Iain Thomas Quotes

Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let the pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place

That’s what it feels like when you touch me. Like millions of tiny universes being born and then dying in the space between your finger and my skin. Sometimes I forget.

Never apologize for how you feel. No one can control how they feel. The sun doesn’t apologize for being the sun. The rain doesn’t say sorry for falling. Feelings just are

And when I asked you how you’d been, I meant I missed you more than I’ve ever missed anything before.

Sometimes I touch the things you used to touch, looking for echoes of your fingers.

If nothing else, one day you can look someone straight in the eyes and say “But I lived through it. And it made me who I am today.

I keep thinking you already know. I keep thinking I’ve sent you letters that were only ever written in my mind.

The conversation between your fingers and someone else’s skin. This is the most important discussion you can ever have.

There are a million ways to bleed. But you are by far my favorite.

And every day, the world will drag you by the hand, yelling, “This is important! And this is important! And this is important! You need to worry about this! And this! And this!” And each day, it’s up to you to yank your hand back, put it on your heart and say, “No. This is what’s important.

Someone you haven’t even met yet is wondering what it’d be like to know someone like you.

Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place.

Stop telling me to follow my heart. It once led me to you.

I know you’re not here, I can see it in your eyes when we talk. Where ever you are, come back soon

I like to think that somewhere out there, on a planet exactly like ours, two people exactly like you and me made totally different choices and that, somewhere, we’re still together. That’s enough for me.

I’m not the person you left behind anymore. There’s no one here to miss.

I have a list in my head of all the feelings I still want to feel before I die. And you have ticked so many things off that list.

This is my skin. This is not your skin, yet you are still under it.

You are the best part of all the songs I love.

If I breathe you in and you breathe me out, I swear we can breathe forever. I swear I’ll find summer in your winter and spring in your autumn and always, hands at the ends of your fingers, arms at the ends of your shoulders and I swear, when we run out of forever, when we run out of air, your name will be the last word that my lungs make air for.

Yet you still value the things you’ve lost the most. Because the things you’ve lost are still perfect in your head. They never rusted. They never broke. They are made of the memories you once had, which only grow rosier and brighter, day by day. They are made of the dreams of how wonderful things could have been and must never suffer the indignity of actually still existing. Of being real. Of having flaws. Of breaking and deteriorating. Only the things you no longer have will always be perfect.

No bird ever looked at a plane in envy

But life isn't something that should be edited. Life shouldn't be cut. The only way you'll ever discover what it truly means to be alive and human is by sharing the full experience of what it means to be human and each blemish and freckle that comes with it.

you weren't mine to begin with.

I’d study the science of you until I turned it into an art. The way your atoms rub together. Molecules colliding. Chemistry building. Explosions of heat and radiation burning like a star at the end of the world.

Maybe you're one of those people that believes that sometimes, the most reckless thing you can do with your heart, is not being reckless with it.

I hope you discover that love is both a feeling and an action, like light is both a particle and a wave.

This is why it hurts the way it hurts. You have too many words in your head. There are too many ways to describe the way you feel. You will never have the luxury of a dull ache. You must suffer through the intricacy of feeling too much

Remember, you are part of a beautiful story that did not start when you were born. As your body cuts through the air, think of only the things that made you smile, the people that made you love, the ideas that made you strong. Remember, those things will never happen again but they cannot unhappen.

Draw every bad word you’ve ever called yourself on your body. Stand in the shower and pay attention to the way the words turn back into ink and disappear down the drain.

The world is hard because you may wake up today but not tomorrow. And yet no one will accept "fear of death and a futile existence" as a reasonable excuse to miss work. The world is hard because you will have to fight for the things you love or worse, fight the things you love.

A man becomes his thoughts and these are now yours.

In bright white snow, when everything sleeps. And hope has left you lonely. When all you ever remember about summer is how it ended. I send hope back to you, wherever you are. I hope you remember all the people you still have time to be. I hope the little things in your life inspire you to do big things with it. I hope you remember that summer comes every year and that the sun, is still sweet. I hope you learn to hope again. I, still, hope.

Everyone changes so slowly, they don't even know that they have. And everyone likes to pretend that things are just the same yet they look at you like you could bring something back that's supposed to already be here. But home is a time. Not just a place.

Joan of Arc came back as a little girl in Japan, and her father told her to stop listening to her imaginary friends. Elvis was born again in a small village in Sudan, he died hungry, age 9, never knowing what a guitar was. Michelangelo was drafted into the military at age 18 in Korea, he painted his face black with shoe polish and learned to kill. Jackson Pollock got told to stop making a mess, somewhere in Russia. Hemingway, to this day, writes DVD instruction manuals somewhere in China. He’s an old man on a factory line. You wouldn’t recognise him. Gandhi was born to a wealthy stockbroker in New York. He never forgave the world after his father threw himself from his office window, on the 21st floor. And everyone, somewhere, is someone, if we only give them a chance.

Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place.

And just like a midsummer nights breeze, she ran away, into the moonlight, a fox, proud and strong. The lone wolf walked away, saddened she was gone.

The problem with the chemicals in my head is they lead to feelings in the rest of me.

And he loves her. He loves her like he can never grab enough of her between his fingers

And every day, the world will drag you by the hand, yelling, “This is important! And this is important! And this is important! You need to worry about this! And this! And this!” And each day, it’s up to you to yank your hand back, put it on your heart and say, “No. This is what’s important.” —IAIN THOMAS

Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let the pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness.

There is no prose as inspiring as a single human being with the courage to live well.

Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness.

The feeling you get when you think of something amazing and then forget it and know that it felt amazing but you cant remember the details. Then, minutes later, you remember it again and you’re so grateful because you nearly lost something, forever. Except, this time, its a person. Not an idea.

Sometimes I have a weird dream that we’re all relatively brief sparks of consciousness that live on a rock circling a ball of fire.

You cannot kill me here. Bring your soldiers, your death, your disease, your collapsed economy because it doesn’t matter, I have nothing left to lose and you cannot kill me here. Bring the tears of orphans and the wails of a mother’s loss, bring your God damn air force and Jesus on a cross, bring your hate and bitterness and long working hours, bring your empty wallets and love long since gone but you cannot kill me here. Bring your sneers, your snide remarks and friendships never felt, your letters never sent, your kisses never kissed, cigarettes smoked to the bone and cancer killing fears but you cannot kill me here. For I may fall and I may fail but I will stand again each time and you will find no satisfaction. Because you cannot kill me here.

She was real to me. And while I can be logical about this, logic has never once mended a broken heart or fixed a sundered soul. She has poisoned the very core of me. A dream has killed me

You can hide so much, you forget what it's like to be found. 

Let someone love you just the way you are—as flawed as you might be, as unattractive as you sometimes feel, as unaccomplished as you think you are. To believe you must hide all the parts of you that are broken, out of fear that someone else is incapable of loving what is less than perfect, is to believe that sunlight is incapable of entering a broken window and illuminating a dark room.

This is my skin. It keeps out the rain and words I’d rather not hear like “I’m tired” or “I’m fine” or “We need to talk.” This is my skin and it’s thick. This is not your skin. Yet you are still under it.

I know that, sometimes, you wish someone would just say the words you needed to hear because, sometimes, you don't even know what those words are. 

I have pretended to go mad in order to tell you the things I need to. I call it art. Because art is the word we give to our feelings made public. And art doesn’t worry anyone.

Scare the world. Be exactly who you say you are, and tell the truth.

There was a research article I read with the headline, “Love Is A Single Act Committed By Two Brains,” because of the way oxytocin levels rose in a mother and a son when they hugged. I wish more poets became scientists

You cannot fix me because I am not broken. And even though everything has changed, I am still more than I've ever been. 

Everyone just kind of leans their expectations of who you are on you and it makes you petrified of who you really might be.

Now if only I could do something about my neurosis that forces me to narrate my life out loud for everyone to hear,” I said, to no one in particular.

Sometimes, you don't think you deserve goodness. But, I promise you, we all have things we think we don't deserve. 

Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place

I hide because there’s more to me than what you see and I’m not sure you’d like the rest. I know that sometimes, I don’t like the rest.

And if you find someone with a head made of colors and a heart made of secrets, try to love them like they need to be loved. 

I need you to understand something. I wrote this for you. I wrote this for you and only you. Everyone else who reads it, doesn’t get it. They may think they get it, but they don’t. This is the sign you’ve been looking for. You were meant to read these words.

Elsewhere are two letters that were never sent, because of pride, each a declaration of love that would’ve changed lives

We only hear the loudest voices when really, we should be listening to the quietest. 

I love no one but you, I have discovered, but you are far away and I am here alone. Then this is my life and maybe, however unlikely, I’ll find my way back there. Or maybe, one day, I’ll settle for second best. And on that same day, hell will freeze over, the sun will burn out and the stars will fall from the sky.

It's not the things you don't want that drag you under. It's the things you think you want. Those, are the killers.

I hope that if love hurts, it teaches you something about yourself or about someone else.

I keep wondering, how many people do you need to be, before you can become yourself.

You are well within your rights to stand up, interrupt everyone around you and say, 'This is not who I am. This is not what I want. I'm sorry, but you've mistaken me for somebody else.

It doesn't hurt because if you keep hurting the same part of you again and again and again, the nerve endings all die. And when that happens, that part of you goes numb. That's why it doesn't hurt. Don't be proud of it.

I hope you never hate anything longer than you need to.

There is a kind of light that can shine in anyone, if they give themselves the space to shine. 

Not everyone wins the lottery, but everyone who does bought a ticket. To live the life you want, you have to be brave and buy the ticket every single day.

Kindness is not a currency, and if you treat it like one, then that is not kindness.

Everyone you meet along the way is just someone at a different point in their story. So be patient and kind. But don’t let anyone tell you how your story should go.

There is a special kind of sadness that can only be found in the confusion between who you think you are and who you think other people want you to be.§

You are here for one moment and it last's exactly one lifetime

What’s this?” “It’s a napkin used by the saddest girl in the world to dry her tears.” “Let me guess. Sylvia Plath?” “No, no one famous. But we knew about her. She gave off so much resonance, it turned our entire map black for one city block.” “And she was no one special?” “You wouldn’t recognise her name if I told it to you.” “So just an everyday, normal person carrying their shopping, reading books at night and going for drinks occasionally with her friends, just some person, that’s the saddest girl in the world?” “Yes. Just a regular person.

Yet you still value the things you've lost the most. Because the things you've lost are still perfect in your head. They never rusted. They never broke. They are made of the memories you once had, which only grew rosier and brighter, day by day. They are made of the dreams of how wonderful things could have been and must never suffer the indignity of actually still existing. Of being real. Of having flaws. Of breaking and deteriorating. Only the things you no longer have will always be perfect.

If you are lucky, one day you'll get the chance to have your life defined by how much you loved and were loved by someone else.

Your nerve endings I know their plot To attack My never endings Until we fall asleep In each other’s arms

And we’re not everything we could be, because we’re afraid to allow ourselves to exist all at once, because too many people have told us not to.

I feel like I’m the only one who feels the things I feel, or thinks the way I think.  I’m worried that I’m taking everything too seriously, or not seriously enough.  Sometimes I want you to see me, and sometimes I want to disappear.  I don’t know if I’ve ever truly felt like the ground beneath me was firm.  Things always feel like they’re moving and I never get the chance to catch up to them and when I do, it feels like it all goes too quickly.  I am nice to people I don’t like because I don’t know what else to do.  I feel like I’m waiting for something but I don’t know what it is.  I often walk past people in the street, and I wonder if anyone else is waiting too.  I don’t know if I’m ever, really, “Here.” So I'm fine.* *I'm not fine.

I hope you love whenever you’re given the chance to love.

It was dark and I didn't know if the sun would come out again. 

But if we are the monster, and the person being chased, then we need to stop running because we cannot run away from ourselves.

What about artists who aren’t nice people? They’re just nice people who cared too much for a person or a world that hurt them too much. So now they chase the world and people away.

I really do hope you find what you’re looking for, and I hope you find something new to look for after that, and I hope some part of you is always looking and that you discover that searching is something beautiful we all do.

That everything you want to happen, will happen, if you decide you want it enough. That every time you think a sad thought, you can think a happy one instead. That you control that completely. That the people who make you laugh are more beautiful than beautiful people. That you laugh more than you cry. That crying is good for you. That the people you hate wish you would stop and you do too. That your friends are reflections of the best parts of you. That you are more than the sum total of the things you know and how you react to them. That dancing is sometimes more important than listening to the music. That the most embarrassing, awkward moments of your life are only remembered by you and no one else

Even if you do it quietly you have to give yourself the life you want.

You can be someone who matters to others. You can be someone who matters to you.

History is a series of difficult choices. The only reason there’s anything left of the human race, the only reason we’re still here is because men like me made those difficult choices

Now listen:  You are made of good things. You are capable of incredible things. You are a song the universe sings itself, in every color it can imagine. Some parts are sad. Some parts are happy. Every part of the song, is a part of you.   Listen. Listen to the sound of the universe.

The Million Ways To Fail – Tuesday, June 30, 2015 Here’s how you fail: You fail with your heart on your sleeve. You fail like you mean it with every part of you. You fail attempting the impossible and the ridiculous. You fail in front of others and you fail and they laugh at you and you fail and you feel nothing and regret less. You fail sincerely and earnestly and you risk everything at every opportunity. This is how you fail: You fail beautifully You fail with grace.

You've got such beautiful words but none I can eat, none which block the rain, none which bandage my wounds, none which build a home. Nothing beautiful, which did not work, ever became anything more than pretty

Because you’ve made sadness a disease….Happiness without sadness is emptiness, nothingness. The world once taught us to say, ‘I’m sorry,’ when we still cried, as if what we were doing was something to be ashamed of. What you’ve done is worse.” “I want you to be happy. The world wants you to be happy.” “…Then why does it have to get so goddamn angry at me, when I’m not?

Yet you still value the things you've lost the most. Because the things you've lost are still perfect in your head. They never rusted. They never broke. They are made of the memories you once had, which only grow rosier and brighter, day by day. They are made of the dreams of how wonderful things could have been and must never suffer the indignity of actually still existing. Of being real. Of having flaws. Of breaking and deteriorating.

Let’s talk about it another time.* *If I’m honest, sometimes I feel like we’ve been trying to find each other in every life before this one, and this is as close as we’ve ever gotten. And I know now that we have to try again because we fucked this up. Maybe we won’t even be born on the same continent next time, or the time after that, and we’ll just spend those lives searching for something we can’t find, miserable for reasons we will never understand. Until we get to try again. Until we somehow find each other in another life.

The Taking Of Turns Monday, June 14, 2010 You are in some songs that still get played on the radio when the DJ is feeling nostalgic. You are in a book you once lent me (never returned) with yellowed pages. You are in trees when I touch them, even ones without names carved into them. You are in the way someone on the street laughs as I pass them. You are in a box I keep filled with letters. You are in a ring I no longer wear. And, every day, you each get a moment to haunt me.

I hope that in the future they invent a small golden light that follows you everywhere and when something is about to end, it shines brightly so you know it's about to end. And if you're never going to see someone again, it'll shine brightly and both of you can be polite and say, "It was nice to have you in my life while I did, good luck with everything that happens after now." And maybe if you're never going to eat at the same restaurant again, it'll shine and you can order everything off the menu you've never tried. Maybe, if someone's about to buy your car, the light will shine and you can take it for one last spin. Maybe, if you're with a group of friends who'll never be together again, all your lights will shine at the same time and you'll know, and then you can hold each other and whisper, "This was so good. Oh my God, this was so good.