Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Our lives are all different and yet the same.

All quotes by Anne Frank

"Because paper has more patience than people."





"And I came to the important discovery that questions which you either can't or shouldn't ask in public, or questions which you can't put into words, can easily be solved in your own head. So the word 'why' not only taught me to ask, but also to think. And thinking has never hurt anyone. On the contrary, it does us all a world of good."

"Memories mean more to me than dresses."

"Boys will be boys. And even that wouldn't matter if only we could prevent girls from being girls."

"It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideas, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart."

Some things in life are out of your control.

All quotes by author Nora Roberts


"You spend your life getting walked on, you learn to recognize the tread."

"She knew there were women who worked successfully out of the home. They ran businesses, created empires and managed to raise happy, healthy, well-adjusted children who went on to graduate magna cum laude from Harvard or became world-renowned concert pianists. Possibly both. These women accomplished all this while cooking gourmet meals, furnishing their homes with Italian antiques, giving clever, intelligent interviews with Money magazine and People, and maintaining a brilliant marriage with an active enviable sex life and never tipping the scale at an ounce over their ideal weight. She knew those women were out there. If she'd had a gun, she'd have hunted every last one of them down and shot them like rabid dogs for the good of womankind."

"She surrounded herself with books at work and at home. Her living space was a testament to her first and abiding love with shelves jammed with books tables crowded with them. She saw them not only as knowledge, entertainment, comfort, even sanity, but as a kind of artful decoration."
--'Key of Knowledge'

"'A woman doesn't want to be told she looks nice,' Jude nuttered as she sat down beside maud's grave. 'She wants to be told she's beautiful, sexy. That she looks outrageous. It doesn't matter if its not true.' She sighed and laid the flowers against the headstone. 'Because for the moment, when the words are said and the words are heard, it's perfect truth.'"

"'What do you know about life?' Bitterness ached in her throat. 'You were born with everything. You never had to struggle for a single thing you wanted, never had to worry if you'd be accepted or loved or wanted back.' He stared at her, grateful for the moment that she couldn't see that he'd spent nearly half of his life worrying that she, the single thing he wanted, would accept him, love him, and want him back.'"
--'Daring to Dream'

"We all look. The lucky find."
--'Heart of the Sea'

--'Vision in White'

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Destiny is up to you.

All quotes by author Richard Bach


--'The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story'




"You're always free to change your mind and choose a different future, or a different past."

"I had grown up in a house with a fence around it, and in this fence was a white smooth wooden gate, two holes bored round and low together so the dog could see through. One night, the moon high, late for me home from the school dance, I remember that I stopped, hand on the gate, and spoke so quietly to myself and to the woman that I would love that not even the dog could have heard. ‘I don’t know where you are, but you’re living right now, somewhere on this earth. And one day you and I are going to touch this gate where I’m touching it now. Your hand will touch this very wood, here! Then we’ll walk through and we’ll be full of a future and of a past and we’ll be to each other like no one else has ever been. We can’t meet now, I don’t know why. But some day our questions will be answers and we’ll be caught in something so bright...and every step I take is one step closer on a bridge we must cross to meet.'"

"Has it ever happened, you’ve seen a striking film, beautifully written and acted and photographed, that you walk out of the theater glad to be a human being and you say to yourself I hope they make a lot of money from that? I hope the actors, I hope the director earns a million dollars for what they’ve done, what they’ve given me tonight? And you go back and see the movie again and you’re happy to be a tiny part of the system that is rewarding those people with every ticket...the actors I see on the screen, they’ll get twenty cents of this very dollar I’m paying now; they’ll be able to buy an ice cream cone any flavor they want from their share of my ticket alone. Glorious moments in art in books and films and dance, they’re delicious because we see ourselves in glory’s mirror."

--'Jonathan Livingston Seagull'

"Nobody means to get carried away in mediocrity, but it happens, it happens unless you think about everything you do, unless you make every choice the best one you know how to make."

--'Running from Safety: An Adventure of the Spirit'


"The only thing that shatters dreams is compromise."

"What matters is how I use what I know, every minute of every day; how I use it to remember, in the midst of the game."

"It doesn’t take time to change once you understand the problem. Somebody hands you a rattlesnake, it doesn’t take long to drop it, does it?"

"Choose a love and work to make it true, and somehow, something will happen, something you couldn’t plan, will come along to move like to like, to set you loose, to set you on the way to your next brick wall."


"From time to time it's fun to close our eyes, and in that dark say to ourselves, 'I am the sorcerer, and when I open my eyes I shall see a world that I have created, and for which I and only I am completely responsible.' Slowly then, eyelids open like curtains lifting stage-center. And sure enough, there's our world, just the way we've built it."

"How is it we’re the lucky ones, living a life that the children-we-were took for dreams?"



Fairy tales are more than true.

All quotes by author G.K. Chesterton


"Fairy tales make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water."





She’s cinnamon on the tongue, and deep lung air, the space between heartbeats, and dreamless seconds. She’s gravity and bent light, years of inescapable regret. She’s a bruised tattoo and a muffled note sounding sad negation, baby skin, and straight flush vertigo; queen high, aphasia, and too much wine. The beginning’s whispered word and insomnia. She’s finish line sweat and denied kisses, dew wet roses and ropes bathed in starlight. She’s candle wax and burnt offerings, a razor wrist, the atom split, lightning dance and a tear of joy. She’s a child tickled too long and quivering lip. She’s dragon chasing smoke raised in prayer, a C4 bunny, three to a match and a bullet; to whom it may concern, sucking chest wound heartbreak. She’s crime in a $4 t-shirt and yesterday’s shorts. She’s her smile and walk, cricket comfort and lumbering grace, electrochemical shock therapy. She’s the fast right hand captured in unnatural acts. She’s unclean thoughts, and unrepentance, salvation offered only in darkness. She’s the better half of a timeless equation, π factored past infinity, an easy answer to an impossible problem. She’s unknown and unknowable, an unopened gift gathering dust, another man’s name on the tag.

I'm alive, but so what.

All quotes by author Douglas Coupland

"I thought I'd finally played my cards right, and now I'm just one more of those broken, sad people out there, figuring out a year in advance where they can have Easter and Christmas dinner without feeling like a burden or duty to others, cursing the quality of modern movies because it's so hard to fill weeknights with movies when they're all crap, and waiting, just waiting, for those three drinks a night to turn into four - and then, well, then I'll be applying my make-up in the morning, combing my hair, washing my clothes, but it's not really for anyone. I'm alive, but so what."
--'Hey Nostradamus!'

"And then I felt truly old for the first time - old in the sense that I was beyond the point of ever doing something radical or bold to change the course of my life."

"Kaitlin thinks I'm claustrophobic, but that's not true - I love elevators and small cars. What I don't like is being exposed to unfiltered social contact, like at parties or meetings, when just anyone can talk to you with no other reason than that you happen to be there."
--'Life After God'

"Because in the end we forget everything, anyway. We're human; we're amnesia machines."

"You stole my loneliness."

"When you're young, you always feel that life hasn't yet begun -- that "life" is always scheduled to begin next week, next month, next year, after the holidays -- whenever. But then suddenly you're old and the scheduled life didn't arrive. You find yourself asking, 'Well then, exactly what was it I was having -- that interlude -- the scrambly madness -- all that time I had before?'"
--'Life After God'

I didn't think. I just was.

"Maybe that whole love thing is just a grown up version of Santa Claus, just a myth that we have been fed since childhood, so we keep buying magazines and joining clubs and doing therapy and watching movies with hip hop songs played over love montages in this pathetic attempt to explain why our love Santa keeps getting caught in the chimney."
--'Kate and Leopold'

What we do is, we start over everyday. I choose you, you choose me.

"People are inspired to do remarkable things to find and be with the one they love. Big movies are made about it, and every relationship you admire bursts with a greatness that you hope for in your own life. And the more you value yourself, the more chance you’ll have of getting it."
--He’s Just Not That In To You

And they meet late on a Saturday, in the grip of winter's chapped lips. One's blind to all she has inside; one's sure that he knows what life's got in store. And when the stars and drunks have left the bar, he says, “We've just met, but I've seen you around. Can we share a car? Back to my place with movies made about outer space.” And so it seems they're off to share their waste.

"When I picked up the phone I realized that out of the billions of people on the planet, you were the one I wanted to speak to the most. It was like the deepest part of me took control and said what it felt, unafraid of embarrassment or rejection or any of that other stuff that normally leaves me paralyzed with fear. I didn't think. I just was."
--Mike Gayle, 'My Legendary Girlfriend'

Time grabs you by the hand and pulls you fast.

I guess I should say thank you, for cutting all my strings. But if it's all the same to you, I wish you'd left my wings.

You think bravery is to fight and courage is to die. But the bravest ones stand in front of those who would and say "We will not fight. Because courage is to live."

Where you are, right here and now, this is how bad stories end. But it's also how the best stories, begin.

Because you're looking for a date, not love. Because you're more interested in who you go to bed with than who you wake up next to. Because you tick boxes in your head instead of crossing lines in your heart.

Time grabs you by the hand and pulls you fast. Sometimes faster. And we don't notice at first because we're all still shocked at being alive.

I'll understand your silence. Because sometimes, you'll have to understand mine.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

There's a hell of a good universe next door: let's go.

--Christopher Robin to Pooh


--Nicholas Sparks, 'At First Sight'


--'Grey's Anatomy'


--Ralph Waldo Emerson

You can't stop the future, you can't rewind the past. The only way to learn the secret is to press play.

--Emily Dickenson

--E.E. Cummings

Travel, travel, travel. Do not settle into the life of the normal average citizen, be more. Realize that time helps, when nothing else can. And that there are two types of people in this world, those who are unhappy, and those who do whatever it takes to ensure their happiness, and you are one of those people.

“There is no such thing as was. To me, no man is himself, he is the sum of his past. There is no such thing really as was, because the past is. It is part of every man, every woman, and every moment.”
--William Faulkner

--Willis Whitney

--James Matthew Barrie

"It is good that the young are beautiful; it is the only advantage they have."
--The Duchess of Windsor

We would often be sorry if our wishes were granted.

--Robert Burdette

Independence is the part that drew you in
You said I like the way you know a thing or two

You gotta have hope
You gotta have something
There's always a reason to break
'Cause nothing less
Will save the day

"Isn't it sad to be in a place where everything is so unbelievable you'd believe anything?"
--'Go Ask Alice'

--'Alice in Wonderland'

--Margaret Thatcher

She only drinks coffee at midnight
When the moment is not right
Her timing is quite unusual
You see her confidence is tragic
but her intuition: magic

Live your life to the fullest.

--Boris Pasternak

--Red Skelton

--Steve Jobs

Eat the damn chocolate cake, get your hair wet, love someone, dance in those muddy puddles, tell someone off, draw a picture with crayons like you're still 6 years old and then give it to someone who is very important to you. Take a nap, go on vacation, do a cartwheel, make your own recipe, dance like no one sees you, paint each nail a different color, take a bubble bath, laugh at a corny joke. Get on that table and dance, pick strawberries, take a jog, plant a garden, make an ugly shirt and wear it all day learn a new language, write a song, date someone you wouldn't usually go for, make a scrap book, go on a picnic, relax in the sun, make your own home video, kiss the un-kissed, hug the un-hugged, love the unloved, and live your life to the fullest. So at the end of the day. You'll have no regrets, no sorrows, no disappointments.

Words aren't necessary.

A person who can speak many languages is not necessarily more valuable than a person who can listen in one.

--Brock Tully
Sixty-five days, three hundred more and nothing's gonna change
Except the day I﻿ wish you back to me

“Lonely men seek companionship. Lonely women sit at home and wait. They never meet.”
--Abraham Lincoln

And everyone just spends their day thinking of someone who's thinking of someone else.

No two loves are identical.

"How different this moment feels, for so many reasons. I tell myself that no two loves are identical--but that I don't have to compare anymore."
--Emily Griffin, 'Love The One You're With'

"I couldn't help but wonder if that was what love was--believing that someone was going to come through, in the end, and that it would still count."
--Laura Dave, 'London Is the Best City in America'

If my heart was a house you'd be home

"Maybe finding one's true self is like building a house and then making it home."
--Anna Esaki-Smith, 'Meeting Luciano'

--Richard Bach

Love is a form of prejudice. You love what you need, you love what makes you feel good, you love what is convenient. How can you say you love one person when there are ten thousand people in the world that you would love more if you ever met them? But you'll never meet them.

“When you’re in love, you don’t need words. A look, a touch, a sigh — you’ve said it all.”
--Juliet Mills

"Many people love in themselves what they hate in others."
--Benzel Sternan
--Ethel Barrymore

Life is far too short not to have a little umbrella in your drink. The bright hilarity of my kind friends and very dear girls.

Saturday, October 03, 2009

Why can't I ever be happy where I am?

"Paris," she whispered.
"Paris," he promised.

I miss what I already have and I surround myself with things that are missing.

It's hard to sleep without you here, but it's nice to care about someone enough to miss them so much.

I got a letter in the mail today from Matthew. It's nice to be reminded that your friends still care about the things you care about and they are still thinking of you even though they aren't calling you up to tell you every time it happens. We talked last night about how it was sad to see people you might have thought you missed just to find them caught up in the same bullshit you left months ago. And today I read a poem about what we built falling to pieces, about what was ours being taken away. It was a slow invasion, but it sure worked. It's hard to say but maybe if we had claimed what was ours that town would still be our town and that house would have been our home.

There is only one state in between Illinois and Ohio. And New Hampshire is right next to Massachusetts, but right now I'm in Florida and he is in North Carolina. I'm at least three states away from everyone I love.

1. You were what I was missing when I had everything else.
2. Now I'm missing everything else.

I can pin point every goddamn thing that bothers me and I feel completely helpless because I know exactly how to change it and I'm just not doing it.

You and I could be anywhere, I just wish anywhere wasn't here.

Today was the first time I hung out with someone in this town without alcohol there. I thought it was nice and they thought it was boring. Why can't I ever be happy where I am?

Things I find to be annoying:
1. Bug bites
2. People who feel like they need to be drunk all the time.
3. People who pride themselves on that.
4. When my dog won't go to the bathroom when we're outside and I know she has to go.
5. Asking "Are you hiring?"
6. When people don't pick up after themselves.

It's been too hot to do anything besides sit in the living room and I'm too busy thinking all the time that I never have the time to actually stop and think. What am I doing? Where do I want to go? And what's the best way to get there?

You're next to me and I'm holding my breath and you're holding my waist.

Friday, October 02, 2009

Life is chaos.

This isn't torture. Torture happens in small, dark rooms in countries with names you struggle to spell. This is just mildly unpleasant. This isn't heroism. Heroism happens in churches that are also schools, performed by teachers with no names and no place to stay. This is just a good deed for the day. This isn't loss. Loss happens on fields filled with poppies, in hospitals buzzing with flies, in distant deserts and late at night when there's no good reason for the phone to ring. This is just longing. This isn't important. Important happens on bended knees and is breathed on last breaths with hands clutched tight, hearts tighter. This is just a distraction.

If it doesn't happen magically over night, you might want to try doing it manually, every day.

If our arms aren't strong enough, we'll rip the roof off with our hearts. If the road is dark, our dreams will light the way. If there isn't space in the back, we'll make space in our hopes. Pack a bag with everything you want to keep and leave the rest behind. Because I'm coming to pick you up.


Don't be afraid of the world. We're just all the people you could've been.

I don't know if you felt that or not. But it felt like two people kissing after hours of thinking about it. It felt like two people talking after nights of silence. It felt like two people touching after weeks of being numb. It felt like two people facing each other after months of looking away. It felt like two people in love after years of being alone. And it felt like two people meeting each other, after an entire lifetime of not meeting each other.

And you keep whispering the same story to yourself "I'll be unhappy now because that'll make me happy later. Because that's how a story works." So your happiness will always happen later, never now. Life isn't a story. Life is chaos.

I won't compose prose every morning you open your eyes next to me (I won't compare you to a summer's day). I won't kiss the tears from your cheeks whenever you cry. I won't remember every appointment. I won't keep the sheen on my armour. I won't know what to say sometimes. I won't get your order right. I'll be late. I'll fuck-up. But I'll write something for you when you least expect it (in summer or winter). But I'll hold you as tight as I can whenever I can. But I'll burst through the door as soon as I remember. But I'll polish it until it shines again. But I'll say something anyway. But I'll go back and make it right. But I'll get there. But I'll try.

Something has moved and bumped the cradle of everything. The world is out of sync. Birds fly backwards and the fish swim through the air. Hours pass like seconds and seconds pass like hours. The light fades before the sun leaves. The stars shine before the night falls. I am here early. You are here late.


If you've got the time, we can play a game. It’s easy. We just see if I’m the same shape as the space you have inside you. If everything fits, we both win. If it doesn’t, don’t force it. That's how you get splinters in your heart.

There's not enough soil in the earth for how deep I want to be buried. There's not enough water in the oceans for how slowly I want to sink. There's not enough fire in the sun for how brightly I want to burn. There aren't enough words in my head to say all the things I can't. There's not enough blood in my body for all I need to bleed. There's aren't enough couches in the world for how long I want to sleep. There's not enough life in me, for all I want to live. All I've had enough of, is you.

You would like to hand your heart to her and say touch it but then give it back.

All quotes by Charles Bukowski

"I don't know if this is true to you but for me sometimes it gets so bad that anything else, say like, looking at a bird on an overhead power line seems as great as a Beethoven symphony. Then you forget it and you're back again."
--'A Moment'

--'Women: A Novel'

"My ambition is handicapped by laziness."



--'Women: A Novel'





"Pain is strange. A cat killing a bird, a car accident, a fire. Pain arrives--bang! And there it is, it sits on you. It's real. And to anybody watching, you look foolish. Like you've suddenly become an idiot. There's no cure for it unless you know somebody who understands how you feel, and knows how to help."

"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."

"If you get married they think you're finished and if you are without a woman they think you're incomplete."


"Dogs and angels are not very far apart."


"In that drunken place you would like to hand your heart to her and say touch it but then give it back."


"She was desperate and she was choosey at the same time, and, in a way, beautiful, but she didn't have quite enough going for her to become what she imagined herself to be."

"I stopped looking for a Dream Girl, I just wanted one that wasn't a nightmare."