People gather bundles of sticks to build bridges they never cross. ~Author Unknown
“This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.” ― Franz Kafka
“We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.” ― E.E. Cummings
“We are as forlorn as children lost in the wood. When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours? And if I were to cast myself down before you and tell you, what more would you know about me that you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful?” ― Franz Kafka
“I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all.”― Richard Wright, Black Boy
“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.” ― Henry David Thoreau
Pull yourself together and use what you have. ~Betsy Cañas Garmon
“My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.” ― William Golding
“If only there could be an invention that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again.” ― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca
“Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.” ― Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance
“Because they are mean is no reason why I should be. I hate such things, and though I think I've a right to be hurt, I don't intend to show it. (Amy March)” ― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
The promises of this world are, for the most part, vain phantoms; and to confide in one's self, and become something of worth and value is the best and safest course. ~Michelangelo
“In everybody’s life there’s a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can’t go forward anymore. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That’s how we survive.” ― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
“It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.” ― Henry David Thoreau
“Anybody can learn to think, or believe, or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel... the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself - in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.” ― E.E. Cummings
Lots of things fade in life - pictures, memories, and some people say feelings. I think they're always there, they just hide sometimes. And maybe it's cause they're sick of getting hurt or someone doesn't have feelings back. But I don't think feelings ever really go away
“It's a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love.” ― Graham Greene
“when man determined to destroy
himself he picked the was
of shall and finding only why
smashed it into because.”
― E.E. Cummings
“Be a light, not a judge. Be a model, not a critic”
― Stephen R. Covey
“Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened. ― Thomas Hardy
“Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.” ― Henry David Thoreau
There comes a time when we stop loving someone, not because they also stopped loving us, but because we've found that they'd be happier if we let go.
"Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge's chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view." Lillian Hellman
“Closing your eyes isn't going to change anything. Nothing's going to disappear just because you can't see what's going on. In fact, things will even be worse the next time you open your eyes. That's the kind of world we live in. Keep your eyes wide open. Only a coward closes his eyes. Closing your eyes and plugging up your ears won't make time stand still.” ― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
“People always talk about how hard it can be to remember things - where they left their keys, or the name of an acquaintance - but no one ever talks about how much effort we put into forgetting. I am exhausted from the effort to forget... There are things that have to be forgotten if you want to go on living.”― Stephen Carpenter
“He found himself understanding the wearisomeness of this life,where every path was an improvisation and a considerable part of one's waking life was spent watching one's feet.” ― William Golding, Lord of the Flies
"Grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear." Zora Neale Hurston
“The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.” ― C.G. Jung
When the superficial wearies me, it wearies me so much that I need an abyss in order to rest. ~Antonio Porchia
“Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” ― Franz Kafka
"There are years that ask questions and years that answer." -Zora Neale Hurston
People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them. ~George Bernard Shaw
“The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.”― Franz Kafka
"Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge's chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view." -Lillian Hellman
“There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must of felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life.
“Time is priceless, but it’s Free. You can't own it, you can use it. You can spend it. But you can't keep it. Once you've lost it you can never get it back.” ― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife
" Live, then, and be happy, beloved children of my heart, and never forget, that until the day God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words, 'Wait and Hope.” ― Alexandre Dumas
“The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the whole moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook on life. That I feed the hungry, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ -- all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren, that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least among them all, the poorest of all the beggars, the most impudent of all the offenders, the very enemy himself -- that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness -- that I myself am the enemy who must be loved -- what then? As a rule, the Christian's attitude is then reversed; there is no longer any question of love or long-suffering; we say to the brother within us "Raca," and condemn and rage against ourselves. We hide it from the world; we refuse to admit ever having met this least among the lowly in ourselves.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.” ― Oscar Wilde
“If only it were possible to love without injury – fidelity isn’t enough: I had been faithful to Anne and yet I had injured her. The hurt is in the act of possession: we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to be possessed without humiliation. In a way I was glad that my wife had struck out at me again – I had forgotten her pain for too long, and this was the only kind of recompense I could give her. Unfortunately the innocent are always involved in any conflict. Always, everywhere, there is some voice crying from a tower. ” ― Graham Greene
Some of your hurts you have cured,
And the sharpest you still have survived,
But what torments of grief you endured
From the evil which never arrived.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”
― C.G. Jung
“Every morning, I wake up and forget just for a second that it happened. But once my eyes open, it buries me like a landslide of sharp, sad rocks. Once my eyes open, I'm heavy, like there's to much gravity on my heart.” ― Sarah Ockler, Twenty Boy Summer
“Maybe there is a beast… maybe it's only us.” ― William Golding, Lord of the Flies
“Happiness is but a mere episode in the general drama of pain.” ― Thomas Hardy
“Life has a way of going in circles. Ideally, it would be a straight path forward––we'd always know where we were going, we'd always be able to move on and leave everything else behind. There would be nothing but the present and the future. Instead, we always find ourselves where we started. When we try to move ahead, we end up taking a step back. We carry everything with us, the weight exhausting us until we want to collapse and give up.
We forget things we try to remember. We remember things we'd rather forget. The most frightening thing about memory is that it leaves no choice. It has mastered an incomprehensible art of forgetting. It erases, it smudges, it fills in blank spaces with details that don't exist.”― Brigid Gorry-Hines
“This wallpaper is dreadful, one of us will have to go.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Not just beautiful, though--the stars are like the trees in the forest, alive and breathing. And they're watching me.” ― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
And a heart that grieves, gets lost in everything. And a heart in need, finds hope in anything.
“I have this strange feeling that I'm not myself anymore. It's hard to put into words, but I guess it's like I was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. That sort of feeling.” ― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart
“So, my unsolicited advice to women in the workplace is this. When faced with sexism, or ageism, or lookism, or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: “Is this person in between me and what I want to do?” If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way. Then, when you’re in charge, don’t hire the people who were jerky to you.” ― Tina Fey, Bossypants
“You have played,
(I think)
And broke the toys you were fondest of,
And are a little tired now;
Tired of things that break, and--
Just tired.
So am I.”
― E.E. Cummings
“Never fear quarrels, but seek hazardous adventures.” ― Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers
Sometimes, if you want to change a man's mind, you have to change the mind of the man next to him first.” ― Megan Whalen Turner, The King of Attolia
"Lonely people, in talking to each other, can make each other lonelier." Lillian Hellman
“I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.” ― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
“I wish for a moment that time would lift me out of this day, and into some more benign one. But then I feel guilty for wanting to avoid the sadness; dead people need us to remember them, even if it eats us, even if all we can do is say "I'm sorry" until it is as meaningless air.”― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife
There were those empty threats and hollow lies, and whenever you tried to hurt me I just hurt you even worse, and so much deeper
“Most men are not wicked... They are sleep-walkers, not evil evildoers.”
― Franz Kafka
"It is easier to lead men to combat, stirring up their passion, than to restrain them and direct them toward the patient labors of peace." -Andre Gide
“I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it -- to be fed so much love I couldn't take any more. Just once. ”― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
Self-respect cannot be hunted. It cannot be purchased. It is never for sale. It cannot be fabricated out of public relations. It comes to us when we are alone, in quiet moments, in quiet places, when e suddenly realize that, knowing the good, we have done it; knowing the beautiful, we have served it; knowing the truth we have spoken it. ~Whitney Griswold
“The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.” ― Dante Alighieri, Inferno
I was tired of being asked how I felt about things. These were the questions I didn't know the answer to. I didn't feel anything. I just felt that white expanse of nothingness slowly spreading to the edges of me.
“Alas," said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into."
"You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.” ― Franz Kafka
“Losing your way on a journey is unfortunate. But, losing your reason for the journey is a fate more cruel.” ― H.G. Wells
“I'm sorry. I didn't know you were coming or I'd have cleaned up a little more. My life, I mean, not just the apartment.” ― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife
“We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.” ― Herman Melville
“Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to sleep through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won't be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there- to the edge of the world. There's something you can't do unless you get there.” ― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
“I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.” ― Jack Kerouac
"For time is the longest distance between two places." - Tennessee Williams
“Never look back unless you are planning to go that way.” ― Henry David Thoreau
"It is not good to see people who have been pretending strength all their lives lose it even for a minute." -Lillian Hellman
“People always think that happiness is a faraway thing," thought Francie, "something complicated and hard to get. Yet, what little things can make it up; a place of shelter when it rains - a cup of strong hot coffee when you're blue; for a man, a cigarette for contentment; a book to read when you're alone - just to be with someone you love. Those things make happiness.” ― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Memories won't leave my mind; it hurts to leave this all behind. Staying now won't make it so, my heart is saying don't let go.
“I go to sleep alone, and wake up alone. I take walks. I work until I'm tired. I watch the wind play with the trash that's been under the snow all winter. Everything seems simple until you think about it. Why is love intensified by abscence?” ― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife
"Oh, you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you - gently, with love, and hand your life back to you." Tennessee Williams
"Most quarrels amplify a misunderstanding." -Andre Gide
“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.” ― Henry David Thoreau
“Courage isn't having the strength to go on - it is going on when you don't have strength.” ― Napoleon Bonaparte
“However mean your life is, meet it and live it.” ― Henry David Thoreau
“Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe.” ― Henry David Thoreau
“But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o'clock in the morning.” ― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
"There are no hopeless situations; there are only men who have grown hopeless about them." -Clare Boothe Luce
“To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
“I'm living under water. Everything seems slow and far away. I know there's a world up there, a sunlit quick world where time runs like dry sand through an hourglass, but down here, where I am, air and sound and time and feeling are thick and dense.” ― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife
“I can alter my life by altering my attitude. He who would have nothing to do with thorns must never attempt to gather flowers.” ― Henry David Thoreau
They say that once you hit rock bottom, things can only get better. But sometimes you never hit rock bottom. Sometimes life’s a black hole and you just keep on falling. No slowing down, no turning around, no stopping. You just fall forever
“Dreams are always crushing when they don't come true. But it's the simple dreams that are often the most painful because they seem so personal, so reasonable, so attainable. You're always close enough to touch, but never quite close enough to hold and it's enough to break your heart.” ― Nicholas Sparks
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. ~F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.” ― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum LP
“Listen, sometimes when you finally find out, you realize that you were much better off not knowing.” ― Audrey Niffenegger, Her Fearful Symmetry
“Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.” ― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
“Sometimes it’s a sort of indulgence to think the worst of ourselves. We say, ‘Now I have reached the bottom of the pit, now I can fall no further,’ and it is almost a pleasure to wallow in the darkness. The trouble is, it’s not true. There is no end to the evil in ourselves, just as there is no end to the good. It’s a matter of choice. We struggle to climb, or we struggle to fall. The thing is to discover which way we’re going.” ― Daphne du Maurier
“The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” ― Ernest Hemingway
"It seems that fighting is a game where everybody is the loser." -Zora Neale Hurston
“This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.” ― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses
"Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth." -Lillian Hellman
“I am always saying "Glad to've met you" to somebody I'm not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.” ― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
“All through my life I've had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world, something big, even sinister, and no one would tell me what it was."
"No," said the old man, "that's just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that.” ― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
“Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned.”― James Joyce
"I am little concerned with beauty or perfection. I don't care for the great centuries. All I care about is life, struggle, intensity." -Emile Zola
People have to face regrets. Becoming mature means learning to accept what you cannot change, facing unresolved sorrows and learning to love life as it really happens, not as you would have it happen. When someone attaches unkindness to criticism, she's angry. Angry people need to criticize as an outlet for their anger. That's why you must reject unkind criticism. Unkind criticism is never part of a meaningful critique of you. Its purpose is not to teach or to help, its purpose is to punish. Life isn't supposed to be an all or nothing battle between misery and bliss. Life isn't supposed to be a battle at all. And when it comes to happiness, well, sometimes life is just okay, sometimes it's comfortable, sometimes wonderful, sometimes boring, sometimes unpleasant. When your day's not perfect, it's not a failure or a terrible loss. It's just another day
“From childhood's hour I have not been. As others were, I have not seen. As others saw, I could not awaken. My heart to joy at the same tone. And all I loved, I loved alone.” ― Edgar Allan Poe
“These days I just can't seem to say what I mean [...]. I just can't. Every time I try to say something, it misses the point. Either that or I end up saying the opposite of what I mean. The more I try to get it right the more mixed up it gets. Sometimes I can't even remember what I was trying to say in the first place. It's like my body's split in two and one of me is chasing the other me around a big pillar. We're running circles around it. The other me has the right words, but I can never catch her.” ― Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories
This must be Thursday,' said Arthur to himself, sinking low over his beer. 'I never could get the hang of Thursdays.” ― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
“Grief is a most peculiar thing; we’re so helpless in the face of it. It’s like a window that will simply open of its own accord. The room grows cold, and we can do nothing but shiver. But it opens a little less each time, and a little less; and one day we wonder what has become of it.” ― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha
“Be good and you will be lonesome.” ― Mark Twain
“I know the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started.” ― Ernest Hemingway
“Just think how many thoughts a blanket smothers while one lies alone in bed, and how many unhappy dreams it keeps warm.” ― Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories
Whatever comes our way, whatever battle is raging inside us, we always have a choice. It's the choices that make us what we are, and we can always choose to do the right thing being heartbroken is really intoxicating…you have been hurt so much that you feel like nothing else can touch you. you feel almost invincible. it's a kind of terrible freedom. -Florence Welch
You are going to lose people in your life. and realize that no matter how much time you spent with them or how much you appreciate them and told them so, it will never seem like it was enough.
“There's always a moment when you start to fall out of love, whether it's with a person or an idea or a cause, even if it's one you only narrate to yourself years after the event: a tiny thing, a wrong word, a false note, which means that things can never be quite the same again.” ― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
“To hell with them. Nothing hurts if you don’t let it.” -Ernest Hemingway
There it goes again. That heavy feeling in your chest when you don't feel any desire to speak or move. All you want to do is close your eyes and sleep, because the process of being broken is incredibly exhausting. You attempt your best to make your days fulfilling, but no matter how hard you try you can't seem to connect to anyone or anything.
“Listen to the mustn'ts, child. Listen to the don'ts. Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me... Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.” ― Shel Silverstein
There are two types of waiting. There's the waiting you do for something you know is coming, sooner or later--like waiting for the 6.28 train, or the school bus, or a party where a certain handsome boy might be. And then there's the waiting you don't know is coming. You don't even know what it is exactly, but you're hoping for it. You're imagining it and living your life for it. That's the kind of waiting that makes a fist in your heart.
“As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know.”― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
“How terribly sad it was that people are made in such a way that they get used to something as extraordinary as living.”― Jostein Gaarder
"There is a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go." Tennessee Williams
“This is why dreams can be such dangerous things: they smolder on like a fire does, and sometimes they consume us completely.” ― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha
“This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.” ― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
“Body cells replace themselves every month. Even at this very moment. Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.” ― Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase
“Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not. Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness. Armour yourself in it, and it will never be used to hurt you.” ― George R.R. Martin
"The future is called 'perhaps,' which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the important thing is not to allow that to scare you." Tennessee Williams
We spend our lives building higher fences and stronger locks, when the gravest dangers are already inside of us.
The person in life that you will always be with the most, is yourself. Because even when you are with others, you are still with yourself, too! When you wake up in the morning, you are with yourself, laying in bed at night you are with yourself, walking down the street in the sunlight you are with yourself.What kind of person do you want to walk down the street with? What kind of person do you want to wake up in the morning with? What kind of person do you want to see at the end of the day before you fall asleep? Because that person is yourself, and it's your responsibility to be that person you want to be with. I know I want to spend my life with a person who knows how to let things go, who's not full of hate, who's able to smile and be carefree. So that's who I have to be.” ― C. JoyBell C.
“Some old wounds never truly heal, and bleed again at the slightest word.”― George R.R. Martin
"The better a work is, the more it attracts criticism; it is like the fleas who rush to jump on white linens." -Gustave Flaubert
"A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it." -Zora Neale Hurston
“What to do if you find yourself stuck in a crack in the ground underneath a giant boulder you can't move, with no hope of rescue. Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far, which given your current circumstances seems more likely, consider how lucky you are that it won't be troubling you much longer.” ― Douglas Adams, The Original Hitchhiker Radio Scripts
“Life is painful and messed up. It gets complicated at the worst of times, and sometimes you have no idea where to go or what to do. Lots of times people just let themselves get lost, dropping into a wide open, huge abyss. But that's why we have to keep trying. We have to push through all that hurts us, work past all our memories that are haunting us. Sometimes the things that hurt us are the things that make us strongest. A life without experience, in my opinion, is no life at all. And that's why I tell everyone that, even when it hurts, never stop yourself from living.”― Alysha Speer
"Things start out as hopes and end up as habits." -Lillian Hellman
“It was that kind of a crazy afternoon, terrifically cold, and no sun out or anything, and you felt like you were disappearing every time you crossed a road.” ― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
Never give in... never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force... never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. ~Winston Churchill
It is very, very difficult realizing that you might actually be better off without certain people weighing down your heart. Some people are meant to guide us, yet leave our lives. I thank the universe for bringing such an honest, loving light to my life, but the light is dim now. It’s certainly not honest nor is it loving: and it is so painful to feel, on the shallow face of it all, but these people are meant to love us and leave. Your time here is done.
“But I didn't understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair.”― Haruki Murakami
“And at some point you realize that there are more flavors of pain than coffee. There's the little empty pain of leaving something behind- graduating, taking the next step forward, walking out of something familiar and safe into the unknown. There's the big, whirling pain of life upending all of your plans and expectations. There's the sharp little pains of failure, and the more obscure aches of successes that didn't give you what you thought they would. There are the vicious, stabbing pains of hopes being torn up. The sweet little pains of finding others, giving them your love, and taking joy in their life as they grow and learn. There's the steady pain of empathy that you shrug off so you can stand beside a wounded friend and help them bear their burdens.
And if you are very, very lucky, there are a few blazing hot little pains you feel when you realize that you are standing in a moment of utter perfection, an instant of triumph, or happiness, or mirth which at the same time cannot possibly last and yet will remain with you for life.
Everyone is down on pain, because they forget something important about it: Pain is for the living. Only the dead don't feel it.”― Jim Butcher, White Night
“Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?”― Haruki Murakami
"It seems to me that trying to live without friends is like milking a bear to get cream for your morning coffee. It is a whole lot of trouble, and then not worth much after you get it." -Zora Neale Hurston
“Destiny is real. And she's not mild-mannered. She will come around and hit you in the face and knock you over and before you know what hit you, you're naked- stripped of everything you thought you knew and everything you thought you didn't know- and there you are! A bloody nose, bruises all over you, and naked. And it's the most beautiful thing.”― C. JoyBell C.
“There are some people you like immediately, some whom you think you might learn to like in the fullness of time, and some that you simply want to push away from you with a sharp stick.” ― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
“At the temple there is a poem called "Loss" carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it.” ― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha
“How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a weary world.” ― William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
“This fall I think you're riding for—it's a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn't permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement's designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn't supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn't supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started.” ― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
“The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls.”― Elizabeth Cady Stanton
“Maybe you think you’ll be entitled to more happiness later by forgoing all of it now, but it doesn’t work that way. Happiness takes as much practice as unhappiness does. It’s by living that you live more. By waiting you wait more. Every waiting day makes your life a little less. Every lonely day makes you a little smaller. Every day you put off your life makes you less capable of living it.” ― Ann Brashares
“It is not enough that we do our best; sometimes we must do what is required.” ― Winston Churchill
“You will find that it is necessary to let things go; simply for the reason that they are heavy. So let them go, let go of them. I tie no weights to my ankles.” ― C. JoyBell C.
“So that’s how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the
loss, no matter how important the thing that's stolen from us - that's
snatched right out of our hands - even if we are left completely
changed, with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to
play out our lives this way, in silence. We draw ever nearer to the
end of our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails off
behind. Repeating, often adroitly, the endless deeds of the everyday.
Leaving behind a feeling of insurmountable emptiness...
Maybe, in some distant place, everything is already, quietly, lost.
Or at least there exists a silent place where everything can
disappear, melting together in a single, overlapping figure. And as
we live our lives we discover - drawing toward us the thin threads
attached to each - what has been lost. I closed my eyes and tried to
bring to mind as many beautiful lost things as I could. Drawing them
closer, holding on to them. Knowing all the while that their lives
are fleeting.” ― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart
“If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
---
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise
---
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
---
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools
---
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
---
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the will which says to them: 'Hold on!'
---
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
---
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!”
― Rudyard Kipling, If: A Father's Advice to His Son
“This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.” ― Franz Kafka
“We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.” ― E.E. Cummings
“We are as forlorn as children lost in the wood. When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours? And if I were to cast myself down before you and tell you, what more would you know about me that you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful?” ― Franz Kafka
“I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all.”― Richard Wright, Black Boy
“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.” ― Henry David Thoreau
Pull yourself together and use what you have. ~Betsy Cañas Garmon
“My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.” ― William Golding
“If only there could be an invention that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again.” ― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca
“Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.” ― Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance
“Because they are mean is no reason why I should be. I hate such things, and though I think I've a right to be hurt, I don't intend to show it. (Amy March)” ― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
The promises of this world are, for the most part, vain phantoms; and to confide in one's self, and become something of worth and value is the best and safest course. ~Michelangelo
“In everybody’s life there’s a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can’t go forward anymore. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That’s how we survive.” ― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
“It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.” ― Henry David Thoreau
“Anybody can learn to think, or believe, or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel... the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself - in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.” ― E.E. Cummings
Lots of things fade in life - pictures, memories, and some people say feelings. I think they're always there, they just hide sometimes. And maybe it's cause they're sick of getting hurt or someone doesn't have feelings back. But I don't think feelings ever really go away
“It's a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love.” ― Graham Greene
“when man determined to destroy
himself he picked the was
of shall and finding only why
smashed it into because.”
― E.E. Cummings
“Be a light, not a judge. Be a model, not a critic”
― Stephen R. Covey
“Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened. ― Thomas Hardy
“Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.” ― Henry David Thoreau
There comes a time when we stop loving someone, not because they also stopped loving us, but because we've found that they'd be happier if we let go.
"Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge's chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view." Lillian Hellman
“Closing your eyes isn't going to change anything. Nothing's going to disappear just because you can't see what's going on. In fact, things will even be worse the next time you open your eyes. That's the kind of world we live in. Keep your eyes wide open. Only a coward closes his eyes. Closing your eyes and plugging up your ears won't make time stand still.” ― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
“People always talk about how hard it can be to remember things - where they left their keys, or the name of an acquaintance - but no one ever talks about how much effort we put into forgetting. I am exhausted from the effort to forget... There are things that have to be forgotten if you want to go on living.”― Stephen Carpenter
“He found himself understanding the wearisomeness of this life,where every path was an improvisation and a considerable part of one's waking life was spent watching one's feet.” ― William Golding, Lord of the Flies
"Grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear." Zora Neale Hurston
“The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.” ― C.G. Jung
When the superficial wearies me, it wearies me so much that I need an abyss in order to rest. ~Antonio Porchia
“Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” ― Franz Kafka
"There are years that ask questions and years that answer." -Zora Neale Hurston
People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them. ~George Bernard Shaw
“The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.”― Franz Kafka
"Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge's chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view." -Lillian Hellman
“There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must of felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life.
“Time is priceless, but it’s Free. You can't own it, you can use it. You can spend it. But you can't keep it. Once you've lost it you can never get it back.” ― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife
" Live, then, and be happy, beloved children of my heart, and never forget, that until the day God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words, 'Wait and Hope.” ― Alexandre Dumas
“The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the whole moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook on life. That I feed the hungry, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ -- all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren, that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least among them all, the poorest of all the beggars, the most impudent of all the offenders, the very enemy himself -- that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness -- that I myself am the enemy who must be loved -- what then? As a rule, the Christian's attitude is then reversed; there is no longer any question of love or long-suffering; we say to the brother within us "Raca," and condemn and rage against ourselves. We hide it from the world; we refuse to admit ever having met this least among the lowly in ourselves.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.” ― Oscar Wilde
“If only it were possible to love without injury – fidelity isn’t enough: I had been faithful to Anne and yet I had injured her. The hurt is in the act of possession: we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to be possessed without humiliation. In a way I was glad that my wife had struck out at me again – I had forgotten her pain for too long, and this was the only kind of recompense I could give her. Unfortunately the innocent are always involved in any conflict. Always, everywhere, there is some voice crying from a tower. ” ― Graham Greene
Some of your hurts you have cured,
And the sharpest you still have survived,
But what torments of grief you endured
From the evil which never arrived.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”
― C.G. Jung
“Every morning, I wake up and forget just for a second that it happened. But once my eyes open, it buries me like a landslide of sharp, sad rocks. Once my eyes open, I'm heavy, like there's to much gravity on my heart.” ― Sarah Ockler, Twenty Boy Summer
“Maybe there is a beast… maybe it's only us.” ― William Golding, Lord of the Flies
“Happiness is but a mere episode in the general drama of pain.” ― Thomas Hardy
“Life has a way of going in circles. Ideally, it would be a straight path forward––we'd always know where we were going, we'd always be able to move on and leave everything else behind. There would be nothing but the present and the future. Instead, we always find ourselves where we started. When we try to move ahead, we end up taking a step back. We carry everything with us, the weight exhausting us until we want to collapse and give up.
We forget things we try to remember. We remember things we'd rather forget. The most frightening thing about memory is that it leaves no choice. It has mastered an incomprehensible art of forgetting. It erases, it smudges, it fills in blank spaces with details that don't exist.”― Brigid Gorry-Hines
“This wallpaper is dreadful, one of us will have to go.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Not just beautiful, though--the stars are like the trees in the forest, alive and breathing. And they're watching me.” ― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
And a heart that grieves, gets lost in everything. And a heart in need, finds hope in anything.
“I have this strange feeling that I'm not myself anymore. It's hard to put into words, but I guess it's like I was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. That sort of feeling.” ― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart
“So, my unsolicited advice to women in the workplace is this. When faced with sexism, or ageism, or lookism, or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: “Is this person in between me and what I want to do?” If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way. Then, when you’re in charge, don’t hire the people who were jerky to you.” ― Tina Fey, Bossypants
“You have played,
(I think)
And broke the toys you were fondest of,
And are a little tired now;
Tired of things that break, and--
Just tired.
So am I.”
― E.E. Cummings
“Never fear quarrels, but seek hazardous adventures.” ― Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers
Sometimes, if you want to change a man's mind, you have to change the mind of the man next to him first.” ― Megan Whalen Turner, The King of Attolia
"Lonely people, in talking to each other, can make each other lonelier." Lillian Hellman
“I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.” ― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
“I wish for a moment that time would lift me out of this day, and into some more benign one. But then I feel guilty for wanting to avoid the sadness; dead people need us to remember them, even if it eats us, even if all we can do is say "I'm sorry" until it is as meaningless air.”― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife
There were those empty threats and hollow lies, and whenever you tried to hurt me I just hurt you even worse, and so much deeper
“Most men are not wicked... They are sleep-walkers, not evil evildoers.”
― Franz Kafka
"It is easier to lead men to combat, stirring up their passion, than to restrain them and direct them toward the patient labors of peace." -Andre Gide
“I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it -- to be fed so much love I couldn't take any more. Just once. ”― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
Self-respect cannot be hunted. It cannot be purchased. It is never for sale. It cannot be fabricated out of public relations. It comes to us when we are alone, in quiet moments, in quiet places, when e suddenly realize that, knowing the good, we have done it; knowing the beautiful, we have served it; knowing the truth we have spoken it. ~Whitney Griswold
“The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.” ― Dante Alighieri, Inferno
I was tired of being asked how I felt about things. These were the questions I didn't know the answer to. I didn't feel anything. I just felt that white expanse of nothingness slowly spreading to the edges of me.
“Alas," said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into."
"You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.” ― Franz Kafka
“Losing your way on a journey is unfortunate. But, losing your reason for the journey is a fate more cruel.” ― H.G. Wells
“I'm sorry. I didn't know you were coming or I'd have cleaned up a little more. My life, I mean, not just the apartment.” ― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife
“We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.” ― Herman Melville
“Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to sleep through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won't be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there- to the edge of the world. There's something you can't do unless you get there.” ― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
“I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.” ― Jack Kerouac
"For time is the longest distance between two places." - Tennessee Williams
“Never look back unless you are planning to go that way.” ― Henry David Thoreau
"It is not good to see people who have been pretending strength all their lives lose it even for a minute." -Lillian Hellman
“People always think that happiness is a faraway thing," thought Francie, "something complicated and hard to get. Yet, what little things can make it up; a place of shelter when it rains - a cup of strong hot coffee when you're blue; for a man, a cigarette for contentment; a book to read when you're alone - just to be with someone you love. Those things make happiness.” ― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Memories won't leave my mind; it hurts to leave this all behind. Staying now won't make it so, my heart is saying don't let go.
“I go to sleep alone, and wake up alone. I take walks. I work until I'm tired. I watch the wind play with the trash that's been under the snow all winter. Everything seems simple until you think about it. Why is love intensified by abscence?” ― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife
"Oh, you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you - gently, with love, and hand your life back to you." Tennessee Williams
"Most quarrels amplify a misunderstanding." -Andre Gide
“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.” ― Henry David Thoreau
“Courage isn't having the strength to go on - it is going on when you don't have strength.” ― Napoleon Bonaparte
“However mean your life is, meet it and live it.” ― Henry David Thoreau
“Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe.” ― Henry David Thoreau
“But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o'clock in the morning.” ― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
"There are no hopeless situations; there are only men who have grown hopeless about them." -Clare Boothe Luce
“To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
“I'm living under water. Everything seems slow and far away. I know there's a world up there, a sunlit quick world where time runs like dry sand through an hourglass, but down here, where I am, air and sound and time and feeling are thick and dense.” ― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife
“I can alter my life by altering my attitude. He who would have nothing to do with thorns must never attempt to gather flowers.” ― Henry David Thoreau
They say that once you hit rock bottom, things can only get better. But sometimes you never hit rock bottom. Sometimes life’s a black hole and you just keep on falling. No slowing down, no turning around, no stopping. You just fall forever
“Dreams are always crushing when they don't come true. But it's the simple dreams that are often the most painful because they seem so personal, so reasonable, so attainable. You're always close enough to touch, but never quite close enough to hold and it's enough to break your heart.” ― Nicholas Sparks
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. ~F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.” ― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum LP
“Listen, sometimes when you finally find out, you realize that you were much better off not knowing.” ― Audrey Niffenegger, Her Fearful Symmetry
“Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.” ― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
“Sometimes it’s a sort of indulgence to think the worst of ourselves. We say, ‘Now I have reached the bottom of the pit, now I can fall no further,’ and it is almost a pleasure to wallow in the darkness. The trouble is, it’s not true. There is no end to the evil in ourselves, just as there is no end to the good. It’s a matter of choice. We struggle to climb, or we struggle to fall. The thing is to discover which way we’re going.” ― Daphne du Maurier
“The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” ― Ernest Hemingway
"It seems that fighting is a game where everybody is the loser." -Zora Neale Hurston
“This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.” ― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses
"Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth." -Lillian Hellman
“I am always saying "Glad to've met you" to somebody I'm not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.” ― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
“All through my life I've had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world, something big, even sinister, and no one would tell me what it was."
"No," said the old man, "that's just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that.” ― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
“Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned.”― James Joyce
"I am little concerned with beauty or perfection. I don't care for the great centuries. All I care about is life, struggle, intensity." -Emile Zola
People have to face regrets. Becoming mature means learning to accept what you cannot change, facing unresolved sorrows and learning to love life as it really happens, not as you would have it happen. When someone attaches unkindness to criticism, she's angry. Angry people need to criticize as an outlet for their anger. That's why you must reject unkind criticism. Unkind criticism is never part of a meaningful critique of you. Its purpose is not to teach or to help, its purpose is to punish. Life isn't supposed to be an all or nothing battle between misery and bliss. Life isn't supposed to be a battle at all. And when it comes to happiness, well, sometimes life is just okay, sometimes it's comfortable, sometimes wonderful, sometimes boring, sometimes unpleasant. When your day's not perfect, it's not a failure or a terrible loss. It's just another day
“From childhood's hour I have not been. As others were, I have not seen. As others saw, I could not awaken. My heart to joy at the same tone. And all I loved, I loved alone.” ― Edgar Allan Poe
“These days I just can't seem to say what I mean [...]. I just can't. Every time I try to say something, it misses the point. Either that or I end up saying the opposite of what I mean. The more I try to get it right the more mixed up it gets. Sometimes I can't even remember what I was trying to say in the first place. It's like my body's split in two and one of me is chasing the other me around a big pillar. We're running circles around it. The other me has the right words, but I can never catch her.” ― Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories
This must be Thursday,' said Arthur to himself, sinking low over his beer. 'I never could get the hang of Thursdays.” ― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
“Grief is a most peculiar thing; we’re so helpless in the face of it. It’s like a window that will simply open of its own accord. The room grows cold, and we can do nothing but shiver. But it opens a little less each time, and a little less; and one day we wonder what has become of it.” ― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha
“Be good and you will be lonesome.” ― Mark Twain
“I know the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started.” ― Ernest Hemingway
“Just think how many thoughts a blanket smothers while one lies alone in bed, and how many unhappy dreams it keeps warm.” ― Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories
Whatever comes our way, whatever battle is raging inside us, we always have a choice. It's the choices that make us what we are, and we can always choose to do the right thing being heartbroken is really intoxicating…you have been hurt so much that you feel like nothing else can touch you. you feel almost invincible. it's a kind of terrible freedom. -Florence Welch
You are going to lose people in your life. and realize that no matter how much time you spent with them or how much you appreciate them and told them so, it will never seem like it was enough.
“There's always a moment when you start to fall out of love, whether it's with a person or an idea or a cause, even if it's one you only narrate to yourself years after the event: a tiny thing, a wrong word, a false note, which means that things can never be quite the same again.” ― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
“To hell with them. Nothing hurts if you don’t let it.” -Ernest Hemingway
There it goes again. That heavy feeling in your chest when you don't feel any desire to speak or move. All you want to do is close your eyes and sleep, because the process of being broken is incredibly exhausting. You attempt your best to make your days fulfilling, but no matter how hard you try you can't seem to connect to anyone or anything.
“Listen to the mustn'ts, child. Listen to the don'ts. Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me... Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.” ― Shel Silverstein
There are two types of waiting. There's the waiting you do for something you know is coming, sooner or later--like waiting for the 6.28 train, or the school bus, or a party where a certain handsome boy might be. And then there's the waiting you don't know is coming. You don't even know what it is exactly, but you're hoping for it. You're imagining it and living your life for it. That's the kind of waiting that makes a fist in your heart.
“As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know.”― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
“How terribly sad it was that people are made in such a way that they get used to something as extraordinary as living.”― Jostein Gaarder
"There is a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go." Tennessee Williams
“This is why dreams can be such dangerous things: they smolder on like a fire does, and sometimes they consume us completely.” ― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha
“This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.” ― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
“Body cells replace themselves every month. Even at this very moment. Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.” ― Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase
“Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not. Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness. Armour yourself in it, and it will never be used to hurt you.” ― George R.R. Martin
"The future is called 'perhaps,' which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the important thing is not to allow that to scare you." Tennessee Williams
We spend our lives building higher fences and stronger locks, when the gravest dangers are already inside of us.
The person in life that you will always be with the most, is yourself. Because even when you are with others, you are still with yourself, too! When you wake up in the morning, you are with yourself, laying in bed at night you are with yourself, walking down the street in the sunlight you are with yourself.What kind of person do you want to walk down the street with? What kind of person do you want to wake up in the morning with? What kind of person do you want to see at the end of the day before you fall asleep? Because that person is yourself, and it's your responsibility to be that person you want to be with. I know I want to spend my life with a person who knows how to let things go, who's not full of hate, who's able to smile and be carefree. So that's who I have to be.” ― C. JoyBell C.
“Some old wounds never truly heal, and bleed again at the slightest word.”― George R.R. Martin
"The better a work is, the more it attracts criticism; it is like the fleas who rush to jump on white linens." -Gustave Flaubert
"A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it." -Zora Neale Hurston
“What to do if you find yourself stuck in a crack in the ground underneath a giant boulder you can't move, with no hope of rescue. Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far, which given your current circumstances seems more likely, consider how lucky you are that it won't be troubling you much longer.” ― Douglas Adams, The Original Hitchhiker Radio Scripts
“Life is painful and messed up. It gets complicated at the worst of times, and sometimes you have no idea where to go or what to do. Lots of times people just let themselves get lost, dropping into a wide open, huge abyss. But that's why we have to keep trying. We have to push through all that hurts us, work past all our memories that are haunting us. Sometimes the things that hurt us are the things that make us strongest. A life without experience, in my opinion, is no life at all. And that's why I tell everyone that, even when it hurts, never stop yourself from living.”― Alysha Speer
"Things start out as hopes and end up as habits." -Lillian Hellman
“It was that kind of a crazy afternoon, terrifically cold, and no sun out or anything, and you felt like you were disappearing every time you crossed a road.” ― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
Never give in... never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force... never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. ~Winston Churchill
It is very, very difficult realizing that you might actually be better off without certain people weighing down your heart. Some people are meant to guide us, yet leave our lives. I thank the universe for bringing such an honest, loving light to my life, but the light is dim now. It’s certainly not honest nor is it loving: and it is so painful to feel, on the shallow face of it all, but these people are meant to love us and leave. Your time here is done.
“But I didn't understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair.”― Haruki Murakami
“And at some point you realize that there are more flavors of pain than coffee. There's the little empty pain of leaving something behind- graduating, taking the next step forward, walking out of something familiar and safe into the unknown. There's the big, whirling pain of life upending all of your plans and expectations. There's the sharp little pains of failure, and the more obscure aches of successes that didn't give you what you thought they would. There are the vicious, stabbing pains of hopes being torn up. The sweet little pains of finding others, giving them your love, and taking joy in their life as they grow and learn. There's the steady pain of empathy that you shrug off so you can stand beside a wounded friend and help them bear their burdens.
And if you are very, very lucky, there are a few blazing hot little pains you feel when you realize that you are standing in a moment of utter perfection, an instant of triumph, or happiness, or mirth which at the same time cannot possibly last and yet will remain with you for life.
Everyone is down on pain, because they forget something important about it: Pain is for the living. Only the dead don't feel it.”― Jim Butcher, White Night
“Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?”― Haruki Murakami
"It seems to me that trying to live without friends is like milking a bear to get cream for your morning coffee. It is a whole lot of trouble, and then not worth much after you get it." -Zora Neale Hurston
“Destiny is real. And she's not mild-mannered. She will come around and hit you in the face and knock you over and before you know what hit you, you're naked- stripped of everything you thought you knew and everything you thought you didn't know- and there you are! A bloody nose, bruises all over you, and naked. And it's the most beautiful thing.”― C. JoyBell C.
“There are some people you like immediately, some whom you think you might learn to like in the fullness of time, and some that you simply want to push away from you with a sharp stick.” ― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
“At the temple there is a poem called "Loss" carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it.” ― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha
“How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a weary world.” ― William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
“This fall I think you're riding for—it's a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn't permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement's designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn't supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn't supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started.” ― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
“The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls.”― Elizabeth Cady Stanton
“Maybe you think you’ll be entitled to more happiness later by forgoing all of it now, but it doesn’t work that way. Happiness takes as much practice as unhappiness does. It’s by living that you live more. By waiting you wait more. Every waiting day makes your life a little less. Every lonely day makes you a little smaller. Every day you put off your life makes you less capable of living it.” ― Ann Brashares
“It is not enough that we do our best; sometimes we must do what is required.” ― Winston Churchill
“You will find that it is necessary to let things go; simply for the reason that they are heavy. So let them go, let go of them. I tie no weights to my ankles.” ― C. JoyBell C.
“So that’s how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the
loss, no matter how important the thing that's stolen from us - that's
snatched right out of our hands - even if we are left completely
changed, with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to
play out our lives this way, in silence. We draw ever nearer to the
end of our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails off
behind. Repeating, often adroitly, the endless deeds of the everyday.
Leaving behind a feeling of insurmountable emptiness...
Maybe, in some distant place, everything is already, quietly, lost.
Or at least there exists a silent place where everything can
disappear, melting together in a single, overlapping figure. And as
we live our lives we discover - drawing toward us the thin threads
attached to each - what has been lost. I closed my eyes and tried to
bring to mind as many beautiful lost things as I could. Drawing them
closer, holding on to them. Knowing all the while that their lives
are fleeting.” ― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart
“If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
---
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise
---
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
---
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools
---
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
---
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the will which says to them: 'Hold on!'
---
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
---
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!”
― Rudyard Kipling, If: A Father's Advice to His Son