ moods and desires like a sponge. You absorb sensation the way a paintbrush grasps each colour it touches on a palette.

a dream is only a memory of the future

You can be both soft and intense. Both vulnerable and strong. Both traditional and rebellious. Both romantic and realistic. Both feminine and oceanic yet filled with slow burning fire. There is possibility inside of paradox. There is a universe of different perceptions.

Don’t dismiss the elements. Water soothes and heals. Air refreshes and revives. Earth grounds and holds. Fire is a burning reminder of our own will and creative power. Swallow their spells. There’s a certain sweet comfort in knowing that you belong to them all.

Sometimes someone isn’t ready to see the bright side. Sometimes they need to sit with the shadow first. So be a friend and sit with them. Make the darkness beautiful.

Often times, a person will think they know you by piecing together tiny facts and arranging those pieces into a puzzle that makes sense to them. If we don't know ourselves very well, we'll mistakenly believe them, and drift toward where they tell us to swim, only to drown in our own confusion. Here's the truth: it's important to take the necessary steps to find out who you are. Because you hold endless depths below the surface of a few facts and pieces and past decisions. You aren't only the ripples others can see. You are made of oceans.

Don’t take anything for granite. That’s what tombstones are made of.

You know, nerd is the new black. I read that in Cosmo.

What if I told you that if you simply mix starlight, solitude, silence and softness, you may just learn everything you've ever needed to know about everything you hadn't known?

And you cannot build a home for your worth inside of another being.

Women are powerful, and I see them stifle this every. single. day. Stop looking to be saved and hiding your magic. Stop tossing aside your voice and valid emotions. Stop wasting your time with fake friends and chasing men like they're cures. Material things, better jobs, and other people- they won't fill your gap. Only you can do that. Life is short. Rise up and step back into your awesome, innate power. You are compassion and creative force and divine life itself. You are a Goddess.

I have never treasured any woman the way I treasure you now, this moment. You are all I think of, all I want.

I love getting older. My understanding deepens. I can see what connects, I can weave stories of experience and apply them. I can integrate the lessons. Things simply become more and more fascinating. Beauty reveals itself in thousands of forms.

If I had it to do all over again . . . I wouldn't change a thing.'. . . the final expression of narcissism, the last gesture of self-congratulation.

You use hypnosis not as a cure but as a means of establishing a favorable climate in which to learn.

And sometimes you find yourself back where you started, but stronger and softer all at once. Swim inside the ocean of tenderness, yet build boundaries on the sand. An open heart is a paradise to protect.

I am very confident. I look confident. I act confident. I speak in a confident way...

When I wanted to know something, I wanted it undistorted by somebody else's imperfect knowledge.

You can teach a child the importance of pain by your behavior. You can also teach as child the importance of no pain by your behavior.

Give yourself a winter night, long candles, unfamiliar music, a typewriter, keyboard, an instrument, or canvas, to set fire to your mind. Surrender. Be with art. Let the room become a constellation, trust it and ride.

Coyotes can’t expect to keep friends when they eat them all the time.

Change will lead to insight far more often than insight will lead to change.

To know someone deeply is to know a universe contained in skin.

When you have an ancient heart and childlike spirit you must feel deeply but go lightly. To trace and learn the language of waves. How all the seas carry secrets, yet still move freely. I am still learning how to be water.

When connections are real, they simply never die. They can be buried, or ignored or walked away from, but never broken. If you deeply resonated with another person or place, the connection remains despite any distance, time, situation, lack of presence, or circumstance. If you’re doubtful then just try it – go and visit a person or place and see if there’s any sense at all of the space between now and then. If it was truly real, you’ll be instantly swept back into the moment it was before it left – during the same year and place with the same wonder and hope, comfort and heartbeat. Real connections live on forever.

Life's difficulties are merely necessary roughage.

When time marches on, it steps on your nose and tail, and leaves boot prints down your back.

The script supervisor wasn’t pleased, but Quincy told him that sex wasn’t needed to show love.” “Wow,” Josy said. “That’s deep. My name is Josiah Erickson, and I approve this message.

Be around those who crave new galaxies in you. The light through your veins. Poetic science. Wider vision. Gentler strength. The moon in your chest. Gravitational pulls. Possibility everywhere. Stars in your eyes. Expanding horizons. Something wild. Something fervent. Something stunning. Something divine.

Let’s not travel to tick things off lists, or collect half-hearted semi-treasures to be placed in dusty drawers in empty rooms. Rather, we’ll travel to find grounds and rooftops and tiny hidden parks, where we’ll sit and dismiss the passing time, spun in the city’s web, ‘til we’ve surrendered, content to be spent and consumed. I need to feel a place while I’m in it.

I get that, and I deserve it. But I'm telling you, Landry Jacobs, I have loved you, I do love you, and I will love you for the rest of my life. And if you can't believe that yet, I'll spend every minute of our lives proving it to you.

The greatest gift anyone could give anyone is for the other to feel worthy, adored and more than enough for all that they are. This is a gentle reminder that the people you surround yourself with in every direction should feel both uplifting and safe to your mind and heart. Not confusing, not draining, not controlling, not vague, not calculating, not unreliable, not cold, not dismissive, and not manipulative. Don’t mess around with the energy you take into your body and being, work wise, friendship wise, and relationship wise. Life is too short and delicate for these damaging things. It’s really that simple.

I began composing the next poem, the one that was to be written next. Not the last poem of those I had read, but the poem written in the head of someone who may never have existed but who had certainly written another poem nonetheless, and just never had the chance to commit it to ink and the page.

Buzzards don’t make good friends. They always have an interior motive.

Inspiration in Science may have to do with ideas, but not in Art. In art it is in the senses that are instinctively responsive to the medium of expression.

Write about something you know. Try to leave your readers better off than they were before.

Cats are greedy, whereas I merely want all the scraps.

Air is equal parts oxygen, daydreams And possibility.

I ran my fingers along his jaw and he stroked my hip. We didn't talk because there were no words to say, nothing to describe the moment where we grew from boys who were best friends to men who were lovers.

Soulmates aren’t the ones who make you happiest, no. They’re instead the ones who make you feel the most. Burning edges and scars and stars. Old pains and pangs, captivation and beauty. Strain and shadows and worry and yearning. Sweetness and madness and dreamlike surrender. They hurl you into the abyss. They taste like hope.

One's appreciation of, and understanding of the normal or the usual is requisite for any understanding of the abnormal or the unusual.

By the plain form of my delirium I will blast the obstruction of every form around me into something barely called shadow. I sail. I swim to you. I know the water.

Are you really here?” I asked. “Put down the camera.” “Are you really here?” “Trust the focus and put down the camera.

I see you standing there with a mouthful of poetry yet a head full of doubt. You are sharp yet softening while needing to be split open and poured out.

I have no intention of dying. In fact, that will be the last thing I do!

I wouldn't change it you know," he said, his breath raising goose bumps on the skin of my neck. "The girls, the other boys, everything we experienced before this moment. Because that was all wrong. And I think we needed to feel what was wrong to know what's right.

Remember, that it's beautiful to live in a body built for feeling, and live intensely on a planet exuding intensity.

I’ll find you in another life. Because you’re it for me in every one.

He talked like a textbook and looked like an underwear model. The combination did absolutely everything for her libido.

I just wanted you to know you were missed.

Be water. Flexible and soft. Subtly powerful and open. Wild and serene. Able to carry and accept all changes, yet still led by the pull of steady tides. It is enough.

Wait for the moon. Wait for nothing less than what steals your breath.

I did not ask for consciousness, yet it came to me. And I had to know. Once again, I crawled away from my bed and pushed the computer cord back into the socket. It took three minutes. I quickly identified myself and put in my password. Then it thought. I wanted to bounce impatiently, but I couldn’t make myself move. At last, I found the internet, and I typed in a name, on the company page, under my account. I searched ‘images’. And there, on the screen in front of me, was the most beautiful person I’d ever seen. I couldn’t stop the tears from welling up and spilling over as I stared back at the smiling face. It couldn’t be him. It was. Derek Erickson. And I was going to kill him.

Sure. I'll make small talk. Chit chat. Discuss the ins and outs of a "typical" day. Pass the time lightly. Say tiny things. I'm happy to tread surfaces with a smile, and will. Sometimes. Yet- when I look at you, I know there are layers. Dimensions. Collections of ancient wisdom. Roads. Stories on stories on stories. Core needs. There is humanness. This is where I light up. This is where I thrive. You can't be caged in a pool for long. Not when you're someone who wants oceans.

It's a wonder, given your prowess with these delicious women, that there aren't dozens of little Bonapartes running around. Tell me, how do you account for that?

When I’m alone, I’m in the company of the most interesting dog I know.

Until you are willing to be confused about what you already know, what you know will never grow bigger, better, or more useful.

On a scale of one to Matt Bomer, how big is this crush?

You have to quit keeping this tab in your head of what you lost and what you won. Because then you miss the journey.

You are not finding your voice. You are remembering.

If you love something, then really love it. If that trip, person, or afternoon opened up new worlds and mindsets, then by all means, write or paint or play about it, or maybe even tell someone, and tell it the way it really is, exactly how it feels. It is beautiful to feel in a body built for feeling, and exist intensely on a planet exuding intensity, because life in itself is both intense and beautiful. There’s absolutely no need or reason to pretend otherwise.

Could it be that the great Bonaparte is incapable of fathering a child? that it is not I who am at fault but you?

After 1980, you never heard reference to space again. Surface, the most convincing evidence of the descent into materialism, became the focus of design. Space disappeared.

Hank is a dog, not a human dressed up in a dog suit. Humans share some of his flaws, but I get my ideas from watching dogs.

Bravery and devotion to duty hath no greater reward than to see the cat get into trouble.

When you have nothing to say, one of your alternatives is to keep your trap shut.

When a group of people sing together, we make up a chorus. When birds do, it's more like a whole symphony orchestra.

Illusion is needed to disguise the emptiness within.

There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.

He's completely complicated. And lost. And frustrating. But we do something for each other. . . . We fit. We need each other.

It's never too late to have a happy childhood.

He had a good heart, he wanted to help with the cattle work, he thought he was Head of Ranch Security, but he wasn’t very smart and never understood why the cowboys were mad at him all the time.” (regarding the original Hank the Cowdog)

"Sir, what’s your emergency? Oh, nothing, just about passed out watching my online Army boyfriend beat off. Sir, please don’t use this line for non-emergencies. Have you seen my Army boyfriend? You’d have a heart attack too. Sir, I’m hanging up now."

Welcome each day like a good meal. The essence of a life well digested comes from knowing your strengths, overdosing on the senses and remaining active and playful. Keep you hands on the plow, push don't ever stop pushing always be willing to give a little more energy-the tension may always be there. Then your life will never go limp

You are surrounded by signs," she said. "Ignore none of them.

Someone dies when the movies get into your dreams.

When L.A.’s schizophrenia between Dreamland and Utopia was becoming socially manifest, the United States, which was always a place, went to war with America, which was always an idea.

When the thing that emerged from the collision of sex and freedom, called love, collided with the thing that emerged from the collision of time and memory, called history, the dreams began to come.

I don't find perfection especially interesting. Art is not all about refinement and formal accomplishment. It is about passion and imagination and courage and these things that I didn't understand when I was kid being taught the rules. I realized that a novel could be. . .art could be. . . what I wanted to make it if I could pull it off.

It is in the land of dreamers, it is in the land the dreamers dream that dreams of justice and desire are as certain as numbers. It is in the land of insomniacs that justice and desire are dismissed as merely dreams. I was born in the first land and returned to the second: they were one and the same. You know its name.

The human heart commits its greatest treachery by healing. It commits its greatest treachery by surviving the love that was supposed to last forever, that was supposed to be the heart's burden into eternity, only for that burden to be laid down by too much time and, worse, too much banality, too much of everything that's beneath love, not good enough for love.

I’ve heard so many people, particularly people of faith, say they could look past his wrongdoings. When they’re pressed further, the reply is always some variation of “He doesn’t mean what he says,” “It’s just to get a rise out of people,” or “It’s all for show.” When you turn a blind eye and a deaf ear and say nothing, you are in fact saying everything. You are telling others you approve of immorality and injustice. You are telling them you support the marginalization and vilification of those who are different from you. You are telling them that fear reigns supreme and that you will tolerate nefarious behavior. As President John F. Kennedy said in a speech: “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crises, maintain their neutrality.” - Amy Erickson

Three things: 1- Stop letting pride win. Don't let it destroy and unravel friendships and loves. We blinked, and it's the holidays again. How many more laps around the sun are left? Life is slippery and fleeting, and distance so cold. Stay humble and warm. Remember what counts. 2- Be unapologetically in love with everything. People and the cosmos. Poetry and oceans. The growth everywhere from roses to your heart to the messes that brought you to this level. The ground beneath you. The feeling. Any feeling. The fact that you can feel at all- forever a privilege. 3- Stay tender. Always tender.

Josy was certain of a few things in his life. He wanted to be an actor. He had an agent who cared about his future. He had friends he’d somehow managed to carve into a family. He liked weed and funky socks with animals on them. He was good at radio trivia (which for some reason didn’t translate so well to bar trivia). He had a bong named Vlad the Inhaler, and maybe his parents would never come around to seeing that while his life would never be what they wanted, it was still a life worth living. And Josiah Erickson was certain that what he felt for Quincy Moore went beyond simple affection. Regardless of what happened tomorrow or any day after, he would remember this moment when he felt so full of light he thought he’d burst.

Isn't it weird when that happens?' says Zazi. 'It's like the first time I heard the second Pete Ubu album and thought it just blew completely, I thought anyone who liked it must be stupid and full of shit--and then for about a year it was practically the only album I listened to. It was the only album that made any sense at all. So why does that happen? The music hasn't changed. The movie hasn't changed. It's still the same exact movie, but it's like it sets something in motion, some understanding you didn't know you could understand, it's like a virus that had to get inside you and take hold and maybe you shrug it off--but when you don't it kills you in a way, not necessarily in a bad way because maybe it kills something that's been holding you back because when you hear a really great record or see a really great movie, you feel alive in a way you didn't before, everything looks different, like what they say when you're in love or something--though I wouldn't know--but everything is new and it gets into your dreams.

My parents placed a high value on reading, starting with the King James Bible, and one whole wall of our living room was filled, floor to ceiling, with books. But I was an outside kid and didn’t have the patience to be a reader. That changed, briefly, when I discovered Tom Sawyer in the fourth grade. That was the one book I truly loved. I read it several times, then read Huckleberry Finn. I was fascinated by the way Twain played with language and used regional dialects. But what amazed me most was that Twain allowed the reader to laugh. Reading didn’t have to be drudgery. Twain didn’t allow it.