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. Ecstacy, even, I felt, with flashes of sudden remembrance, and feeling sweaty and drowsy I felt like sleeping and dreaming in the grass.
— — Jack Kerouac
He slept curled against her back, a dark comma against her pale elegant phrase.
— — Possession, A.S. Byatt
Cussing doesn’t come from a lack of vocabulary–I know all the other words. None of them speak the same language that my fucking heart does.
— — Anis Mojgan
Music is the language of the Universe. By creating good and harmonious sound-vibrations, we should, therefore, extend and expand our mental horizons even while sitting quietly in our home instead of wasting time on cheap entertainment like cinema and TV, which besides making us addicts through systematic brain-washing and slow poisoning, adversely affect the clarity and transparency of the mind. By our noble thoughts, benevolent aspirations and harmonious sound-vibrations we are able to help even plants, flowers, birds and animals.
— — Swami Nirmalananda
Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.
— — Kahlil Gibran
Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of, I never thought of myself as quiet, much less silent, I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn’t the world, it wasn’t the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, the cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don’t know, but it’s painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I’ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.
— — Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
Stress has become a lifestyle. People don’t know how to function without stress in their lives anymore. We think anything less than perfection is failure. We don’t give ourselves permission to say “I’m doing the best I can, and that’s good enough.” We don’t even give ourselves the right to rest or relax. We’ve created a stress culture—a group of people that thrive on pressure and anxiety. Rethinking our pro-stress perspective is the first step in truly grasping the concept of a lower-stress life.
— — Emma Tyle
As long as I was alive, I was something. That was just how it was. But somewhere along the way it all changed. Living turned me into nothing.
— — Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
Time stands still best in moments that look suspiciously like ordinary life.
— — Brian Andreas
I think there’s a kind of desperate hope built into poetry that one really wants, hopelessly, to save the world. One is trying to say everything that can be said for the things that one loves while there’s still time.
— — W. S. Merwin
And that is how change happens. One gesture. One person. One moment at a time.
— — Libba Bray
Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery.
— — William Shakespeare
Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.
— — Virginia Woolf
This I believe: That the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected.
— — John Steinbeck
If men could regard the events of their own lives with more open minds, they would frequently discover that they did not really desire the things they failed to obtain.
— — André Maurois
