It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness.
We have no scar to show for happiness.
We learn so little from peace. -- Chuck Palahnuik
It was only as I began to startle and disappoint others that I was aware of myself at all, that I came to understand slowly that I wasn't who I pretended to be. And now, when I was pretending to be someone completely other than myself, I felt for the first time, at home in my skin.
“He said that those who have endured some misfortune will always be set apart but that it is just that misfortune which is their gift and which is their strength.”
― Cormac McCarthy
“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.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
“None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.”
― Eugene O'Neill
“The rain falls upon the just
And also on the unjust fellas
But mostly it falls upon the just
Cause the unjust have the just's umbrellas” ― Cormac McCarthy
It's hard for decent people to stay angry at someone who has burst into tears, which is why it is often a good idea to burst into tears if a decent person is yelling at you.
- Lemony Snicket
“You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past.”
― Chuck Palahniuk
“Remember particularly that you cannot be a judge of anyone. For no one can judge a criminal until he recognizes that he is just such a criminal as the man standing before him, and that he perhaps is more than all men to blame for that crime. When he understands that, he will be able to be a judge. Though that sounds absurd, it is true. If I had been righteous myself, perhaps there would have been no criminal standing before me. If you can take upon yourself the crime of the criminal your heart is judging, take it at once, suffer for him yourself, and let him go without reproach. And even if the law itself makes you his judge, act in the same spirit so far as possible, for he will go away and condemn himself more bitterly than you have done. If, after your kiss, he goes away untouched, mocking at you, do not let that be a stumbling-block to you. It shows his time has not yet come, but it will come in due course. And if it come not, no matter; if not he, then another in his place will understand and suffer, and judge and condemn himself, and the truth will be fulfilled. Believe that, believe it without doubt; for in that lies all the hope and faith of the saints.” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
“There are scores of people waiting for someone just like us to come along; people who will appreciate our compassion, our encouragement, who will need our unique talents. Someone who will live a happier life merely because we took the time to share what we had to give.” ― Leo Buscaglia
“The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That's the only lasting thing you can create.” ― Chuck Palahniuk
“Why am I afraid to dance, I who love music and rhythm and grace and song and laughter? Why am I afraid to live, I who love life and the beauty of flesh and the living colors of the earth and sky and sea? Why am I afraid to love, I who love love?”
― Eugene O'Neill
“How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?” ― Cormac McCarthy
“There are two things that men should never weary of, goodness and humility; we get none too much of them in this rough world among cold, proud people.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
“It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin
“Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from.” ― Cormac McCarthy
“Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.”
― H.L. Mencken
“The world says: "You have needs -- satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don't hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more." This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
“We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won't do harm - yes, choose a place where you won't do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.” ― E.M. Forster
“Nostalgia for what we have lost is more bearable than nostalgia for what we have never had” ― Mignon McLaughlin
“No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all. There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention. Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel some day.
This is all practice.” ― Chuck Palahniuk
"Sometimes God doesn't change your situation because He is trying to change your heart."
“Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”
― Cormac McCarthy
“You're an interesting species. An interesting mix. You're capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you're not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.” ― Carl Sagan, Contact
“The hardest learned lesson: that people have only their kind of love to give, not our kind.” ― Mignon McLaughlin
“Everyone, at some point in their lives, wakes up in the middle of the night with the feeling that they are all alone in the world, and that nobody loves them now and that nobody will ever love them, and that they will never have a decent night's sleep again and will spend their lives wandering blearily around a loveless landscape, hoping desperately that their circumstances will improve, but suspecting, in their heart of hearts, that they will remain unloved forever. The best thing to do in these circumstances is to wake somebody else up, so that they can feel this way, too.”
― Lemony Snicket
“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.” ― Carl Sagan
“Today is the sort of day where the sun only comes up to humiliate you.”
― Chuck Palahniuk
“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin
“Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.” ― Robert Frost
“You are not special. You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We're all part of the same compost heap. We're all singing, all dancing crap of the world.” ― Chuck Palahniuk
"Seems like a riddle
How do people move on?
When everything has gone wrong?
Where did it come from?
How can it be so strong?
How does the rain fall for so long?
Something tripped me, took my legs out
Thought I could fix it, repair it, climb over it
I'm so scared I need you to hold me down
Hold me down, I'm losing ground
Sometimes I say I'd like you better
If you were only a little bit stronger
But I know I'm talking to me, when I'm talking to you"
-Losing Ground Tyrone Wells
“What's the bravest thing you ever did?
He spat in the road a bloody phlegm. Getting up this morning, he said.”
― Cormac McCarthy
“Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull.” ― H.L. Mencken
“Only after disaster can we be resurrected. It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything. Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart.” ― Chuck Palahniuk
“Look in my face. My name is Might-Have-Been; / I am also called No More, Too Late, Farewell.” ― Eugene O'Neill
“Love can change a person the way a parent can change a baby- awkwardly, and often with a great deal of mess.” ― Lemony Snicket
“Have your adventures, make your mistakes, and choose your friends poorly -- all these make for great stories.” ― Chuck Palahniuk
“True remorse is never just a regret over consequences; it is a regret over motive.”
― Mignon McLaughlin
“You may never have proof of your importance but you are more important than you think. There are always those who couldn’t do without you. The rub is that you don’t always know who.” ― Robert Fulghum
“Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.” ― T.S. Eliot
“If trouble comes when you least expect it then maybe the thing to do is to always expect it.” ― Cormac McCarthy
“The fog was where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can’t see this house. You’d never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn’t see but a few feet ahead. I didn’t meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That’s what I wanted—to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. Out beyond the harbor, where the road runs along the beach, I even lost the feeling of being on land. The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was the ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost.”
― Eugene O'Neill
“We'll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create.”
― Chuck Palahniuk
I've fallen victim to my greatest fear. The calendar marks that I lost a whole year. Three-sixty-five, barely alive. Grace took her good natured time to arrive.
“...you know that a good, long session of weeping can often make you feel better, even if your circumstances have not changed one bit.” ― Lemony Snicket
"And when you laugh be sure to laugh out loud, 'cause it will carry all your cares away. And when you see, see the beauty all around and in yourself, and it will help you feel okay. And when you pray, pray for strength to help to carry on when the troubles come your way."
“People fall so in love with their pain, they can’t leave it behind. The same as the stories they tell. We trap ourselves.” ― Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted
“A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.” ― Charles Dickens
“Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat.” ― Jean-Paul Sartre
“I don't know if you've ever noticed this, but first impressions are often entirely wrong.”
― Lemony Snicket
"At the end of the after, after doing all these things, there is an empty space. There is going to be something you ache for. The key is to find something you have a passion for, something you can live for every day of your life, and stay with it. To fulfill, you must fulfill your purpose."
“You have a choice. Live or die.
Every breath is a choice.
Every minute is a choice.
Every time you don't throw yourself down the stairs, that's a choice. Every time you don't crash your car, you re-enlist.” ― Chuck Palahniuk
“Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were, but without it we go nowhere.” ― Carl Sagan
“The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.” ― Jean-Paul Sartre
“My soul is ten thousand miles wide and extremely invisibly deep. It is the same size as the sea, and you cannot, you cannot cram it into beer cans and fingernails and stake it out in lots and own it. It will drown you all and never even notice.”― Ursula K. Le Guin
“Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it isn't so.” ― Lemony Snicket
“Forgive me my nonsense as I also forgive the nonsense of those who think they talk sense.” ― Robert Frost
“Hysteria is impossible without an audience. Panicking by yourself is the same as laughing alone in an empty room. You feel really silly.” ― Chuck Palahniuk
“It's quite an undertaking to start loving somebody. You have to have energy ,generosity, blindness. There is even a moment right at the start where you have to jump across an abyss: if you think about it you don't do it.” ― Jean-Paul Sartre
“No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.”
― Charles Dickens
“The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true.” ― Carl Sagan
No matter how good things are, there will always be solitary nights you spend in
your bedroom or car or in a party full of your closest friends when it feels like the walls are caving in. + Dan Campbell
“There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns.
If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself.
What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher. what we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish.
There is no free will.
There are no variables.” ― Chuck Palahniuk
“You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin else.” ― Cormac McCarthy
Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth.” ― Jean-Paul Sartre
“People do not seem to realise that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
“To hear the phrase "our only hope" always makes one anxious, because it means that if the only hope doesn't work, there is nothing left.” ― Lemony Snicket
“And I speak of spiritual suffering! Of people seeing their talent, their work, their lives wasted. Of good minds submitting to stupid ones. Of strength and courage strangled by envy, greed for power, fear of change. Change is freedom, change is life”
― Ursula K. Le Guin
But eventually you learn that you just can't save anyone no matter how hard you try. people have to want to change, they have to want to do better, and to be better. all you can do is love people and pray for them and be present when they need you. but you can't save them, at the end of the day, we all have to save ourselves. + Kovie Biakolo
“Words are loaded pistols.” ― Jean-Paul Sartre
“People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.” ― Chuck Palahniuk
“The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.” ― Cormac McCarthy, The Road
“How many things have to happen to you before something occurs to you?”
― Robert Frost
“Entertaining a notion, like entertaining a baby cousin or entertaining a pack of hyenas, is a dangerous thing to refuse to do. If you refuse to entertain a baby cousin, the baby cousin may get bored and entertain itself by wandering off and falling down a well. If you refuse to entertain a pack of hyenas, they may become restless and entertain themselves by devouring you. But if you refuse to entertain a notion - which is just a fancy way of saying that you refuse to think about a certain idea - you have to be much braver than someone who is merely facing some blood-thirsty animals, or some parents who are upset to find their little darling at the bottom of a well, because nobody knows what an idea will do when it goes off to entertain itself.” ― Lemony Snicket
“Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.” ― Jean-Paul Sartre
Blowing out someone else's candle doesn't make your shine any brighter.
“Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away.” ― Charles Dickens
“Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.”
― T.S. Eliot
“He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.”
― Cormac McCarthy
“The best way is not to fight it, just go. Don't be trying all the time to fix things. What you run from only stays with you longer. When you fight something, you only make it stronger.” ― Chuck Palahniuk
“Every person passing through this life will unknowingly leave something and take something away. Most of this “something” cannot be seen or heard or numbered or scientifically detected or counted. It’s what we leave in the minds of other people and what they leave in ours. Memory. The census doesn’t count it. Nothing counts without it.” ― Robert Fulghum
“Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.” ― Cormac McCarthy
“A new experience can be extremely pleasurable, or extremely irritating, or somewhere in between, and you never know until you try it out.” ― Lemony Snicket, The Blank Book
“Probably I dont believe in a lot of things that I used to believe in but that doesnt mean I dont believe in anything.” ― Cormac McCarthy
“Six hundred and forty fish later, the only thing I know is everything you love will die. The first time you meet someone special, you can count on them one day being dead and in the ground.” ― Chuck Palahniuk
“Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.”
― Robert Frost
“Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road
“It's easy to cry when you realize that everyone you love will reject you or die.”
― Chuck Palahniuk
Love me or hate me are both in my favor. if you love me, i will always be in your heart. if you hate me, I will always be in your mind. + William Shakespeare
“We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.” ― T.S. Eliot
“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.”
― Cormac McCarthy
“I feel my heart ache, but I've forgotten what that feeling means.”
― Chuck Palahniuk
“The way sadness works is one of the strange riddles of the world. If you are stricken with a great sadness, you may feel as if you have been set aflame, not only because of the enormous pain, but also because your sadness may spread over your life, like smoke from an enormous fire. You might find it difficult to see anything but your own sadness, the way smoke can cover a landscape so that all anyone can see is black. You may find that if someone pours water all over you, you are damp and distracted, but not cured of your sadness, the way a fire department can douse a fire but never recover what has been burnt down.” ― Lemony Snicket, The Bad Beginning
“your handwriting. the way you walk. which china pattern you choose. it's all giving you away. everything you do shows your hand. everything is a self portrait. everything is a diary.” ― Chuck Palahniuk
"I still love the people I’ve loved, even if I cross the street to avoid them."
“To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life.” ― T.S. Eliot
“When one has nothing left make ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.”
― Cormac McCarthy
“Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” ― H.L. Mencken
“The truth is you can be orphaned again and again and again. The truth is, you will be. And the secret is, this will hurt less and less each time until you can't feel a thing. Trust me on this.” ― Chuck Palahniuk
“The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity.” ― George Bernard Shaw
“There's nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child.” ― Erma Bombeck
“Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased. I had no belief in your ability to move a coin to your bidding. How could you? A person's path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning.” ― Cormac McCarthy
“We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.”
― Robert Frost
“For years now, I've wanted to fall asleep. The sort of slipping off, the giving up, the falling part of sleep. Now sleeping is the last thing I want to do.”
― Chuck Palahniuk
"Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly."
-- Morticia Addams
“I will love you as a thief loves a gallery and as a crow loves a murder, as a cloud loves bats and as a range loves braes. I will love you as misfortune loves orphans, as fire loves innocence and as justice loves to sit and watch while everything goes wrong. I will love you as a battlefield loves young men and as peppermints love your allergies, and I will love you as the banana peel loves the shoe of a man who was just struck by a shingle falling off a house. I will love you as a volunteer fire department loves rushing into burning buildings and as burning buildings love to chase them back out, and as a parachute loves to leave a blimp and as a blimp operator loves to chase after it.
I will love you as a dagger loves a certain person’s back, and as a certain person loves to wear dagger proof tunics, and as a dagger proof tunic loves to go to a certain dry cleaning facility, and how a certain employee of a dry cleaning facility loves to stay up late with a pair of binoculars, watching a dagger factory for hours in the hopes of catching a burglar, and as a burglar loves sneaking up behind people with binoculars, suddenly realizing that she has left her dagger at home. I will love you as a drawer loves a secret compartment, and as a secret compartment loves a secret, and as a secret loves to make a person gasp, and as a gasping person loves a glass of brandy to calm their nerves, and as a glass of brandy loves to shatter on the floor, and as the noise of glass shattering loves to make someone else gasp, and as someone else gasping loves a nearby desk to lean against, even if leaning against it presses a lever that loves to open a drawer and reveal a secret compartment. I will love you until all such compartments are discovered and opened, and until all the secrets have gone gasping into the world. I will love you until all the codes and hearts have been broken and until every anagram and egg has been unscrambled.
I will love you until every fire is extinguised and until every home is rebuilt from the handsomest and most susceptible of woods, and until every criminal is handcuffed by the laziest of policemen. I will love until M. hates snakes and J. hates grammar, and I will love you until C. realizes S. is not worthy of his love and N. realizes he is not worthy of the V. I will love you until the bird hates a nest and the worm hates an apple, and until the apple hates a tree and the tree hates a nest, and until a bird hates a tree and an apple hates a nest, although honestly I cannot imagine that last occurrence no matter how hard I try. I will love you as we grow older, which has just happened, and has happened again, and happened several days ago, continuously, and then several years before that, and will continue to happen as the spinning hands of every clock and the flipping pages of every calendar mark the passage of time, except for the clocks that people have forgotten to wind and the calendars that people have forgotten to place in a highly visible area. I will love you as we find ourselves farther and farther from one another, where we once we were so close that we could slip the curved straw, and the long, slender spoon, between our lips and fingers respectively.
I will love you until the chances of us running into one another slip from slim to zero, and until your face is fogged by distant memory, and your memory faced by distant fog, and your fog memorized by a distant face, and your distance distanced by the memorized memory of a foggy fog. I will love you no matter where you go and who you see, no matter where you avoid and who you don’t see, and no matter who sees you avoiding where you go. I will love you no matter what happens to you, and no matter how I discover what happens to you, and no matter what happens to me as I discover this, and now matter how I am discovered after what happens to me as I am discovering this.” ― Lemony Snicket
We have no scar to show for happiness.
We learn so little from peace. -- Chuck Palahnuik
It was only as I began to startle and disappoint others that I was aware of myself at all, that I came to understand slowly that I wasn't who I pretended to be. And now, when I was pretending to be someone completely other than myself, I felt for the first time, at home in my skin.
“He said that those who have endured some misfortune will always be set apart but that it is just that misfortune which is their gift and which is their strength.”
― Cormac McCarthy
“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.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
“None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.”
― Eugene O'Neill
“The rain falls upon the just
And also on the unjust fellas
But mostly it falls upon the just
Cause the unjust have the just's umbrellas” ― Cormac McCarthy
It's hard for decent people to stay angry at someone who has burst into tears, which is why it is often a good idea to burst into tears if a decent person is yelling at you.
- Lemony Snicket
“You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past.”
― Chuck Palahniuk
“Remember particularly that you cannot be a judge of anyone. For no one can judge a criminal until he recognizes that he is just such a criminal as the man standing before him, and that he perhaps is more than all men to blame for that crime. When he understands that, he will be able to be a judge. Though that sounds absurd, it is true. If I had been righteous myself, perhaps there would have been no criminal standing before me. If you can take upon yourself the crime of the criminal your heart is judging, take it at once, suffer for him yourself, and let him go without reproach. And even if the law itself makes you his judge, act in the same spirit so far as possible, for he will go away and condemn himself more bitterly than you have done. If, after your kiss, he goes away untouched, mocking at you, do not let that be a stumbling-block to you. It shows his time has not yet come, but it will come in due course. And if it come not, no matter; if not he, then another in his place will understand and suffer, and judge and condemn himself, and the truth will be fulfilled. Believe that, believe it without doubt; for in that lies all the hope and faith of the saints.” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
“There are scores of people waiting for someone just like us to come along; people who will appreciate our compassion, our encouragement, who will need our unique talents. Someone who will live a happier life merely because we took the time to share what we had to give.” ― Leo Buscaglia
“The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That's the only lasting thing you can create.” ― Chuck Palahniuk
“Why am I afraid to dance, I who love music and rhythm and grace and song and laughter? Why am I afraid to live, I who love life and the beauty of flesh and the living colors of the earth and sky and sea? Why am I afraid to love, I who love love?”
― Eugene O'Neill
“How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?” ― Cormac McCarthy
“There are two things that men should never weary of, goodness and humility; we get none too much of them in this rough world among cold, proud people.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
“It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin
“Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from.” ― Cormac McCarthy
“Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.”
― H.L. Mencken
“The world says: "You have needs -- satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don't hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more." This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
“We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won't do harm - yes, choose a place where you won't do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.” ― E.M. Forster
“Nostalgia for what we have lost is more bearable than nostalgia for what we have never had” ― Mignon McLaughlin
“No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all. There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention. Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel some day.
This is all practice.” ― Chuck Palahniuk
"Sometimes God doesn't change your situation because He is trying to change your heart."
“Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”
― Cormac McCarthy
“You're an interesting species. An interesting mix. You're capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you're not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.” ― Carl Sagan, Contact
“The hardest learned lesson: that people have only their kind of love to give, not our kind.” ― Mignon McLaughlin
“Everyone, at some point in their lives, wakes up in the middle of the night with the feeling that they are all alone in the world, and that nobody loves them now and that nobody will ever love them, and that they will never have a decent night's sleep again and will spend their lives wandering blearily around a loveless landscape, hoping desperately that their circumstances will improve, but suspecting, in their heart of hearts, that they will remain unloved forever. The best thing to do in these circumstances is to wake somebody else up, so that they can feel this way, too.”
― Lemony Snicket
“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.” ― Carl Sagan
“Today is the sort of day where the sun only comes up to humiliate you.”
― Chuck Palahniuk
“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin
“Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.” ― Robert Frost
“You are not special. You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We're all part of the same compost heap. We're all singing, all dancing crap of the world.” ― Chuck Palahniuk
"Seems like a riddle
How do people move on?
When everything has gone wrong?
Where did it come from?
How can it be so strong?
How does the rain fall for so long?
Something tripped me, took my legs out
Thought I could fix it, repair it, climb over it
I'm so scared I need you to hold me down
Hold me down, I'm losing ground
Sometimes I say I'd like you better
If you were only a little bit stronger
But I know I'm talking to me, when I'm talking to you"
-Losing Ground Tyrone Wells
“What's the bravest thing you ever did?
He spat in the road a bloody phlegm. Getting up this morning, he said.”
― Cormac McCarthy
“Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull.” ― H.L. Mencken
“Only after disaster can we be resurrected. It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything. Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart.” ― Chuck Palahniuk
“Look in my face. My name is Might-Have-Been; / I am also called No More, Too Late, Farewell.” ― Eugene O'Neill
“Love can change a person the way a parent can change a baby- awkwardly, and often with a great deal of mess.” ― Lemony Snicket
“Have your adventures, make your mistakes, and choose your friends poorly -- all these make for great stories.” ― Chuck Palahniuk
“True remorse is never just a regret over consequences; it is a regret over motive.”
― Mignon McLaughlin
“You may never have proof of your importance but you are more important than you think. There are always those who couldn’t do without you. The rub is that you don’t always know who.” ― Robert Fulghum
“Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.” ― T.S. Eliot
“If trouble comes when you least expect it then maybe the thing to do is to always expect it.” ― Cormac McCarthy
“The fog was where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can’t see this house. You’d never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn’t see but a few feet ahead. I didn’t meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That’s what I wanted—to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. Out beyond the harbor, where the road runs along the beach, I even lost the feeling of being on land. The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was the ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost.”
― Eugene O'Neill
“We'll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create.”
― Chuck Palahniuk
I've fallen victim to my greatest fear. The calendar marks that I lost a whole year. Three-sixty-five, barely alive. Grace took her good natured time to arrive.
“...you know that a good, long session of weeping can often make you feel better, even if your circumstances have not changed one bit.” ― Lemony Snicket
"And when you laugh be sure to laugh out loud, 'cause it will carry all your cares away. And when you see, see the beauty all around and in yourself, and it will help you feel okay. And when you pray, pray for strength to help to carry on when the troubles come your way."
“People fall so in love with their pain, they can’t leave it behind. The same as the stories they tell. We trap ourselves.” ― Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted
“A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.” ― Charles Dickens
“Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat.” ― Jean-Paul Sartre
“I don't know if you've ever noticed this, but first impressions are often entirely wrong.”
― Lemony Snicket
"At the end of the after, after doing all these things, there is an empty space. There is going to be something you ache for. The key is to find something you have a passion for, something you can live for every day of your life, and stay with it. To fulfill, you must fulfill your purpose."
“You have a choice. Live or die.
Every breath is a choice.
Every minute is a choice.
Every time you don't throw yourself down the stairs, that's a choice. Every time you don't crash your car, you re-enlist.” ― Chuck Palahniuk
“Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were, but without it we go nowhere.” ― Carl Sagan
“The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.” ― Jean-Paul Sartre
“My soul is ten thousand miles wide and extremely invisibly deep. It is the same size as the sea, and you cannot, you cannot cram it into beer cans and fingernails and stake it out in lots and own it. It will drown you all and never even notice.”― Ursula K. Le Guin
“Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it isn't so.” ― Lemony Snicket
“Forgive me my nonsense as I also forgive the nonsense of those who think they talk sense.” ― Robert Frost
“Hysteria is impossible without an audience. Panicking by yourself is the same as laughing alone in an empty room. You feel really silly.” ― Chuck Palahniuk
“It's quite an undertaking to start loving somebody. You have to have energy ,generosity, blindness. There is even a moment right at the start where you have to jump across an abyss: if you think about it you don't do it.” ― Jean-Paul Sartre
“No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.”
― Charles Dickens
“The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true.” ― Carl Sagan
No matter how good things are, there will always be solitary nights you spend in
your bedroom or car or in a party full of your closest friends when it feels like the walls are caving in. + Dan Campbell
“There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns.
If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself.
What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher. what we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish.
There is no free will.
There are no variables.” ― Chuck Palahniuk
“You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin else.” ― Cormac McCarthy
Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth.” ― Jean-Paul Sartre
“People do not seem to realise that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
“To hear the phrase "our only hope" always makes one anxious, because it means that if the only hope doesn't work, there is nothing left.” ― Lemony Snicket
“And I speak of spiritual suffering! Of people seeing their talent, their work, their lives wasted. Of good minds submitting to stupid ones. Of strength and courage strangled by envy, greed for power, fear of change. Change is freedom, change is life”
― Ursula K. Le Guin
But eventually you learn that you just can't save anyone no matter how hard you try. people have to want to change, they have to want to do better, and to be better. all you can do is love people and pray for them and be present when they need you. but you can't save them, at the end of the day, we all have to save ourselves. + Kovie Biakolo
“Words are loaded pistols.” ― Jean-Paul Sartre
“People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.” ― Chuck Palahniuk
“The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.” ― Cormac McCarthy, The Road
“How many things have to happen to you before something occurs to you?”
― Robert Frost
“Entertaining a notion, like entertaining a baby cousin or entertaining a pack of hyenas, is a dangerous thing to refuse to do. If you refuse to entertain a baby cousin, the baby cousin may get bored and entertain itself by wandering off and falling down a well. If you refuse to entertain a pack of hyenas, they may become restless and entertain themselves by devouring you. But if you refuse to entertain a notion - which is just a fancy way of saying that you refuse to think about a certain idea - you have to be much braver than someone who is merely facing some blood-thirsty animals, or some parents who are upset to find their little darling at the bottom of a well, because nobody knows what an idea will do when it goes off to entertain itself.” ― Lemony Snicket
“Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.” ― Jean-Paul Sartre
Blowing out someone else's candle doesn't make your shine any brighter.
“Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away.” ― Charles Dickens
“Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.”
― T.S. Eliot
“He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.”
― Cormac McCarthy
“The best way is not to fight it, just go. Don't be trying all the time to fix things. What you run from only stays with you longer. When you fight something, you only make it stronger.” ― Chuck Palahniuk
“Every person passing through this life will unknowingly leave something and take something away. Most of this “something” cannot be seen or heard or numbered or scientifically detected or counted. It’s what we leave in the minds of other people and what they leave in ours. Memory. The census doesn’t count it. Nothing counts without it.” ― Robert Fulghum
“Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.” ― Cormac McCarthy
“A new experience can be extremely pleasurable, or extremely irritating, or somewhere in between, and you never know until you try it out.” ― Lemony Snicket, The Blank Book
“Probably I dont believe in a lot of things that I used to believe in but that doesnt mean I dont believe in anything.” ― Cormac McCarthy
“Six hundred and forty fish later, the only thing I know is everything you love will die. The first time you meet someone special, you can count on them one day being dead and in the ground.” ― Chuck Palahniuk
“Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.”
― Robert Frost
“Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road
“It's easy to cry when you realize that everyone you love will reject you or die.”
― Chuck Palahniuk
Love me or hate me are both in my favor. if you love me, i will always be in your heart. if you hate me, I will always be in your mind. + William Shakespeare
“We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.” ― T.S. Eliot
“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.”
― Cormac McCarthy
“I feel my heart ache, but I've forgotten what that feeling means.”
― Chuck Palahniuk
“The way sadness works is one of the strange riddles of the world. If you are stricken with a great sadness, you may feel as if you have been set aflame, not only because of the enormous pain, but also because your sadness may spread over your life, like smoke from an enormous fire. You might find it difficult to see anything but your own sadness, the way smoke can cover a landscape so that all anyone can see is black. You may find that if someone pours water all over you, you are damp and distracted, but not cured of your sadness, the way a fire department can douse a fire but never recover what has been burnt down.” ― Lemony Snicket, The Bad Beginning
“your handwriting. the way you walk. which china pattern you choose. it's all giving you away. everything you do shows your hand. everything is a self portrait. everything is a diary.” ― Chuck Palahniuk
"I still love the people I’ve loved, even if I cross the street to avoid them."
“To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life.” ― T.S. Eliot
“When one has nothing left make ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.”
― Cormac McCarthy
“Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” ― H.L. Mencken
“The truth is you can be orphaned again and again and again. The truth is, you will be. And the secret is, this will hurt less and less each time until you can't feel a thing. Trust me on this.” ― Chuck Palahniuk
“The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity.” ― George Bernard Shaw
“There's nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child.” ― Erma Bombeck
“Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased. I had no belief in your ability to move a coin to your bidding. How could you? A person's path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning.” ― Cormac McCarthy
“We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.”
― Robert Frost
“For years now, I've wanted to fall asleep. The sort of slipping off, the giving up, the falling part of sleep. Now sleeping is the last thing I want to do.”
― Chuck Palahniuk
"Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly."
-- Morticia Addams
“I will love you as a thief loves a gallery and as a crow loves a murder, as a cloud loves bats and as a range loves braes. I will love you as misfortune loves orphans, as fire loves innocence and as justice loves to sit and watch while everything goes wrong. I will love you as a battlefield loves young men and as peppermints love your allergies, and I will love you as the banana peel loves the shoe of a man who was just struck by a shingle falling off a house. I will love you as a volunteer fire department loves rushing into burning buildings and as burning buildings love to chase them back out, and as a parachute loves to leave a blimp and as a blimp operator loves to chase after it.
I will love you as a dagger loves a certain person’s back, and as a certain person loves to wear dagger proof tunics, and as a dagger proof tunic loves to go to a certain dry cleaning facility, and how a certain employee of a dry cleaning facility loves to stay up late with a pair of binoculars, watching a dagger factory for hours in the hopes of catching a burglar, and as a burglar loves sneaking up behind people with binoculars, suddenly realizing that she has left her dagger at home. I will love you as a drawer loves a secret compartment, and as a secret compartment loves a secret, and as a secret loves to make a person gasp, and as a gasping person loves a glass of brandy to calm their nerves, and as a glass of brandy loves to shatter on the floor, and as the noise of glass shattering loves to make someone else gasp, and as someone else gasping loves a nearby desk to lean against, even if leaning against it presses a lever that loves to open a drawer and reveal a secret compartment. I will love you until all such compartments are discovered and opened, and until all the secrets have gone gasping into the world. I will love you until all the codes and hearts have been broken and until every anagram and egg has been unscrambled.
I will love you until every fire is extinguised and until every home is rebuilt from the handsomest and most susceptible of woods, and until every criminal is handcuffed by the laziest of policemen. I will love until M. hates snakes and J. hates grammar, and I will love you until C. realizes S. is not worthy of his love and N. realizes he is not worthy of the V. I will love you until the bird hates a nest and the worm hates an apple, and until the apple hates a tree and the tree hates a nest, and until a bird hates a tree and an apple hates a nest, although honestly I cannot imagine that last occurrence no matter how hard I try. I will love you as we grow older, which has just happened, and has happened again, and happened several days ago, continuously, and then several years before that, and will continue to happen as the spinning hands of every clock and the flipping pages of every calendar mark the passage of time, except for the clocks that people have forgotten to wind and the calendars that people have forgotten to place in a highly visible area. I will love you as we find ourselves farther and farther from one another, where we once we were so close that we could slip the curved straw, and the long, slender spoon, between our lips and fingers respectively.
I will love you until the chances of us running into one another slip from slim to zero, and until your face is fogged by distant memory, and your memory faced by distant fog, and your fog memorized by a distant face, and your distance distanced by the memorized memory of a foggy fog. I will love you no matter where you go and who you see, no matter where you avoid and who you don’t see, and no matter who sees you avoiding where you go. I will love you no matter what happens to you, and no matter how I discover what happens to you, and no matter what happens to me as I discover this, and now matter how I am discovered after what happens to me as I am discovering this.” ― Lemony Snicket