My favorite quotes of all time.

Our love is all we have.

Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.

I don’t know where I am, I don’t know where I been, but I know where I want to go.

Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.

When I was deep in poverty you taught me how to give.

if the damned gave you a road map then you’d know which way to go

Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.

I thought of that old joke, y’know, the, this, this guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, “Doc, uh, my brother’s crazy. He thinks he’s a chicken.” And, uh, the doctor says, “Well, why don’t you turn him in?” And the guy says, “I would, but I need the eggs.” Well, I guess that’s pretty much how I feel about relationships. Y’know, they’re totally irrational and crazy and absurd and, but, uh, I guess we keep going through it because, uh, most of us need the eggs.

Which is worse, hell or nothing? Only if we’re caught and punished can we be saved. ‘Burn the Louvre,’ the mechanic says, ‘and wipe your ass with the Mona Lisa. This way at least, God would know our names.’

My heart was aching, and my belief is that when things are bad, it’s better to make them worse.

I love you as the plant that never blooms, but carries within itself the light of hidden flowers. Thanks to your love, a certain solid fragrance, risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

You, me, and everything caught in the fire.

You know, at one time, I used to break into pet shops to liberate the canaries. But I decided that was an idea way before its time. Zoos are full, prisons are overflowing… oh my, how the world still dearly loves a cage.

There’s nothing like unrequited love to take all the flavor out of a peanut butter sandwich.

There are too many ideas and too many people. And too many directions to go. I was starting to believe that the reason it matters to care passionately about something, is that is whittles the world down to a more manageable size.

Judith looked all wrong. Her hair was pulled back tightly; she was wearing some cheap polka-dotted dress she’d bought at a thrift shop. Our meeting was all full of false starts. What’s going on at school? How is your painting? What did you do over spring break? What music are you listening to? Then it got into harder stuff. I took her hands. I grabbed at them greedily and held them in my lap. Why wasn’t I good enough? I asked. Why couldn’t I be closer to her than I was? What was I doing wrong? Why was I so bad at human commerce when it was the thing I wanted more than anything?

She felt heightened in her own eyes, while knowing this sensation was not different from drunkenness, and that it would vanish like the ecstasies of drink, leaving her the next day even more shaky, even weaker at the core, deflated, possessing nothing within herself.

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

That’s the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.

In a dream you are never eighty.

We are the dead. Short days ago, We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie, here in Flanders Fields.

i love dogs better than anything else on earth, next to cigarettes & a couple of people.

i wanted this one to be different. i wanted to think i would have liked her, in another time and place, another life. But i could see already that i wouldn’t have liked her, nor she me.

Practice- that’s all it took. All a guy needed was a chance. Somebody was always controlling who got a chance, & who didn’t.

I hold a beast, an angel, and a madman in me, and my inquiry is as to their working, and my problem is their subjugation and victory, downthrow and upheaval, and my effort is their self expression.

It don’t mean nothing, drive on.

I’d love to wear a rainbow everyday, & tell the world that everything’s okay. But until we start to make a move to make a few things right, you’ll never see me wear a suit of white.

I am just a dreamer, but you are just a dream. You could have been anyone to me.

What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?

I have seen the future, brother, it is murder.

So may the sunrise bring hope where it once was forgotten. Sons are like birds, flying always over the mountain.

The window was wide, she could see the dogs come running, saying, wait, we swear
we’ll love you more and holy, Jezebel. it’s we, we that you are for- only.

once my heart was filled with the love of a girl. i held her close but she faded in the night, like a poem i meant to write…

He taught me the meaning of pain. Pain without reason.

I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my darling. Only a fool would give out such a vital organ.

There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest.

Do not seek the because – in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.

I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.

“Go on take everything, i dare you to.
i told you from the start just how this would end when i get what i want and i never want it again.”

And your long time curse hurts but what’s worse
is this pain in here; I can’t stay in here
ain’t it clear that i just can’t fit
yes i believe it’s time for us to quit
When we meet again, introduced as friends,
Please don’t let on that you knew me when
I was hungry, and it was your world

Now your dancing child with his chinese suit
He spoke to me, i took his flute
Even though i wasn’t very cute to him, was i?
But i did it because you lied
& because he took you for a ride
Because time is on his side
& because i want you

Look at the sun sinkin’ like a ship
Ain’t that just like my heart babe,
When i kiss your lips?

Half the people can be part right all of the time, an’
Some of the people can be all right part of the time,
But all the people can’t be all right all of the time.
I think Abraham Lincoln said that.
“I’ll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours.”
I said that.

She is good to me
and there’s nothing she doesn’t see
She knows where i’d like to be
but it doesn’t matter

We might die from medication but we sure killed all the pain.

I am a lonely painter, I live in a box of paints. I’m frightened by the devil & drawn to those ones that ain’t.”

“This is what you shall do: Love the earth and the sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy…”

If you’re going through hell, keep going.

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.

I can’t find those church bells.

We’ll meet again. Don’t know where, don’t know when, but I know we’ll meet again some sunny day.

Lord have mercy on my rough & rowdy ways.

It’s everything that you want babe.
It’s everything that you need.
Soft and warm al the time, make you want it over and over.
Strong on the horizon,
But ends up bein really so sweet… oh so sweet.

She says, ‘oh, it’s so hard to love when love was your great disappointment.’

Cheer up baby, it wasn’t always quite so bad.

To say the things i want to say to you would be a crime.
To admit i’m still in love with you
after all this time
i’d rather let you touch my arm until you die.
Seduce me with your charms until i’m drunk on them go home and drink in bed
and never let myself love like that again.

We built our get away up in a tree we found.
We felt so far away but we were still in town.
Now I remember watching that old tree burn down
I took a picture that I don’t like to look at.

For a minute there i lost myself.

she was consumed by 3 simple things:
drink, despair, loneliness; and 2 more:
youth and beauty

I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman

We all die. The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.

From the backstabbing co-worker to the meddling sister-in-law, you are in charge of how you react to the people and events in your life. You can either give negativity power over your life or you can choose happiness instead. Take control and choose to focus on what is important in your life. Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life.

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.

Anxiety is love’s greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.

Do not seek the because – in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.

I never change, I simply become more myself.

What you call your personality, you know? –it’s not like actual bones, or teeth, something solid. It’s more like a flame. A flame can be upright, and a flame can flicker in the wind, a flame can be extinguished so there’s no sign of it, like it had never been.

Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.

Even without wars, life is dangerous.

I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.

Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It’s like the tide going out, revealing whatever’s been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future. The ruin you’ve made.

What we share may be a lot like a traffic accident but we get one another. We are survivors of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something.

I did not know how to paint or even what to paint, but I knew I had to begin.

He considers me also a little fragile because artistic. I need to be cared for, like a potted plant.

You don’t look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.

In my dreams of this city I am always lost.

We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.

If you’re losing your soul and you know it, then you’ve still got a soul left to lose

I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of.

We are like roses that have never bothered to bloom when we should have bloomed and it is as if the sun has become disgusted with waiting.

Great art is horseshit, buy tacos.

You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.

I lie to myself all the time, but I never believe me.

Things are rough all over.

If you have two friends in your lifetime, you’re lucky. If you have one good friend, you’re more than lucky.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.

‘You are all a lost generation,” Gertrude Stein said to Hemingway. ‘We weren’t lost. We knew where we were, all right, but we wouldn’t go home. Ours was the generation that stayed up all night.’

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.

“Maybe…you’ll fall in love with me all over again.”
“Hell,” I said, “I love you enough now. What do you want to do? Ruin me?”
“Yes. I want to ruin you.”
“Good,” I said. “That’s what I want too.”

You know I like you best when you are lying through your teeth.

Laughter. Running. Let-down hair. That is all there is to life.

It’s just when it’s summer in the city and you are long gone from this city, I start to miss you baby, sometimes.

I’m selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.

I love you as the plant that never blooms, but carries within itself the light of hidden flowers.

In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.

And do these dreams have any meaning?

Things change. And friends leave. Life doesn’t stop for anybody.

Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild…

How much smaller the large places are once we’re grown up, when we have car keys and credit cards.

I’ve been thinking I’d like to be Daisy; I’d like to have someone like Gatsby stare at my house for whole years and never stop dreaming of me.

The problem with being a modern woman, I thought, as the front door swung wide, is that you have to pretend to be stronger than you are.

The story of Adam and Eve has less to do with evil than the cosmic human sadness that relationships are never straightforward, never pure enough.

The past was so past it hurt.

This moment will just be another story someday.

I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we’ll never know most of them. But even if we don’t have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there.

If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed.

Great art is shit, buy tacos.

You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don’t try to forget the mistakes, but you don’t dwell on it. You don’t let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.

You’re so beautiful to look at when you cry.

Oh, darling, it’s so sweet you think you know how crazy I am.

Everybody’s dying, it’s just a different disease.

..I will comfort & console you, first of all I will gather you together again, you’re always so battered by the outside world.

Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

“Darling,” you said, “We’re a train wreck.”
“Sweetheart,” I said, “Train wrecks always make the front page.”

I like people too much or not at all. I’ve got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.

. . . there is a wish in the heart of mankind to be distracted and confused. Truth is but one attraction, and not always the most powerful.

We sit silently in our living room. He watches the mute television screen and I watch him. The planes and ridges of his face are more familiar to me than my own. I understand that he wishes even more than I do that he still loved me.

I wanted to know how ugly I could get, how ruined and ugly and spoiled, before they stopped trying to fuck me. I didn’t think they’d ever notice. Nobody had so far. Because I was still in the shape of a beautiful girl. Although I behaved like an ugly one.

She took her pattern of life from men but she was not a masculine woman. She demanded the freedom to change, to evolve, to grow. She was not a feminist at all but struggling against the feminine side of herself in order to maintain her integrity as an individual.

I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don’t know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness. In reality those who satisfy me are those who simply allow me to live with my ”idea of them.”

Don’t you bully me with your politeness! Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?

Lovers alone wear sunlight.

We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?

Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.

We must not fear daylight just because it almost always illuminates a miserable world.

Nothing is impossible, the word itself says, ‘I’m Possible!’

We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.

I am alone here in my own mind.
There is no map
and there is no road.
It is one of a kind
just as yours is.

Live or die. But don’t poison everything.

Only my books anoint me,
and a few friends,
those who reach into my veins.

Life is not rational; it is just mad and full of pain.

We will be stronger for it, each of us, stronger with our love and our hate.

We decided we should not run away together. I told him sadly, “You will lose me soon because you don’t love me enough.”

Strangers this road we are on, we are not two, we are one.

I feel my past like an unbearable weight on me, like a curse, the source of every movement I make, every word I utter.

I told him a little of the storm I had been through in the past days. I felt like someone condemned to die and then suddenly paroled.

Each morning we are born again. What we do today is what matters most.

Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.

To be 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.

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph

and death i think is no parenthesis

my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping
but
I shall go on living.

grief is a house
where the chairs
have forgotten how to hold us
the mirrors how to reflect us
the walls how to contain us

Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal.

She could not mourn. She could no longer weep grasping the essence of annihilation, she wished only to cease, to be no more, as if sunk in some profound sleep devoid of wakening.

I wonder if the artist ever lives his life — he is so busy recreating it. Only as I write do I realize myself. I don’t know what that does to life.

Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them.

Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.

How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.

I want the impossible, I want to fly all the time, I destroy ordinary life, I run towards all the dangers of love as he ran towards all the dangers of war. He runs away, war is less terrifying to him than life…

If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience and creation.

I am overflowing. I talk too much. I love too much. I want to work. I like the confusion in my head because a whirlpool of feelings confuses my mind and destroys its control. I want to live by my feelings. Artistically and humanly, they are of better quality than my analysis.

Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever.

The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud.

I’m not afraid of storms, for I’m learning to sail my ship.

I do not want people to be agreeable, as it saves me that trouble of liking them.

You live but once; you might as well be amusing.

I don’t care what you think about me. I don’t think about you at all.

There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.

To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard.

I don’t need an alarm clock. My ideas wake me.

Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.

When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don’t seem to matter very much, do they?

Books are the mirrors of the soul.

What lies inside a cage of flames? The truth, the heart, but burned up before you can see it. Only traces remain in the ashes, a pattern you guess at or invent, an intangible thing that might leave a mark, but could just as easily blow away.

We intersect. He says he thanks every star that we existed on the same celestial plain. But here we are on earth, dirty, well used, a man-made throughway for intersecting dreams.

I’m in love with someone good and kind and gentle, and he’s seen the darkness too, but somehow we’ve become each other’s light.

Your own love story? Your paramour may have had lovers before you. But no one has ever loved him the way you do. No one has ever heard music. Not the way you hear it. The songs are beautiful vampires, asleep in your iPod, coming alive at night, aglow. You can have them on your hours, yours to conduct. Music shapes us and we shape it.

I’m not crazy or dangerous,
just a bit eccentric and lonely.

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.

Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.

Life may not be the party we hoped for, but while we’re here we should dance.

When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

I must be a mermaid. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.

Other people will call me a rebel, but I just feel like I’m living my life and doing what I want to do. Sometimes people call that rebellion, especially when you’re a woman.

I think I was born strong-willed. That’s not the kind of thing you can learn. The advantage is, you stick to what you believe in and rarely get pushed out of what you want to do.

He not busy being born is busy dying.

Some people seem to fade away but then when they are truly gone, it’s like they didn’t fade away at all.

Colleges are like old-age homes, except for the fact that more people die in colleges.

Her heart sank into her shoes as she realized at last how much she wanted him. No matter what his past was, no matter what he had done. Which was not to say that she would ever let him know, but only that he moved her chemically more than anyone she had ever met, that all other men seemed pale beside him.

I don’t care what they say after I’m dead. In fact, I hardly care what they say while I’m alive. I only write to help myself get through the weeks and the months and the years.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.

Thrown into life without experience, naïve, I feel that something has saved me. I feel equal to life.

To give pleasure to a single heart by a single act is better than a thousand heads bowing in prayer.

The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

Be the change that you wish to see in the world.

Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.

Always do what you are afraid to do.

You never fail until you stop trying.

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.

When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.

Care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner.

Behind every beautiful thing, there’s some kind of pain.

Follow your bliss. That which you love you must spend your life doing, as passionately and as perfectly as your heart, mind and instincts allow.

I think literature is best when it’s voicing what we would prefer not to talk about.

Her heart was a secret garden and the walls were very high.”

There is something addictive about a secret.

Deliberate cruelty is unforgivable, and the one thing I’ve never been guilty of.

Take a lover that looks at you like maybe you are magic.

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.

The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

Anti-social behaviour is a trait of intelligence in a world full of conformists.

Don’t fear failure… in great attempts it is glorious even to fail.

Only the dead have seen the end of the war.

Compassion and tolerance are not a sign of weakness, but a sign of strength.

It always seems impossible until it’s done.

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.

The trouble is, you think you have time.

Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?

No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.

We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.

You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger.

If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.

Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it-don’t cheat with it.

The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really try to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really try to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

The most important things are the hardest to say.

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.

When I see you, the World stops. It stops and all that exists for me is you and my eyes staring at you. There’s nothing else. No noise, no other people, no thoughts or worries, no yesterday, no tomorrow. The World just stops, and it is a beautiful place, and there is only you.

Memory was a curse, yes, he thought, but it was also the greatest gift. Because if you lost memory you lost everything.

Did you ever look back at some moment in your past and have it suddenly grow so vivid that all the intervening years seemed brief, dreamlike, impersonal—the motions of a May afternoon surrendered to routine?

When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself, and his suffering is spilling over. He does not need punishment; he needs help.

The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole goddamned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves.

I hated them because they had something I had not yet had, and I said to myself, I said to myself again, someday I will be as happy as any of you, you will see.

We sat on a park bench and chewed the gum and I thought, well, now I have found something, I have found something that is going to help me, for a long time to come. The park grass looked greener, the park benches and the flowers were trying harder.

I am a collection of dismantled almosts.

I am queen of all my sins forgotten.

My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to find peace with exactly who and what I am. To take pride in my thoughts, my appearance, my talents, my flaws and to stop this incessant worrying that I can’t be loved as I am.

You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book, or you take a trip, and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken.

Please understand that I’m in full rebellion against my own mind, that when I live, I live by impulse, by emotion, by white heat.

You cannot save people, you can only love them.

I’m a neurotic in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.

Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.

You don’t find love, it finds you. It’s got a little bit to do with destiny, fate and what’s written in the stars.

When I look at your face, I want to let go and share your madness, which I carry inside of me like a secret and cannot conceal any more.

Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful, and good things are.

I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women are in me.

He was now in that state of fire that she loved. She wanted to be burnt.

Someday I’ll be locked up for love insanity. ‘She loved too much.’

A woman is like a tea bag—you never know how strong she is until she gets in hot water.

The highest purpose of art is to inspire. What else can you do? What else can you do for anyone but inspire them?

Painting embraces all the ten functions of the eye; that is to say, darkness, light, body and color, shape and location, distance and closeness, motion and rest.

beware those who seek constant crowds for
they are nothing alone

Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich.

If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first four hours sharpening the axe.

Religion is for people who are afraid of going to hell. Spirituality is for those who have already been there.

The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone—that is the secret of invention: be alone, that is when ideas are born.

Without great solitude no serious work is possible.

And here in my isolation I can grow stronger. Poetry seems to come of itself, without effort, and I need only let myself dream a little while painting to suggest in it.

My work is always better when I am alone and follow my own impressions.

The artist is a strange being. I think it’s safe to say that a real artist is conscious of having a personal singularity that is partly a blessing and partly a curse. An artist enjoys and suffers from isolation. As solitude, isolation can nurture. It can also destroy.

I will not be “famous,” “great.” I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one’s self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.

In myself, too many things have perished which, I imagined, would last forever.

All we need is someone to let us in.

People are always telling me I’m tough. Maybe because I’ve survived so much. The only time I’m tough in my own mind is when I’m seized by a poem and then determined to conquer it and let it live its own peculiar life. All my toughness goes into my writing.

I only feel close to people who arouse my energy, who make enormous demands of me, who are capable of enriching me with experience, pain, people who do not doubt my courage, or my toughness.

I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic — in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.

Only my books anoint me,
and a few friends,
those who reach into my veins.

My life was hurrying, racing tragically toward its end. And yet at the same time it was dripping so slowly, so very slowly now, hour by hour, minute by minute. One always has to wait until the sugar melts, the memory dies, the wound scars over, the sun sets, the unhappiness lifts and fades away.

The “real me” lives in words, not in what words mean; it lives in what letters and words do and show, not in what they hide

Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they’ll make your soul impervious to the world’s soft decay.

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

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.

She had become accustomed to being lonely. She was used to walking alone and to being considered ‘different.’ She did not suffer too much.

We loved with a love that was more than love.

The artist’s life is the best life… if you can get through the first forty years.

I paint every day. Sometimes I hate painting, but I keep at it, thinking always that before I croak I’ll really learn how to do it – maybe as well as some of the old painters.

Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.

All who have died are equal.

When a man moves away from nature his heart becomes hard.

The one who tells the stories rules the world.

It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you.

There is no path to happiness: happiness is the path.

One moment can change a day, one day can change a life and one life can change the world.

The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.

You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don’t try to forget the mistakes, but you don’t dwell on it. You don’t let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.

I wore black because I liked it. I still do, & wearing it means something to me. It’s still my symbol of rebellion against a stagnant status quo, against our hypocritical houses of God, against people whose minds are closed to others ideas.

I like good company, but I like hard work still better.

The artist who does not feel completely satisfied by elegant lines, by harmonious colors, and by a beautiful succession of chords does not understand the art of music.

Be a loner. That gives you time to wonder, to search for the truth. Have holy curiosity. Make your life worth living.

Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.

And about all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.

A good mixture of nothing & everything is eating up my head alive.

You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something sometime in your life.

Oh my name it means nothing and my age it means less. The country I come from is called the midwest

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.

Normality is a paved road: it’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow

If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own back yard. Because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with.

I hoard my books. They are people who do not leave.

You hold me in your arms.
How strange that you’re so tender!
Child-woman that I am,
you think that you can mend her.

I look for uncomplicated hymns
but love has none.

Love! That red disease

You taught me
to believe in dreams;
thus I was the dredger.

Forgive your enemies, but remember the bastard’s name.

You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken.

Some people read to confirm their own hopelessness. Others read to be rescued from it.

Death was the glass; death was between us; coming to the woman first, hundreds of years ago, leaving the house, sealing all the windows; the rooms were darkened.

Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting.

Love breaks my bones
and I laugh

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.

It was a time of deep plunging sleep and when she woke each time he was still dead.

If you, my love, if you
have died,
all the leaves will fall within my chest,
it will rain on my soul both day and night,
snow will burn in my heart,
I will walk with frost and fire
and death and snow,
and my feet will want to find you wherever you lie sleeping,
but I will stay alive

I want you to live while I wait for you, asleep,
I want for your ears to go on hearing the wind,
for you to smell the sea that we loved together
and for you to go on walking the sand where we walked.

I want for what I love to go on living
and as for you I loved you and sang you above everything,
for that, go on flowering, flowery one,

so that you reach all that my love orders for you,
so that my shadow passes through your hair,
so that they know by this the reason for my song.

But I’ll see you in the sky above
In the tall grass, in the ones I love
You’re gonna make me lonesome when you go

The tigers have found me and I do not care.

Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.

A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never entirely recover.

I went to the worst of bars hoping to get killed but all I could do was to get drunk again.

I want so much that is not here and do not know where to go.

It was like the beginning of life and laughter. It was the real meaning of the sun

In the morning it was morning and I was still alive.

She’s mad, but she’s magic. There’s no lie in her fire.

Nobody can save you but yourself and you’re worth saving. it’s a war not easily won but if anything is worth winning then this is it.

so it’s always a process of letting go, one way or another

nothing can save
you
except
writing.
it keeps the walls
from
failing.

He asked, “What makes a man a writer?” “Well,” I said, “it’s simple. You either get it down on paper, or jump off a bridge.

your letters got sadder. your lovers betrayed you. kid, I wrote back, all lovers betray. it didn’t help. you said you had a crying bench and it was by a bridge and the bridge was over the river and you sat on the crying bench every night and wept for the lovers who had hurt and forgotten you.

Some people like what you do, some people hate what you do, but most people simply don’t give a damn.

I guess the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them.

It was a joy! Words weren’t dull, words were things that could make your mind hum. If you read them and let yourself feel the magic, you could live without pain, with hope, no matter what happened to you.

Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?

Understand me. I’m not like an ordinary world. I have my madness, I live in another dimension and I do not have time for things that have no soul.

There is a place in the heart that will never be filled; a space. And even during the best moments, and the greatest times, we will know it.

The less I needed, the better I felt.

I want so much that is not here and do not know where to go.

I guess we often get the deep blues, both of us, and wonder what it all means – the people, the buildings, the day by day things, the waste of time, of ourselves.

Nobody goes through more shit in life than a person with a good heart.

Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.

Love breaks my bones & i laugh

If you want to fly, give up everything that weighs you down.

New beginnings are often disguised as painful endings.

New beginnings are often disguised as painful endings.

No matter how hard the past is, you can always begin again.

There was nothing about him that was violent or mean. Even stray insects inside the house were more likely to find themselves scooped up and tossed out the back door than squished.

Everybody had marks on their bodies from years of living – a trail of life left on them, evidence of all the adventures and sleepless nights and practical jokes and heartbreaks that had made then who they were.

In that moment, I suddenly loved us all the more for our flaws, for being broken and human, for being embarrassed and lonely, for being hopeful or tired or disappointed or sick or brave or angry. For being who we were, for making the world interesting. It was a good reminder that the human condition is imperfection. And that’s how it’s supposed to be.

These were the soap operas of life, the melodramas, the mini-crises that occupied our attention while famine, war, and death raged across the human experience.

I kept thinking about how even the most hopelessly lost people can sometimes get found.

It’s not really what happens to you that matters as much as who you become in response to those things.

But the trouble with getting what you’ve always wanted is that once you have it, you have to worry that you’ll lose it.

What was it with me? Why could I ever, ever feel like I belonged anywhere?

You can’t just wish strength for yourself. Or wisdom. Or resilience. Those things have to be earned.

Speaking the words is a physical impossibility, and I realize, in one shaft of illumination, that my life is never just going back to how it was.

How is something so simple so hard to get?

I miss him irrationally.

I should say something, but I can’t. It’s not that the words won’t come, it’s that there aren’t any. My little world has been blown apart, and the debris is raining down all around me.

I don’t want him to see me cry. I need to get home. I need to be alone, to lick my wounds and be still until the world stops spinning and settles on this new reality. Maybe with some time I’ll be okay. For the first time in my life, I can’t see how.

I love you. How dare he say those words to me? They follow me around the house, from one room to another, step after step.

Any rose can succumb to rot, given the right conditions. But, with enough attention, it can come back better than before.

Damn it, if only life came with a rewind button. I would do it all so very differently.

It’s what you do when you’ve experienced the worst of the worst. You seek out people like you…people worse off than you…and you use them to make yourself feel better about the terrible things that have happened to you.

I always look tired, and maybe even perpetually bored.

But a woman knows if she wants to keep a man forever, she has to act like she could get over him in a day.

Imagine, forty years with the same man and still the thought of him made her blush. If true love ever existed, that was it.

I’ve never kicked a puppy, but I imagine this must be how a puppy kicker felt.

You’ll find the balance you need as soon as you let go of how you think things should be and accept them as they are.

I was on a date. A real, honest-to-goodness date with someone who knew me and asked me out anyway.

Some things needed to be experienced to be learned.

Plants did not merely grow tall; they grew wide, curious about their surroundings, eager to seek nourishment from anywhere they could get it. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes I had to prune them back or watch a branch snap and wilt. My garden was a patchwork of failures and successes. I loved it.

Sometimes the brain takes a while to catch up with the heart.

Patience will be rewarded, the garden reminded me.

When life gives you tomatoes, you make tomato sauce.

Everything terrible is something that needs our love.

Beware irony, ignore criticism, look to what is simple, study the small and humble things of the world, do what is difficult precisely because it is difficult, do not search for answers but rather love the questions, do not run away from sadness or depression for these might be the very conditions necessary to your work. Seek solitude, above all seek solitude.

If writing wasn’t painful, O’Connor says, it would not be worth doing.

Strays is what a writer I recently read calls those who, for one reason or another, and despite whatever they might have wanted earlier in life, never really become a part of life, not in the way most people do. They may have serious relationships, they may have friends, even a sizable circle, they may spend large portions of their time in the company of others. But they never marry and they never have children. On holidays, they join some family or other group. This goes on year after year, until they finally find it in themselves to admit that they’d really rather just stay home.

Nothing has changed. It’s still very simple. I miss him. I miss him every day. I miss him very much. But how would it be if that feeling was gone? I would not want that to happen. I told the shrink: It would not make me happy at all not to miss him anymore. You can’t hurry love, as the song goes. You can’t hurry grief, either.

I thought the moment had come yesterday, when you left your breakfast untouched. I broke off a piece of my own breakfast bread, which you ate from my hand. (Like reading mass together.) By evening, though, your appetite had returned. So let’s think no more about it. Let’s look to this day, and only this day. This gift of a perfect summer morning.

What we miss — what we lose and what we mourn — isn’t it this that makes us who, deep down, we truly are.

He was thirty-five, and it seemed to him that those years had passed as quickly and ephemerally as a momentary draft under a door.

Books are a uniquely portable magic.

Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.

Grief is like a drunken houseguest, always coming back for one more goodbye hug.

The problem is that we live in an uptight country. Why don’t we just laugh at ourselves? We are funny. Gays are funny. Straights are funny. Women are funny. Men are funny. We are all funny, and we all do funny things. Let’s laugh about it.

Laughter gives us distance. It allows us to step back from an event, deal with it and then move on.

That is my principal objection to life, I think: It is too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.

From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood.

Sometimes I think it’s better to suffer bitter unhappiness and to fight and to scream out, and even to suffer that terrible pain, than to just be… safe. At least she knows she’s living.