A house is very much like a portrait. I cannot disconnect houses from people. The thought of arrangement, the curves and straight lines. It gives an indication of the character at the heart of it.

- Christian Louboutin

Chronic anxiety is a state more undesirable than any other, and we will try almost any maneuver to eliminate it. Modern man is living in anxious anticipation of destruction. Such anxiety can be easily eliminated by self-destruction. As a German saying puts it: 'Better an end with terror than a terror without end.”

― Robert E. Neale, The Art of Dying

 

In this universe, and this existence, where we live with this duality of whether we exist or not and who are we, the stories we tell ourselves are the stories that define the potentialities of our existence. We are the stories we tell ourselves.

Shekhar Kapur

 

Ever been in a spelling bee as a kid? That snowy second after the announcement of the word as you sift your brain to see if you can spell it? It was like that, the blank panic.

― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

 

If you knew that your life was merely a phase or short, short segment of your entire existence, how would you live? Knowing nothing 'real' was at risk, what would you do? You'd live a gigantic, bold, fun, dazzling life. You know you would. That's what the ghosts want us to do - all the exciting things they no longer can. 

Chuck Palahniuk

I think of love and marriage in the same way I do plants: We have perennials and annuals. The perennial plant blooms, goes away, and comes back. The annual blooms for just a season, and then winter arrives and takes it out for good. But it's still enriched the soil for the next flower to bloom. In the same way, no love is wasted. 

Glennon Doyle Melton

This was something she would keep hidden within herself, maybe in place of the knot of pain and anger she had been carrying under her breastbone...a security blanket, an ace up her sleeve. She might never use it, but she would always feel its presence like a swelling secret stone, and that way when she let go of the rage, she would not feel nearly as empty.

Jodi Picoult

It’s not a bad lesson to learn in the bleaker months: how you view a storm is a question of perspective; provided you find the right rock to watch it from, it could be the most incredible thing you’ll ever witness.

Dan Stevens

Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.

John Green, 'The Fault in Our Stars'

I looked outside to see what I could make the world give me, instead of looking inside to see what was there.

Bell Livingstone

But love and hate, he thought now, good and evil, lived side by side in the human heart, and not merely in differing proportions in one man and the next, but all good and all evil. One had merely to look for a little of either to find it all, one had merely to scratch the surface. All things had opposites close by, every decision a reason against it, every animal an animal that destroys it, the male the female, the positive the negative... Nothing could be without its opposite bound up with it. Could space exist in a building without objects that stopped it? Could energy exist without matter, or matter without energy? Matter and energy, the inert and the active, once considered opposites, were now known to be one.”

Patricia Highsmith

Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous.

Leonardo da Vinci

I've learned that no matter what happens, or how bad it

seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow. I've learned that

you can tell a lot about a person by the way he/she handles these three things:

a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights. I've learned that

regardless of your relationship with your parents, you'll miss them when they're

gone from your life. I've learned that making a living is not the same thing as

making a life. I've learned that life sometimes gives you a second chance.

I've learned that you shouldn't go through life with a catcher's mitt on both

hands; you need to be able to throw some things back. I've learned that whenever

I decide something with an open heart, I usually make the right decision. I've

learned that even when I have pains, I don't have to be one. I've learned that

every day you should reach out and touch someone. People love a warm hug, or

just a friendly pat on the back. I've learned that I still have a lot to learn.

I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you

did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

Maya Angelou

Uncertain ways unsafest are, And doubt a greater mischief than despair.

John Denham

Sanity is a cozy lie.

- Susan Sontag

When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.

  -Franklin D. Roosevelt

The soul that can speak through the eyes, can also kiss with a gaze.

-Gustav Adolfo Becquer

The conventional wisdom says madness and sanity can never meet over the wall that divides them. But I cannot see the origins of my madness and my sanity as two parallel stories; they are one story in two dimensions. Madness and sanity are not two different garments; they are the warp and weft of the same fabric.  

-Mary O'Hagan

i know what you are

Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

--  C.S. Lewis

Reverie

The unreal is more powerful than the real, because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. stone crumbles. wood rots. people, well, they die. but things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.

--  Chuck Palahniuk