Quotes

the gosling’s increasingly disorganized quote collection: 

“& the leaves that fall around her/ tickle her cheek in such mockery.” -play-tragic

“A family’s like a loaded gun; you point it in the wrong direction, someone’s going to get killed.” –Belle and Sebastian

“A great flame follows a little spark.” -Dante Alighieri

“A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union.” -Howard’s End

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” -Thomas Mann

“after that she just followed her nose/ cuz fate is not just whose cooking smells good/ but which way the wind blows” -Ani

“All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.” -Tolstoy

“All that had come to me, really, was – well, the feasibility of conversion. I suddenly knew that religion, God – something beyond everyday life – was there to be found, provided one is really willing. And I saw that though what I felt in the church was only imagination, it was a step on the way; because imagination itself can be a kind of willingness – a pretence that things are real, due to one’s longing for them. It struck me that this was somehow tied up with what the Vicar said about religion being an extension of art – and then I had a glimpse of how religion really can cure you of sorrow; somehow make use of it, turn it to beauty, just as art can make sad things beautiful.” -Cassandra, I Capture the Castle

“Am I really admitting that my sister is determined to marry a man she has only seen once and doesn’t much like the look of? It is half real and half pretence – and I have an idea that it is a game most girls play when they meet any eligible young men. They just … wonder. And if any family ever had need of wondering, it is ours. But only as regards Rose. I have asked myself if I am doing any personal wondering and in my deepest heart I am not. I would rather die than marry either of those quite nice men.” -Cassandra, I Capture the Castle

“America: a country where everything is done to prove life isn’t tragic.” -Albert Camus

“and half of learning how to play/ is learning what not to play/ and she’s learning the spaces she leaves/ have their own things to say/ then she’s trying to sing just enough/ so that the air around her moves/ and make music like mercy/ that gives what it is/ and has nothing to prove// she crawls out on a limb/ and begins to build her home/ it’s enough just to look around/ to know she’s not alone” -Ani

“and i knew you pigtails and all/ girls when they fall/ and they say marianne killed herself/ and i said not a chance/ don’t you love the girls ladies babes old bags who say she was so pretty why/ why why why did she crawl down in the old/ deep ravine” -Tori

“And I’d just like to say, when all of it is said and done, I still choose to love.” -Beth Ann (y)

“And if you’re a struggling teen writer having doubts about your first relationship, and it’s, say, the year 2000, and you’re driving up Route 29 North in a snow flurry listening to Joni Mitchell and squinting to make out the car headlights between your windshield wipers and your steamy breath, pull over for just a minute and listen to your gut. Don’t lose heart, love–it all does get better from here.” -Bemused

“And it’s so hard to do and so easy to say. / But sometimes, sometimes you just have to walk away.” -Ben Harper

“and is your place in heaven/ worth giving up these kisses?” -Tori

“And I’ve felt pleasure and I’ve felt pain./ And I know now that I can never be the same. // And if someday, I find my peace of mind, I will share my wealth with all of human kind.” -Ben Harper

“And I would hold you in my arms until both thoughts and lives are over; this may be exactly as we’ll be.” -Winter Machine

“and just when you think that you’ve got enough/ enough grows/ and everywhere that you go in life/ enough knows” -Ani

“and my only way way out is to go so far in” –Tori

“And now I have to confess the unpardonable and the scandalous. I am a happy man. And I am going to tell you the secret of my happiness. It is quite simple. I love mankind. I love love. I hate hate. I try to understand and accept.” -Jean Cocteau

“And now I will bounce up and down because nothing will vanquish a stubborn phone phobia like a really enlivening conversation with a friend!” -peregryn

“And so September becomes October becomes November and December and the grass turns to hairbrushes and the bus riders fog the windows with their breath.” -Loser, Jerry Spinnelli

“And so to sum it up I am happily miserable.” -Valeofenna

“and they can call me crazy if i fail/ all the chance that i need/ is one-in-a-million/ and they can call me brilliant/ if i succeed/ gravity is nothing to me/ moving at the speed of sound/ i’m just gonna get my feet wet/ until i drown…” -Ani

“and this brave little smile is my all purpose expression/ the meaning of which I will leave to your discretion.” -misheard Ani

“Anything dead coming back to life hurts.” -Beloved

“Anyone who can live on welfare should be courted by Wall Street. He is a financial genius.” -Joanna Clark

“Apparitions still won’t leave me alone/ It’s as if you never left/ How am I supposed to remember you/ When you won’t let me forget?” -Barenaked Ladies

“are you at home now with your kitty cats are you just at home now with the way that you act do you split the rent there with all your secrets or do you just pretend to all your friends they’re uninvited guests…” -Ani

“As always before, it was a weirdly silent shattering. In the world where she was most alive, the sun split in the sky, the earth erupted, her body was torn to pieces, her teeth and bones crazed and broken to fragments. In the other place, where the ghosts and shadows lived, a car turned into a side drive and down a road to where an old red brick building stood.” -I Never Promised You A Rose Garden

“As they say at Red, we say “need attention” like it’s a bad thing – sometimes it’s a very real thing. Sometimes we’re going crazy and we need attention.” -Chordchild

“At night, my father blazed up the fire with a can of petrol and my mother told stories from her youth. Her youth was like a far-off city where she had lived for a time and been happy. She had all the longing of an exile for a place where she could never return. // Like other exiles, her longing grew a narrative of its own. Her desire told itself as memory. Her past was a place that none of us could visit without her. It was the only kingdom she could control.” -The Powerbook

“At the bottom things can only go up.” -Unknown

“At this rate, we’ll never get to the future.” -Invisible Monsters, Chuck Palahniuk

“Because the only way I’ve ever felt safe in this world did not involve disorder. Because I love my life, even though I’ve never been in this much pain, and I don’t always believe that I can stand it. Because somewhere along the line impossible started meaning, “something I haven’t done yet” and it’s going to stay that way. Somewhere along the line, after I realized that there were hundreds of thousands of reasons to relapse, I realized there weren’t any. Because the only other option isn’t one.” -Chordchild

“Believe in me/ Help me believe in anything/ I want to be someone who believes…” -Counting Crows

“Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it.” -Andre Gide

“Blame rests always. It is a condition of human life that blame rests, like a butterfly on a leaf. We do not care to see blame hovering about us unable to decide where to rest. No one guesses the burden of the butterfly.” -Scented Gardens for the Blind

“Books have always been some of my best friends, and I spend lots of time chatting with published dead people.” -bronx-bound1

“buildings and bridges/ are made to bend in the wind/ to withstand the world,/ that’s what it takes/ all that steel and stone/ is no match for the air, my friend/ what doesn’t bend breaks/ what doesn’t bend breaks” -Ani

“can you imagine? the sky would / be the limit.” I glanced up -/ I saw what she could not see/ the white plaster dry wall/ of the office ceiling. I saw/ what she could not see – the / shyness is the limit.” -atomgirl

“causation by definition/ is such a complex compilation/ of factors/ that to even try to say why/ is to oversimplify.” -Ani

“Color me damned.” -Nellie McKay

“Cut flowers last longer, I am told, if they are bruised or singed or if you crumble in the water one or two of those pills which people swallow to deaden a continual feeling of pain.” -Scented Gardens for the Blind

“Damn you, syntax! Nothing I want to think fits it.” -liegt_am_meer

‘dear foureyes: i need to go bouncing off a mountain in new snow, & your repeling gear is in the shop. my cheeks are already red with the cold, & all i can offer is the sureness that my breath will show up whenever you ask for help.’ -as quoted by mess

“depression is a lousy editor. I proof my own work from now on.” -atomgirl

“Disbelief could be a product of hysteria just as much as belief. The wet of the snow, where the passage of many people had melted it, worked through my soles and reminded me of the dew of my dream, but when I tried to remember her voice saying, ‘Don’t worry,’ I found I had no memory for sounds. I couldn’t imitate her voice. I couldn’t even caricature it: when I tried to remember it, it was anonymous – just any woman’s voice. The process of forgetting her had set in. We should keep gramophone records as we keep photographs.” -The End of the Affair 144-145

“Divisions of the kind were fashionable at that time, and it was so easy to stifle one’s need to help by deciding that help could neither be accepted nor understood. I have seen a quick-drying paint advertised lately in the shops. It is most convenient: it dries immediately it is brushed upon the wall. It is like habit, except that habit sets even more quickly upon the mind, and one is grateful for this convenience, the way it removes the need for laborious action or thought. And so we have grouped the deaf, dumb, blind, crippled, mentally ill, in one mass in order to ‘deal with’ them, for we must ‘deal with’ these vast surfaces of strangeness which demand all our lives a protective varnish of sympathy. …Protective for us; against them and ourselves. It is easy to ward off the demands for patient understanding by obliterating them with a mass dull coat of generality.” -Scented Gardens for the Blind

“Does it all come down to/ the thing one girl fears/ in the night/ is another girl’s/ paradise?” -Tori

“Do not be susceptible to crap! You are too good a person for it!” -Cameron

“Do what you feel in your heart to be right – for you’ll be criticized anyway.” -Eleanor Roosevelt

“Do you have any idea what we have gone through this week? We have been up all night every night studying. We haven’t slept. We haven’t talked about anything else except this school and this test for seven days. We have stretched ourselves as thin as humanly possible without going completely postal. My God! We’re only one person!” -Lorelai, Gilmore Girls

“Don’t accuse me of false advertising…I was NEVER selling what you wanted to buy. -banefulvenus

“Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.” -Dorothy Day

“Dude, you’re the shock and awe of cute.” –Joan of Arcadia

“Each decision requires that you choose which parts of yourself you want to cultivate and which parts you want to release.” -Gary Zukav

“Early to Bed and Early to rise makes a man stupid and blind in the eyes” – Mazer Rackham, Ender’s Game

“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” -“Closing Time”

“Every now and then he looks back. The spinning lights are far away now, a fallen spaceship. He loves the distant spinning light. It is his leash. He wishes Claudia had not wanted to be quite so free.” -Loser, Jerry Spinnelli

“Everyone pretends to know me/ long enough to make me lonely” -John Maxfield

“Even the sky is no limit.” -Unknown

“Fashion magazines are society’s way of saying, ‘If you don’t feel inadequate already — read one of these.”  -Maxine

“For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin, real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way. Something to be got through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.” -Fr. Alfred D’Souza

“Forever always seems/ to be around when things begin/ but forever never seems/ to be around when things end/ So give me your forever/ Please your forever/ Not a day less will do/ From you.” -Ben Harper

“Friends are God’s apology for relatives.” -Hugh Kingsmill

“Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.” -Beloved

“Give light, and the darkness will disappear of itself.” -Desiderius Erasmus

“Give me fruitful error anytime full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself.” -Vilfredo Pareto

“God knows I’ve never been a spiritual man.” -Billy Joel

“got a garden of songs where i grow all my thoughts wish i could harvest one or two for some small talk i’m always starving for words when you’re around nothing on my tongue so much in my ground half the time i got my gaze trained on your motel door fourth door from the end rest of the time my gaze lays like a stain on the carpeted floor if it weren’t for my brain i’d go over and make friends too bad about my brain ’cause i’d like to make friends. see the little song bird unable to make a sound even though she follows her words from town to town we both have gardens of songs and maybe its okay that i am speechless because i picked you this bouquet.” -Ani

“growing up isn’t always fun/ they tore your dress and stole your ribbons/ they see you cry, they lick their lips/ but butterflies don’t belong in nets// oh mary, can you hear me?/ mary, you’re bleeding/ mary, don’t be afraid/ we’re just waking up/ and i hear help is on the way// mary, can you hear me?/ mary, like jimmy said/ mary, don’t be afraid/ ’cause even the wind…/ even the wind cries your name” -Tori

“grown-ups are so silly sometimes, when they think they know things.” -braveatoms

“Have you considered what it meant for Alia to be born into the universe fully cognitive, possessed of all her mother’s memories and knowledge? No rape could be more terrifying.” -Dune Messiah

“Have you ever felt like your only comfort was your cage? You’re not alone; I have felt the same as you. Have you ever felt like your secrets give you away? You’re not alone I have been there, too.” -Lifehouse

“have any of you ever had an uncle threaten to roll you up and stick you inside his artificial leg?” -Roo

“He smells his homesickness.” -The Powerbook

“He wonders if Claudia is making snow angels. He wonders if angels are invisible in the snow. He wonders if angels make people in the snow. He wonders if Claudia is an angel. -Loser, Jerry Spinnelli

“Here is a kiss for the beauty inside you.”  -Gina Young

“His body knew things then never learned in consciousness.” -Dune Messiah

“Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come.” -Anne Lamott

“Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things. And a good thing never really dies.” -Stephen King

“How soon shall we learn enough to be able to open the door to them without putting ourselves in more grave danger? How soon shall we learn to break the silence and speak to them?” -Scented Gardens for the Blind

“How strange it is to be liked. It automatically awakens a certain loyalty. …How strange too and unfamiliar to think that one has been loved, that one’s presence had once had the power to make a difference between happiness and dullness in another’s day.” -Bendrix, The End of the Affair

“’how you been’/ I’ve been cruisin’/ a good invention/ but in some ways/ I don’t think it gets/ any easier” -Tori

“huh? wha? will this ever not be weird?” -braveatoms

“Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves; when that right is preempted it is called brain-washing.” -Germaine Greer

“Human beings say, “It never rains but it pours.” This is not very apt for it frequently does rain without pouring. The rabbits’ proverb is better expressed. They say, “One cloud is lonely”: and indeed it is true that the appearance of a single cloud often means that they sky will soon be overcast.” -Richard Adams, Watership Down

“I am a princess. All girls are. Even if they live in tiny old attics, even if they dress in rags, even if they aren’t pretty, or smart, or young. They’re still princesses. All of us.” -A Little Princess (1995 Screenplay)

“I am a restlessness inside a stillness inside a restlessness.” -Cassandra, I Capture the Castle

“I am blessed to be a witness.” -Ben Harper

“i am not an angry girl but it seems like i’ve got everyone fooled every time i say something they find hard to hear they chalk it up to my anger and never to their own fear and imagine you’re a girl just trying to finally come clean knowing full well they’d prefer you were dirty and smiling and i am sorry i am not a maiden fair and i am not a kitten stuck up a tree somewhere” -Ani

“I am playing Operation WITH MY LIFE.” -Roo

“I barely survived yesterday, and it’s already tomorrow.” -Unknown

“I beg you…to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. don’t search for the answers, which could not be given you now, because you would not be able to live them. and the point is, to live everything. live the questions now. perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually without ever noticing it, live your way into the answer.” -Rainer Maria Rilke

“I believe that we are solely responsible for our choices, and we have to accept the consequences of every deed, word, and thought throughout our lifetime. -Elizabeth Kübler-Ross

“I can handle reality in small doses, but as a lifestyle, it’s much too confining.” -Lily Tomlin

“I can imagine, for example, spending a summer in NJ/Philadelphia and turning it into something wonderful- after all, that’s what I tried for 18 years. And in the end, I did have a life for myself there. I walked to the coffee shop every every weekend and saw the seasons changing along the way. I knew where to look for the first crocuses and listen for the February birds. I learned to walk alone and look for beautiful things along the sidewalk, in the trees, and on the bridge across the river. I made a home walking along the streets of Philadelphia and sitting in the park benches of a giant living room. I miss it sometimes, but really, it’s not the place. It’s the dreams I would spin down the sidewalks. Every breath of that air was potential, somewhere else I could go, another life I could live. I had so many choices, and I didn’t have to pick any of them. It was my insular Tahiti. And I did pick the life I loved the most. But now I have to live this life, rather than dreaming it. And so I sometimes miss that insular Tahiti, where I had a thousand lives in my mind in a thousand places I could see from my bedroom window, but of course, you know how it goes: once you leave, you can never go back.” -bronx-bound1

“I can’t keep losing sleep over this, no, I can’t And now I cannot stop pacing Give me a few hours and I’ll have this all sorted out If my mind would just stop racing ‘Cause I cannot stand still I can’t be this unsturdy This cannot be happening This is over my head but underneath my feet ‘Cause by tomorrow morning I’ll have this thing beat And everything will be back to the way that it was I wish that it was just that easy ‘Cause I’m waiting for tonight Then waiting for tomorrow And I’m somewhere in between What is real and just a dream… What is real and just a dream… What is real and just a dream… Would you catch me if I fall out of what I fell in Don’t be surprised if I collapse down at your feet again I don’t want to run away from this I know that I just don’t need this ‘Cause I cannot stand still I can’t be this unsturdy This cannot be happening ‘Cause I’m waiting for tonight Then waiting for tomorrow And I’m somewhere in between What is real and just a dream… What is real and just a dream… What is real and just a dream… What is real and just a dream…” -Lifehouse

“I carry around some extraordinary, powerful stories that I don’t ever actually fashion into stories or include in my public, spoken self because they don’t quite fit any language I know, and any name seems to misrepresent them. So now I’m glad I ended up writing this story that’s being such a pain in my ass and sending me off to do all kinds of research, because damn, maybe those stories of mine really are going to be told. As much as they can be, at least, considering how language slides off of them and representation conveys nothing of their power.” -liegt_am_meer

“I criticize by creation, not by finding fault.” -Cicero

“I’d rather be alone with you.” -Lisa Loeb

“I don’t believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is so vertical. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other person and learns from the other. I have a lot to learn from other people.” -Eduardo Galeano

“I don’t believe in Switzerland.” -Nora, care of Mimi Smartypants

“I don’t buy original sin.  Just because somebody ate an apple one time does not make us all sinners. And if it was from the tree of knowledge, I think she should have eaten more than one.  She should’ve baked a pie.”  -Margaret Cho

“I don’t like being assassinated. It’s not nearly as fun as you’d think.” -Cameron

“I feel, therefore I can be free.” -Audre Lorde

“I feel there is something unexplored about women that only a woman can explore.” -Georgia O’Keefe

“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.” -Martin Luther King, Jr.

“i have had something to prove as long as i know there’s something that needs improvement and you know that every time i move i make a woman’s movement and first you decide what you’ve gotta do then you go out and do it and maybe the most we can do is just to see each other through it” -Ani

“I guess sometimes the government being stupid can work in your favor.” -Britt

“i have a rash. maybe i’m allergic to not getting enough of you. i was fine, you know, when i had you in abundance.” -perdiendome

“I have a tendency to wear my mind on my sleeve/ I have a history of taking off my shirt.” -Barenaked Ladies

“I have no need to write to you or talk to you, you know everything before I can speak, but when one loves, one feels the need to use the same old ways one has always used. I know I am only beginning to love, but already I want to abandon everything, everybody but you; only fear and habit prevent me.” -The End of the Affair

“I have severe abandonment issues, so I guess I feel if I go on without keeping hold of the few people who did stay in my life long enough for me to get attached, then I would be abandoning them, by forgetting the love they tried so hard to show me, love is a verb too, too many people forget. And if I did forget their love it would be repeating a crime that happened to me, to repeat the abandonment upon another innocent person.” -valeofenna

“I have so many personalities, and I still feel lonely.” -Tori

“I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.” -Agatha Christie

“I have to approach each substance separately and make a decision about it. I can’t go along with society’s decision about what’s acceptable or not — I don’t want to drink, or smoke cigarettes. It’s up to me to figure it out. Maybe I need to reevaluate my relationship with sugar and caffeine. On the other hand, I don’t want to get sucked into the ‘addiction’ of deprivation — giving up one comfort after another and feeling more self-righteous with each one.” -clean2202

“I just finished this horrible, horrible book, Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding. Yeah, I know, I shouldn’t have expected it to be good, but it was there in the library and I hadn’t found anything else. Anyway, it’s dreadful. Stay away. All this whining and size obsession: who is like this? Real women are not like this. At least I hope not. If they are, give me names and addresses because I need to kick some ass.” -mimi smartypants

“I kept talking to myself/ I had to get the words out of my head (so I did)/ You barely said a thing/ You kind of heard me out and then you said (you said) // You’re crazy, why do you keep doing this?/ Everything is fine/ Then I think I’m crazy, I do this all the time/ Until I start to think that nothing’s even wrong // Maybe I am hiding in my own confusion/ Maybe we’re just a picture in my head/ Maybe what if it could be the way I wish it really was/ Maybe I don’t wanna see it, the way it really is.” -Lisa Loeb

“I know all about the facts of life. And I don’t think much of them.” -Cassandra, I Capture the Castle

“I know that Santa Fe is in its own dimension entirely, that we are all surviving on half the oxygen available to the lungs of those living at sea-level, that there are next to no sidewalks, etc., etc. But we have grasshoppers here, in a city/town with no grass. And I thought I had self-defeating habits.” -E

“I like attention/ and other worse things I could mention.” -Lisa Loeb

“I listen to a whisper/ slowly drift away/ Silence is the loudest/ parting word you never say.” –Ben Harper

“I look at the politics of this country as a game that is played on the people, this illusion of choice. It’s interesting that the important things have been reduced in number: oil companies, communications, pharmaceuticals, insurance, banking, accounting, all these firms have been merged and reduced. The choices are very limited. But if you want a bagel, we’ve got twenty-six flavors. These are the illusions of choice. I don’t really think choice is here to any substantive degree.” -George Carlin

“I look back on where I’m from, look at the woman I’ve become/ and the strangest things seem suddenly routine…” -Hedwig and the Angry Inch

“I looked more widely around me, I studied the lives of the masses of humanity, and I saw that, not two or three, or ten, but hundreds, millions, had so understood the meaning of life that they were able both to live and to die. All these men were well acquainted with the meaning of life and death, quietly labored, endured privation and suffering, lived and died, and saw in all this, not a vain, but a good thing.” -Leo Tolstoy

“I lost myself in another person’s definition of me when I was sixteen and seventeen. I became ‘the shy one,’ ‘the quiet one,’ ‘the fucked-up one,’ M+M over 2. And it would not be much of an exaggeration to say that every skill I’ve learned since is a tool to ensure that I will never again get lost like that.” -Bemused

“I’m a bliss bubble…I have a way of walking when I’m feeling bubbly where my arms swirl, and a way of making myself laugh so hard, in the middle of the sidewalk, that I can barely stand up straight. I have a language known only to myself, a set of inside jokes to which I solely am a party, a style of banter restricted brilliantly to internal dialogue. I swear more when I talk to myself. I sing more too. I am more ruthless. I am so swift that sometimes, I surprise even myself.” -Bemused

“I’m afraid once your heart is involved it all comes out in Moron.” -Lorelai, Gilmore Girls

“I’m always amazed that people will actually choose to sit in front of the television and just be savaged by stuff that belittles their intelligence.” -Alice Walker

“I’m drowning here! And you’re describing the water!” -As Good As It Gets

“I’m not afraid of making mistakes; I’m afraid of not being allowed to make them.” -Chordchild

“i need a better hobby than loving people. something less emotionally expensive.” -Shan

“I need to remember to put in my will that I should be buried with both popcorn and marshmallows, that way if I go to Hell for thinking everything I think about the Bible, I’ll at least be able to make an afterlife marshmallow roasting popcorn popping party. Heat from flames can in fact be quite useful.” -E

“I never thought I’d end up here/ I never thought I’d be standing where I am/ I guess I kind of thought it would be easier than this/ I guess I was wrong/ now, one more time…” –Lifehouse

“I play the chords and words of my songs/ maybe I can forget that there’s anything wrong/ maybe I can go on living my life.” -Sissies

“i turn myself inside out/ in hope someone will see” -Tori

“I run off where the DRIFTS GET DEEPER/ sleeping beauty trips me with a frown/ i hear a voice/ “you must learn to stand up for yourself/ cause i can’t always be around”/ he says when you gonna make up your mind/ when you gonna love you as much as i do/ when you gonna make up your mind/ cause things are gonna CHANGE so fast/ all the white horses are still in bed/ i tell you that i’ll always want you near/ you say that things change my dear” –Tori

“I suppose the best thing to take for granted is a wish.” -chordchild

“I think it’s getting to the point/ where I can be myself again/ I think it’s getting to the point/ where we have almost made amends/ I think it’s the getting to the point/ that is the hardest part.” -Barenaked Ladies

“I think the world would be vastly improved if we had more shouting in public. Today I have a strange urge to shout, ‘THERE’S A FRIED EGG SANDWICH ON THE LOOSE!!’ as loud as possible. Preferably through a megaphone.” -mimi-smartypants

“I used to regard dish-washing merely as an ignoble chore, a kind of hateful discipline which had to be undergone with knitted brow and brazen fortitude. When my wife went away the first time, I erected a reading stand and an electric light over the skin, and used to read while my hands went automatically through base gestures of purification. I made the great spirits of literature partners in my sorrow, and learned by heart a good deal of Paradise Lost and of Walt Mason, while I soused and wallowed among pots and pans. I used to comfort myself with two lines of Keats: ‘The moving waters at their priest-like task/ Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores–’ Then a new conception of the matter struck me. It is intolerable for a human being to go on doing any task as a penance, under duress. No matter what the work is, one must spiritualize it in some way, shatter the old idea of it into bits and rebuild it nearer to the heart’s desire. How was I do this with dish-washing?… I broke a good many plates while I was pondering over the matter. Then it occurred to me that here was just the relaxation I needed. I had been worrying over the mental strain of being surrounded all day by vociferous books, crying out at me their conflicting views as to the glories and agonies of life. Why not make dish-washing my balm and poultice? …When one views a stubborn fact from a new angle, it is amazing how all its contours and edges change shape! Immediately my dishpan began to glow with a kind of philosophic halo! The warm, soapy water became a sovereign medicine to retract hot blood from the head; the homely act of washing and drying cups and saucers became a symbol of the order and cleanliness that man imposes on the unruly world about him. I tore down my book rack and reading lamp from over the sink… Do not laugh at me when I tell you I have developed a whole kitchen philosophy of my own.” -R. Mifflin, The Haunted Bookshop

“i walk in stride with people much taller than me and partly it’s the boots but mostly it’s my chi and i’m becoming transfixed with nature and my part in it which i believe just signifies i’m finally waking up…” -Ani

“i want someone to hold me not because i’m crying but simply because i’m here.” -whereistand

“I want someone to know me. We walk through so many myths of each other and ourselves, we are so thankful when someone sees us for who we are and accepts us.” -Natalie Goldberg

“I want to be a lion/ Everybody wants to pass as cats/ We all want to be big big stars, but we got different reasons for that.” -Counting Crows

“I was blind. I am blind. A quick pinch of a word and time is adjusted, and we believe its adjustment, thinking, We have put time in its place, its pen, cell, hutch of tense, and all that remains now is to feed it, fatten it, kill it for the feast.” -Scented Gardens for the Blind

“I was wet before I got to the street. I headed north on Post Road, towards town. There was only that artificial, very yellow sort of light to guide my way, along with the occasional (very bright) flash of lightning. I looked down at each footstep, which is not normal for me while I run, but I had to pay extra attention to footing. I watched my feet splash through puddles and of course thought of Claire, and the night we played in the rain. I felt a little lonely, just in realizing that now I’m the only one who holds that memory. There were two versions of it, side by side, and now there is just one. But the rain helped the loneliness slide off, slip to the ground, lay there in a puddle, left behind. Each drop reminded me, ‘there were thousands of us there that night, and here are thousands of us again. And who’s to say we’re not the same rain, that we pushed and swam and tunneled our way down to the Gulf, where we went out into the deep, then we were evaporated up, carried across hundreds of miles to here, to pour down on you, on the night you so desperately wanted rain?’” -Beth Ann (y)

“i wish i didn’t have this nervous laugh/ i wish i didn’t say/ half the stuff i say/ i wish i could just learn to cover my tracks/ i guess i’m not concerned about getting away/ ’cause every time i try to hold my tongue/ it slips like a fish from a line/ they say if you want to play/ you should learn how to play dumb/ i guess i can’t bring myself to waste your time…” -Ani

“If I died tonight/ Would you hold my hand, no/ Would you understand/ And if I lived in spite/ Would you still be here, no/ Would you disappear…” –Cranberries

“If I’m drowning I’ll grow gills.” -Chordchild

“If I were writing a novel I would end it here: a novel, I used to think, has to end somewhere, but I’m beginning to believe my realism has been at fault all these years, for nothing in life now ever seems to end. Chemists tell you matter is never completely destroyed, and mathematicians tell you that if you halve each pace in crossing a room, you will never reach the opposite wall, so what an optimist I would be if I thought that this story ended here. Only, like Sarah, I wish I weren’t as strong as a horse.” -The End of the Affair p.147

“If God wanted us to vote, we’d have been given candidates.” -Northern Sun

“If I get there, I will get there with my dignity/ and I will take as many people as I can with me.” -Winter Machine

“If I seem to take part in politics, it is only because politics encircles us today like the coil of a snake from which one cannot get out, no matter how much one tries. I wish therefore to wrestle with the snake.” -Mahatma Gandhi

“If I’m alive and well, will you be there holding my hand?” -3 Doors Down

“If I’m to run the future, you’ve got to let the old world go.” –Sleater-Kinney

“If the aborigine drafted an IQ test, all of Western civilization presumably would flunk it.” -Stanley Marion Garn

“If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn’t.” -Emerson M. Pugh

“If there’s anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.” -Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“If they gave me nothing, that was the one thing they could not take away.” -The Powerbook

“If you can’t run, walk. If you can’t walk, crawl. If you can’t crawl, just keep moving.” -Unknown

“I’m afraid of terrorists, but I’m more afraid of the Patriot Act.”  -Margaret Cho

“I’m in free fall/ This could be love/ Or nothing at all.” -Stephen Merrit

“I’m finding my way back to sanity again/ Though I don’t really know what I’m gonna do when I get there.” –Lifehouse

“I’m lost, too! But look – I know how to catch rabbits!” -Bird by Bird

“I’m no fucking Buddhist, but this is enlightenment.” –Bjork

“I’m not hurting anyone/ no, I’m just telling my own truth/ and if you think there’s something wrong/ maybe there’s something wrong with you.” -Ani

“I’m not really a compulsive liar, Dear Diary. I made that up.” –pinkpajamas

“I’m totally schooling you. And I’m doing it an English accent just to make it more painful.” -me

 
“in the end the world comes down to just a few people/ but for you it comes down to one/ but no one ever asked me if i thought i could be/ everything to someone/ there’s a crowd of people harbored in every person/ there are so many roles that we play/ and you’ve decided to love me for eternity/ i’m still deciding who i want to be today…” -Ani

“In this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don’t love your eyes; they’d just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind chop off, and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face ‘cause they don’t love that either. You got to love it, you! And no, they ain’t in love with your mouth. Yonder, out there, they will see it broken and break it again. What you say out of it they will not heed. What you scream from it they do not hear. What you put into it to nourish your body they will snatch away and give you leavins instead. No, they don’t love your mouth. You got to love it. This is the flesh I’m talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved. Feet that need to rest and to dance; backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong arms I’m telling you. And O my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it and hold it up. And all your inside parts that they’d just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them. The dark, dark liver – love it, love it, love it, and the beat of the beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize.” -Beloved

“In this life you have to be your own hero. By that I mean you have to win whatever it is that matters to you by your own strength and in your own way.” -The Powerbook

“It has come to me, sitting here in the barn feeling very full of cold rice, that there is something revolting about the way girls’ minds so often jump to marriage before they jump to love. And most of those minds are shut to what marriage really means. Now I come to think of it, I am judging from books mostly, for I don’t know any girls except Rose and Topaz. But some characters in books are very real – Jane Austen’s are; and I know those five Bennets at the opening of Pride and Prejudice, simply waiting to raven the young men at Netherfield Park, are not giving one thought to the real facts of marriage.” -Cassandra, I Capture the Castle

“It has occurred to me that perhaps Edward too has lost his power of speech, that when I meet him he will stare at me as Erlene stares now, proclaiming my guilt, that he will go to Erlene in the next room and sit with her and the two will remain there forever in silence. And gradually others will join them. People will call at the house, enter the next room, sit by the windowsill and contemplate the insects, all in silence. The whole world will be struck dumb, and I shall be the only one left with speech, and all will gaze at me, proclaiming my guilt and not replying or seeming even to understand when I speak to them; but they will smile and smile amongst themselves in their new secret language; and everywhere I go – I cannot go far, for this town and this country are my loves – I shall find heaps of decaying words – on the sides of the road, in gutters in rubbish dumps and litter tins, for every home will have cast out words as useless, throwing them recklessly and thankfully away yet without thought for hygiene, forgetting the stench and diseases which have arisen from accumulations of decaying or dead words which no one has taken care to bury or burn. How can I take it upon myself to be responsible for the language of speech if the world is struck dumb? Oh, I must urge the furniture to speak, and the walls, and the trees; my clothes, my food, all objects musk speak; it is a panic; anything to drown the final silence of the human race! What use is the silence? Even now as I look out of the window I can see the mounds of rotting words, the foul steam arising from them as, like compost, they generate their own fertile vapors and powers … you see? there is no end, growth must emerge from them, perhaps I too shall walk all over the land scattering the dead words upon the soil and watching for the plants which grow from them, all the new trees which will shelter us from the sun and the fires in the sky. It is a new Eden: the growth of articulate speech from the silence that fell like a shroud upon the language.” -Scented Gardens for the Blind

“It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much – the wheel, New York, wars and so on – while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man – for precisely the same reasons.” -Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not to deserve them.” -Mark Twain

“It is doubtless impossible to approach any human problem with a mind free from bias.” -Simone de Beauvoir

“It is high time the ideal of success should be replaced with the ideal of service.” -Albert Einstein

“It is much more comfortable to be mad and know it, than to be sane and have one’s doubts.” -G. B. Burgin

“It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and impossible to find it elsewhere.” -Agnes Repplier

“It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to put him in posession of the truth.” -John Locke

“It is time everyone open up the envelope of their soul and get their orders from inside.” -Unknown

“It took me a long time not to judge myself by other people’s standards.” -Sally Field

“It was a lie, of course, that it wouldn’t hurt a bit. But since adults always said it when it was going to hurt, he could count on that statement as an accurate prediction of the future. Sometimes lies were more dependable than the truth.” -Ender’s Game

“It was not facing what life dealt that made you crazy, but rather trying to set life straight where it was unstraightenable.” -Anne Lamott

“It’s a Broadway musical about cockfighting. From the rooster’s perspective.” -Paisley, WIGU

“It’s a whore’s nest of confusion.  -my friend Austin, in reference to Microsoft Access

“It’s not about the fear; it’s about the courage. It’s not about the repression; it’s about the resilience.” -Unknown

“It’s the perfect time of year/ somewhere far away from here/ I feel fine enough I guess/ considering everything’s a mess.” -Barenaked Ladies

“It’s the wanting we want, not the having.” -Geneen Roth

“I’ve been trying to think up a definitive word for when you find someone, or someone finds you as is the case, and you have everything in common. And I’ve come to the conclusion that nice doesn’t quite fit, and wonderful sounds over-celebratory. There’s no English word good enough. But it’s calming not being alone. To know that you’ve shared enough experiences, and know enough…to just know.” -Valeofenna

“I’ve got somebody else’s thoughts in my head/ I want some of my own” -Lifehouse

“‘I’ve never been one for physical exercise,’ she said. ‘But what God does with our faith must be something like workouts. He sees to it that our faith gets pushed and pulled, stretched and pounded, taken to its limits so its limits can expand.” -Cynthia Coppersrmith, At Home in Mitford

“Late night episodes of Antique Roadshow show us how a thing can be so old, so full of dust, and still be worth so much. Like the hearts that pound inside our chest, resisting cardiac arrest; despite the damage, they will still warm to the touch.” -Winter Machine

“Let’s understand the power of our pens. I’m all for people writing what they believe in. But this is about then saying that you don’t believe in it — that ‘it’s only words.’ You cannot separate yourself from your creation. You can’t. You have to be responsible for the shit you put out there.” -Tori

“Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Let us face a pluralistic world in which there are no universal churches, no single remedy for all diseases, no one way to teach or write or sing, no magic diet, no world poets, and no chosen races, but only the wretched and wonderfully diversified human race.” -Jacques Barzun

“Life is lived forwards, but understood backwards.” -Soran Kierkegaard

“Life is no brief candle to me.  It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for a moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible.”  -Georbe Bernard Shaw

“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” -George Bernard Shaw

“Light must get in, at all costs. Light will commit murder to get in. It is no use boarding up the house with blindness. One can pour darkness over the house until a thick layer sets, impenetrable as death, a concrete refusal, numbness, isolation; yet inside one meets light in every room, sitting by the fire, at home.” -Scented Gardens for the Blind

“Literature will tell you what life is, but it won’t tell you how to get out of it.” -Katagiri Roshi

“Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.” -Ursula K. LeGuin

“Love is friendship set on fire.” -Jeremy Taylor

“Love is the energy of life.” -Robert Browning

“Love is worth death. Love is worth life. My search for you, your search for me, goes beyond life and death into one long call in the wilderness. I do not know if what I hear is an answer or an echo. Perhaps I will hear nothing. It doesn’t matter. The journey must be made.” -The Powerbook

“Loyalty to the country always.  Loyalty to the government when it deserves it.”  -Mark Twain

“Magic has to be believed. That’s the only way it’s real.” -A Little Princess (1995 screenplay)

“Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering in order that they may have existence.” -Leon Bloy

“maybe i didn’t like hear/ but i still can’t believe speed racer is dead/ so then i thought i’d make some plans/ but fire thought she’d really rather be water instead” -Tori

“me, oh, i keep busy at haunting myself.” -the entirety of mess’s entry entitled ” what to say when someone asks what you’ve been up to, when what you’ve really been doing is being stuck in the dark place, no matter how many flashlights you have, no matter how many batteries, and you just want to give up on everything.”

“Mom doesn’t just enjoy guilt trips; she runs the travel agency.” -Unknown

“…mourn the loss/ of something you cannot name.” -play-tragic

“my blah was un-blahed.” -E

“My father dug so fiercely at the end of the rainbow that part of the kitchen subsided.” -The Powerbook

“‘My feet are cold,’ one says, and the legless man replies: ‘So are mine. So are mine.’” -Kentucky folklore

“my mom assumed that because I go out by myself at night, I must not be afraid at all. if I were even a little afraid I’d stay in or wait till I had a man to go out with. in her world there’s no room for doing something anyway even if it’s scary. in my world that’s one of the most important ways I fight against this sort of shit.” -Julian

“My parents separated this summer, and I spent a month in Virginia watching the house turn strange.” -Bemused

“my scream got lost in a paper cup/ you think there’s a heaven/ where some screams have gone/ i got 25 bucks and a cracker/ do you think it’s enough/ to get us there/ but what if i’m a mermaid/ in these jeans of his/ with her name still on it/ hey but i don’t care/ cause sometimes i said/ sometimes i hear my voice and it’s been/ HERE silent all these/ years go by will i still be waiting/ for somebody else to understand/ years go by if i’m stripped of my beauty/ and the orange clouds raining in my head/ years go by will i choke on my tears/ till finally there is nothing left/ one more casualty/ you know we’re too EASY easy easy” -Tori

“My search for you, your search for me, is a search after something that cannot be found. Only the impossible is worth the effort.” -The Powerbook

“My stomach is growling like a ho in lingerie crawling across a bed.”  -my friend Mandy

“Nature is a language; can’t you read?” -The Smiths

“never thought i.d end up being girl crazy—as in a girl, as in crazy.” -mess

“Never underestimate the power of a meowing snail…” -Chordchild

“Nine-tenths of wisdom is appreciation. Go find somebody’s hand and squeeze it, while there’s time.” -Dale Dauten

“no i don’t prefer obscurity but i’m an idealistic girl and i wouldn’t work for you no matter what you paid and i may not be able to change the whole fucking world but i could be the million that you never made” -Ani

“No matter how low you go, there’s always an unexplored basement.” -F. Scott Fitzgerald

“No one knows how much the world is worn out, defaced, by the continual rubbing of human sight upon its pages.” -Scented Gardens for the Blind

“Nonsense, duckie – it’s perfectly simple. You lose yourself in something other than yourself, and it’s a lovely rest. -Miss Blossom, I Capture the Castle

“Not till the loom is silent/ and the wheels have ceased to fly,/ shall God unroll the canvas/ and explain the reason why.” -Unknown

“Note of Happiness, as mentioned above, it’s official Eric is too busy to talk to me…once again…but he’s back! One mile from me! Here! Now! He could technically one day run me over with his car! Yay!” -E

“Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everybody I’ve ever known.” -Invisible Monsters, Chuck Palahniuk

“Now is the autumn of our ennui.” -Invisible Monsters, Chuck Palahniuk

“Now that you’ve made me want to die/ You tell me that you’re unboyfriendable/ And I could make you pay and pay/ But I could never make you stay.” -Stephen Merrit

“Now we have a responsibility to treat ourselves kindly; then we will treat the world in the same way.”  -Natalie Goldberg

“Often in a beginning class students break down crying when they read pieces they have written. That is okay. Often as they write they cry, too. However, I encourage them to continue reading or writing right through the tears so they may come out on the other side and not be thrown off by the emotion. Don’t stop at the tears; go through to the truth. This is the discipline.” -Natalie Goldberg

“Once bitten, twice shy.” -GF Northell

“once told not to ask what she could answer/ she quit the use of words/ whose syllables were worn./ a language born inside her brain/ ripped at her minds like pterodactyls/ neon rain…revised: she is wiser now/ but also lost./ still as feet the shade of sky/ a blue blood vein/ remains.” -Chordchild

“one of my cool professors at seminary used to teach us that when we have a decision to make and we could do the loving thing or the ‘right’ thing, it’s nearly always best to do the loving thing!” -mitfordgal

“One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to travel and explore. Another is that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around.” -Anne Lamott

“One of the things that makes a dead leaf fall to the ground is the bud of the new leaf that pushes it off the limb. When you let God fill you with his love and forgiveness, the things you think you desperately want to hold on to start falling away…and we hardly notice their passing.” -Father Tim, At Home in Mitford

“One person caring about another represents life’s greatest value.” -Jim Rohn

“Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.” -Richard Feynman

“Our own heart always exceeds us.” -Rilke

“Our task is to say a holy yes to the real things of our life as they exist – the real truth of who we are: several pounds overweight, the gray cold street outside, the Christmas tinsel in the showcase, the Jewish writer in the orange booth across from her blond friend who has black children. We must become writers who accept things as they are, come to love the details, and step forward with a yes on our lips so there can be no more noes in the world, noes that invalidate life and stop these details from continuing.” -Natalie Goldberg

“Or was the atmosphere something which one by one the inhabitants brought with them when they came to stay and which remained when they left, as much a apart of their discarded property as the worn shaving brush, the rusty razor blades dropped behind teh bath, the empty coat hangers hanging light-headed in the closed serious wardrobe, the stray shirt that came back from the laundry too late to be claimed…” -Scented Gardens for the Blind

“Originality does not consist in saying what no one has ever said before, but in saying exactly what you think yourself.” -James Stephens

“Parts of the inside of her head screamed at other parts of the inside of her head.” -Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“People are particularly stupid today. I can’t talk to any more of them.” -Michel, Gilmore Girls

“People are struggling always for their identity, trying to carry home in knotted handkerchiefs, handbags, purses, brain cells, gutters of flesh, those parts of themselves which they most treasure; but in the dark there is always confusion, with pieces of self being mislaid or exchanged unawares or snatched by others who covet them, so that on return from the outer edge of being there is little cause for triumph; the entire plunder has become the common property of humanity.” -Scented Gardens for the Blind

“People are the most fascinating mysteries I’ve ever read.” -Tori Amos

“Perfection is the consolation of those who have nothing else.”  -Steven Milhauser, The Ambition of the Short Story

“Poems are taught as though the poet has put a secret key in his words and it is the reader’s job to find it. Poems are not mystery novels. Instead we should go closer and closer to the work. Learn to recall images and lines precisely as the writer said them. Don’t step away from their warmth and fire to talk ‘about’ them. Stay close to them. That’s how you’ll learn to write. Stay with the original work. Stay with your original mind and write from it.” -Natalie Goldberg

“Prayers are answered in the way they’re asked.” -Ram Tirth

“Psychos are the last straw!” -Georgette, Amelie

“Rabbits…are like human beings in many ways. One of these is certainly their staunch ability to withstand disaster and to let the stream of their life carry them along, past reaches of terror and loss. They have a certain quality that would not be accurate to describe as callousness or indifference. It is, rather, a blessedly circumscribed imagination and an intuitive feeling that Life is Now. …As with primitive humans the very strength and vividness of their sympathy brought with it a true release. Their feelings were not false or assumed. While the story was being told, they heard it without the reserve or detachment that the kindest of civilized humans retains as he reads the newspaper…The story over, the demands of their own hard, rough lives began to re-assert themselves in their hearts, in their rooms, their blood and appetites.” -Richard Adams, Watership Down

“Reach out and touch faith.” -Depeche Mode

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” -Philip K. Dick

“Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.” -F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a
particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit.” -Abbie Hoffman

“School is an institution built on the axiom that learning is the result of teaching. And institutional wisdom continues to accept this axiom, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.” -Ivan Illich

“School was a worry to her. She was not glib or quick in a world where glibness and quickness were easily confused with ability to learn.” -Tillie Olsen

“Seeing death as the end of life is like seeing the horizon as the end of the ocean.” -David Searls

“Several years ago, I took a singing lesson from a Sufi singing master, and he told me there is no such thing as tone-deafness. ‘Singing is ninety percent listening. You have to learn to listen.’ If you listen totally, your body fills with the music, so when you open your mouth the music automatically comes out of you.” -Natalie Goldberg

“Shall we make a new rule of life from tonight: always to try to be a little kinder than is necessary?” -Sir James Matthew Barrie

“She had been utterly pleased with herself. ‘I runned away!’ she chirped, and the sun was no match for her smile. And Zinkoff saw in that moment something that he had no words for. He saw that a kid runs to be found and jumps to be caught. That’s what being a kid is: found, caught.” -Loser, Jerry Spinnelli

“She sat down next to him on the swing, in her nightgown, not slim the way girls get when they are not loved at seventeen, not fat the way women get when they are not loved at fifty, but absoluteley right, a roundness, a firmness, the way women get at any age, he thought, when there is not question.”  -Dandelion Wine

“She was a diva goddess, the funkiest woman I’ve ever seen. She had bright red braided hair piled on her head, a rhinestone necklace, and every inch of her big body could dance. It was as if the Venus of Willendorf had learned to sing the blues.” -bronx-bound1

“she’s writing, she’s writing, she’s writing a novel/ she’s writing, she’s weaving, conceiving a plot/ it quickens, it thickens, you can’t put it down now/ it takes you, it shakes you, it makes you lose your thought/… you think she’s an open book/ but you don’t know which page to turn to/ do you…” -Cake

“Shyness is nice, and shyness can stop you for doing things in life you’d like to.” -The Smiths

“Sights and Sounds/ pull me back down/ another year/ I WAS HERE/ I WAS HERE” -Tori

“She would like to fill the lake/ with other swimmers, with answers/ she calls her name.” -Margaret Atwood

“She shook her head from side to side, resigned to her rebellious brain. Why was there nothing it refused? No misery, no regret, no hateful picture too rotten to accept? Like a greedy child it snatched up everything. Just once, could it say, No thank you? I just ate and can’t hold another bite? I am full God damn it of two boys with mossy teeth, one sucking on my breast the other holding me down, their bookreading teacher watching and writing it up. I am still full of that, God damn it, I can’t go back and add more. …But my greedy brain says, Oh thanks, I’d love more – so I add more. And no sooner than I do, there is no stopping. …My brain would go right ahead and take it and never say, No thank you. I don’t want to know or have to remember that. I have other things to do: worry, for example, about tomorrow…about age and sickness, not to speak of love.” -Beloved

“she’s been everybody else’s girl/ maybe one day she’ll be her own” -Tori

“Slightest accidents open up new worlds.” -The Powerbook

“Smiling will only intensify the mystery.” -Unknown

“So the whole world stepped outside/ 50 million people filling the streets worldwide/ But one man still closed his eyes/ Yeah, yeah/ Him and his followers who have more safety and security/ than money should ever be able to buy/ And I thought, who cries?/ Does he cry?/ Will his family every die?/ Will his daughters ever go to war?/ Or do we save that poor?” -Gina Young

“So turn the lights off on the girl with the broken face/ her pencil heart has been erased/ she’s standing on a lonely stage/ and if you’re nice/ you can throw a secondhand smile her way/ just please don’t lie to her/ she’s had enough today.” -Gina Young

“Some people rival art.” -Chordchild

“Something we were withholding made us weak until we found it was ourselves.” -Robert Frost

“Sometimes, in this room, at the last minute, the parents, husbands, wives, turned with loathing from the truth of the frightening sickness. Sometimes they took their strange-eyed ones away again. It was fear, or bad judgment well meant enough, or…that straying grain of jealousy and anger that would not let the long line of misery be severed a generation after their own.” -I Never Promised You A Rose Garden

“Sometimes it’s a form of love just to talk to somebody that you have nothing in common with and still be fascinated by their presence.” -David Byrne

“Sometimes things don’t go, after all,/ from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel/ faces down frost; green thrives; the crops down’t fail,/ Sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.// A people sometimes will step back from war;/ elect an honest man; decide they care/ enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor./ Some men become what they were born for.// Sometimes our best efforts do not go/ amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to./ The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow/ that seemed hard frozen: may it happen for you.” -Sheenagh Pugh

“Sometimes, we get so worn out with being useful that we get useless. …Are you too exhausted to run and too scared to rest?” -At Home in Mitford

“somewhere between my paranoia and my wishful thinking, I’m convinced someone must be reading this.” -atomgirl

“Somewhere in the brain, the book said, an impulse in the brain letting the words go free, sympathetic movement of larynx lips tongue, the shaping of breat, and even then, the book said, it may not be speech which emerges, it may only be a cry such as a bird makes or a beast lurking in the trees at night, or loneliest of all, not the cry of a bird or beast but the first uttering of a new language which is understood by no one and nothing, and which causes a smoke screen of fear to cloud the mind, as defense against the strangeness.” -Scented Gardens for the Blind

“Start doing the things you think should be done, and start being what you think society should become. Do you believe in free speech? Then speak freely. Do you love the truth? Then tell it. Do you believe in an open society? Then act in the open. Do you believe in a decent and humane society? Then behave decently and humanely.” -Adam Michnik

“Summer here can batter you senseless…Everything seems as if it’s been cooked and stirred together so that when I hear a voice speaking on the street, I can’t tell how far away it is or even really differentiate it from the lights over the river and the shuttered storefronts in the dusk. And really, it doesn’t matter because we’re all part of the same city that is breathing right now and letting us run and laugh and speak through it like the delerium of its fever.” -bronx-bound1

“take me home/ take me home/ and leave me there/ think i’m going to cry, i don’t know why/ think i’m going to sing myself a lullaby/ feel free to listen/ feel free to stare…” -Ani

“Teach in order to learn.” -Baba Hari Dass

“that’s all we ever write/ I said – our out-of-order abcs.” -Chordchild

“That’s the way I want to be/ colorful and crazy loud/ and absolutely free…” -Winter Machine

“The doctor leaned forward in her chair, feeling Deborah’s exhaustion at revealing the things which seemed to Deborah to most truly motivate her. A secret language concealing a still more secret one; a world veiling a hidden world; and symptoms guarding still deeper symptoms to which it was not yet time to go, and those in turn concealing a still, still deeper burning wish to live. She wanted to tell the stunned-looking girl in front of her that this sickness, which everyone shied away from and was frightened of – and tongues and codes and propitiations were for her the means to stay alive in a world of anarchy and terror.” -I Never Promised You A Rose Garden

“The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.” -Henri Bergson

“The freedom of the press is meaningless if nobody asks the question.” -Ani DiFranco

“The future was a matter of keeping the past at bay.” -Beloved

“The giving of love is an education in itself.” -Eleanor Roosevelt

“The heart has its reasons which reason does not know.” -Pascal

“the mad gifted/ girl/ swims away.” -transparencies

“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” -Audre Lorde

“The moment you have in your heart this extraordinary thing called love and feel the depth, the delight, the ecstacy of it, you will discover that for you the world is transformed.” -I Krishnamurti

“The most painful moral struggles are not those between good and evil, but between the good and the lesser good.” -Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

“The most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy is a liquid.” -JD Salinger

“The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions.” -Susan Sontag

“The only way you can endure your pain is to let it be painful.” -Shunryu Suzuki

“The past is magnetic. It draws us in. We cannot help ourselves and, as with other things that we cannot help in ourselves, we make up elaborate explanations, reasonable rational explanations to chant away the powerful things that don’t belong to us.” -The Powerbook

“The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.” -Albert Einstein

“The President in particular is very much a figurehead – he wields no real power whatsoever. He is apparently chosen by the government, but the qualities he is required to display are not those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage. For this reason the President is always a controversial choice, always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it.” -Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“The problem is not that there are problems. The problem is expecting otherwise and thinking that having problems is a problem.” -Theodore Rubin

“The quickest remedy [for a broken heart] is that you must learn not to value love because it is requited. It makes no difference whether your love is returned. Your love is of value to you because you give it.” -The Wit and Wisdom of Quentin Crisp

“The real trick to life is not to be in the know, but to be in the mystery.” -a rather terrible movie (What the Bleep)

“The real questions are the ones that obtrude upon your consciousness whether you like it or not, the ones that make your mind start vibrating like a jackhammer, the ones that you ‘come to terms with” only to discover that they are still there. Real questions refuse to be placated. They barge into your life at the times when it seems most important for them to stay away. They are the questions asked most frequently and answered most inadequately, the ones that reveal their true natures slowly, reluctantly, most often against your will.” -Ingrid Bengis

“The sick are all so afraid of their own uncontrollable power! Somehow they cannot believe that they are only people, holding only a human-sized anger!” -I Never Promised You A Rose Garden

“The story is reading you now, line by line.” -The Powerbook

“The thing that is so wrong about being mentally ill is the terrible price you have to pay for your own survival.”-I Never Promised You A Rose Garden

“the threads that are golden don’t break easily.” -Tori

“The university of life has taught me how to brave the night, pretending to be somewhat cool.” -Winter Machine

“The World is not dangerous because of those who do harm, but because of those who look at it without doing anything.” -Albert Einstein

“Their very illness made them examine sanity as few “sane” people could.” -I Never Promised You A Rose Garden

“There are luxuries we can’t afford/ But in our house we never get bored/ We can dance to the radio station/ That plays in our teeth.” -Barenaked Ladies

“there are too many stars and not enough sky.” -Tori

“There goes my pain/ There goes my chains/ Did you see them fall … There goes the world/ off of my shoulders/ There goes the world off of my back.” –Lifehouse

“There was a day, years and years ago, when I tried to escape from the Muck House. I took a ladder and leaned it against the high wall that kept us in and the world out. I was three rungs away from the top of the ladder when I felt it shake down below. I didn’t need to look down to know that my mother was trying to shake me off like an apple from a tree. // ‘Get down here!’ // I got down, and as I hit the ground my mother hit me twice across the face. // ‘What do you think you were playing at?’ //’I wanted to see the Wilderness.’ // ‘There’s nothing there. You know that.’ // ‘If there’s nothing there, it can’t harm me.’ //
‘Nothing is the most dangerous thing of all.’ // ‘Why?’// ‘If there’s nothing there, you can invent something. You won’t be able to bear the emptiness. It will still be empty, but you’ll tell yourself it’s not.’// ‘What I tell myself is true.’ // ‘What you tell yourself is a story.’ // ‘This is a story – you, me, the Muck House, the treasure.’ // ‘This is real life.’ // ‘How do you know?’ // ‘No one would ever pay to watch it.’ || She turned to go in to the battered house. Then she turned to me again. // ‘And I would pay anything not to live it.’// ‘Don’t live it. Change it.’// ‘You don’t understand, do you?’// ‘Understand what?’ // ‘This is real life.’” -The Powerbook

“There’s not such thing as effortless beauty – you should know that. There’s no effort which is not beautiful.” -The Powerbook

“There’s so much joy in life,/ so many pleasures all around/ But the pleasure of insomnia/ is one I’ve never found./ With all life has to offer,/ there’s so much to be enjoyed/ But the pleasures of insomnia/ are ones I can’t avoid.” -Barenaked Ladies

“They can not take away our self respect if we do not give it to them.” -Mahatma Gandhi

“Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for joy.” -Pema Chodron

“This brave little smile is my all-purpose expression/ the meaning of which I will leave to your discretion.” -Ani

“This is just another ending in a neverending story.” -Unknown

“This looks familiar, vaguely familiar,/ Almost unreal, yet, it’s too soon to feel yet./ Close to my soul, and yet so far away./ I’m going to go back there someday.// Sun rises, night falls, sometimes the sky calls./ Is that a song there, and do I belong there?/ I’ve never been there, but I know the way./ I’m going to go back there someday.// …Part heaven, part space, or have I found my place?/ You can just visit, but I plan to stay./ I’m going to go back there someday.” -”I’m Going to Go Back There Someday”

“There’s not a word yet/ for old friends who’ve just met.” -Gonzo the Great, “I’m Going to Go Back There Someday”

“They gave him a seashell. ‘So you’ll learn to love the water.’ They opened a cage and let a bird go free: ‘So you’ll learn to love the air.’ They gave him a geranium. ‘So you’ll learn to love the earth.’ And they gave him a little bottle sealed up tight. ‘Don’t ever, ever open it. So you’ll learn to love mystery.’” -Eduardo Galeano

“Thought,/ So long a jade, and for so long oppressed,/ Springs from his forehead ! She will know Why !…/ Let her but gallop free, and Man will find Faith !/ – Why the blue silence, unfathomable space ?/ Why the golden stars, teeming like sands ?/ If one ascended forever, what would one see up there ?/ Does a sheperd drive this enormous flock/ Of worlds on a journey through this horror of space ?/ And do all these worlds contained in the vast ether,/ tremble at the tones of an eternal voice ?/ – And Man, can he see ? can he say : I believe ?/ Is the langage of thought anymore than a dream ?/ If man is born so quickly, if life is so short/ Whence does he come ? Does he sink into the deep Ocean/ Of Germs, of Foetuses, of Embryos, to the bottom/ of the huge Crucible where Nature the Mother/ Will resuscitate him, a living creature,/ To love in the rose and to grow in the corn ?…// We cannot know ! – We are weighed down/ With a cloak of ignorance, hemmed in by chimaeras !/ Men like apes, dropped from our mothers’ wombs,/ Our feeble reason hides the infinite from us !/ We wish to perceive : – and Doubt punishes us !/ Doubt, dismal bird, beat us down with its wing…/ – And the horizon rushes away in endless flight !…/// The vast heaven is open ! the mysteries lie dead/ Before erect Man, who folds his strong arms/ Among the vast splendour of abundant Nature !/ He sings… and the woods sing, the river murmurs/ A song full of happiness which rises towards the light !…/ – it is Redemption ! it is love ! it is love !…” -Arthur Rimbaud

“Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.” -Cicero

“To avoid discovery I stay on the run. To discover things for myself I stay on the run.” -The Powerbook

“To be too conscious is an illness.” -Dostoevsky

“To embrace the child may threaten the adult who values information above wonder, entertainment above play, and intelligence above ignorance. If we were really to care for the child, we would have to face our own lower natures – our indomitable emotions, our insane desires, and the vast range of our incapacity.” -Thomas Moore

“To get to a place where you could love anything you chose – not to need permission for desire – well now, that was freedom.” -Beloved

“To love someone deeply gives you strength. Being loved by someone deeply gives you courage.” -Lao Tzu

“To me you are the teacher in the Charlie Brown cartoon.” -Michel, Gilmore Girls

“To some extent, conformity is insanity.” -John Nash

“Touch me quick.  We won’t be in these bodies for long.”  -Gina Young

“Tradition is a trap that allows people to stick their heads in the sand. Everything in the past was so quaint, so charming. Times were simpler. Kids didn’t have sex. Neighbors knew each other. It’s a freaking fairy tale. Things sucked then too. It just sucked without indoor plumbing.” -Luke, Gilmore Girls

“Truth suffers from too much analysis.” -Dune Messiah

“watch me be this other thing, i never know/ if i’m marooned or where the purple people go/ then lily white matricide from vicious words/ it doesn’t leave a scratch so therefore no one’s hurt/ thunder wishes it could be the snow/ wishes it could be as loved as she can be/ these gifts are here for her, for you, for me” -Tori

“We are all interwoven and create each other’s universes. When one person dies out of his time, it affects us all. We don’t live for ourselves; we are interconnected. We live for the earth, for Texas, for the chicken we ate last night who gave us its life, for our mother, for the highway and the ceiling and the trees. We have a responsibility to treat ourselves kindly; then we will treat the world in the same way.” -Natalie Goldberg

“We are story tellers, story seekers. We lean into the promise of narrative the way dogs lean into the wind, imagining a meal from a faint whiff of hide, detecting some kind of trouble in the distant rumble of an engine. It is our way of making sense of the world. We guess that the policeman who issued a ticket when a warning would have sufficed must have had an argument with his wife this morning; we assume the ailing or distracted parent makes the small child at the supermarket drag her feet or fret. One thing occurs, then something else occurs after that as a result. What happens next? we are always asking. And why? A story develops, the weaving together of circumstance and explanation. There is the rhythm of cause and effect, cause and effect; they are links in a chain of understanding.” -Deborah Y. Abramson

“We don’t have to stars exploding in the night/ Or electric eels under the covers/ We don’t have to be/ Anything quite so unreal/ Lets just be lovers.” -Stephen Merrit

“We have what you want, though you may not know you want it.” -Roger Mifflin, Propr., The Haunted Bookshop

“We may be young, but we’re not powerless. We play by their rules long enough and it becomes our game.” -Valentine (“Ender’s Game” pg. 237)

“We must always be on the lookout for perverse dynamic processes which carry even good things to excess. It is precisely these excesses which become the most evil things in the world. The devil, after all, is a fallen angel.” -Kenneth Boulding

“We must someday make a test to show us where the health is as well as the illness…The hidden strength is to deep a secret. But in the end…it is our only ally.” -I Never Promised You A Rose Garden

“We need a president who’s fluent in at least one language.” -Buck Henry

“We put our truths together in pieces, but you use nails, and I use glue. You mend with staples. I mend with screws. You stitch what I would bandage. Your truth may not look like mine, but that is not what matters. What matters is this. You can look at a scar and see hurt or you can look at a scar and see healing. Try to understand.” -Sheri Reynolds

“we scream in cathedrals/ why can’t it be beautiful?/ why does there got to be a sacrifice?” -Tori

“we took down all the pictures and then we took down all the walls packed up our expectations and piled em up in the hall yeah we bagged our future and kicked it to the curb and then we stood there unencumbered and we stood there undeterred cuz we were done clinging to the things we were afraid to lose and the only thing left was a breathtaking view and you looked at me and i looked at you and you said how bout now baby? now whatchoo wanna do?” -Ani

“we were here, and I am here, and time is the only thing keeping us from being together.” -mcearstix

“We were not lovers. We were love.” -The Powerbook

“Welcome to the human race. Nobody controls his own life, Ender. The best you can do is choose to be controlled by good people, by people who love you.”
-Valentine, Ender’s Game

“Well there’s a piece of Maria in every song that I sing/ And the price of a memory is the memory of the sorrow it brings.” -Counting Crows

“Well you may not be beautiful/ But it’s not for me to judge/ I don’t know if you’re beautiful/ Because I love you too much…” -Stephen Merrit

“What a difference there is between wearing even the skimpiest bathing-suit and wearning nothing! After a few minutes I seemed to live in every inch of my body as fully as I usually do in my head and my hands and my heart. I had the fascinating feeling that I could think as easily with my limbs as with my brain – and suddenly the whole of me thought that Topaz’s nosense about communing with nature isn’t nonsense at all.” -Cassandra, I Capture the Castle

“What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only wish I’d realized it sooner.” -Colette

“What began as good reason became good excuse.” -The Powerbook

“What is the good of the arts if they’re interchangeable? What is the good of the ear if it tells you the same as the eye? Helen’s one aim is to translate tunes into the language of painting, and pictures into the language of music. It’s very ingenious, and she says several pretty things in the process, but what’s gained, I’d like to know? Oh, it’s all rubbish, radically false. If Monet’s really Debussy and Debussy’s really Monet, neither gentleman is worth his salt – that’s my opinion.” -Margaret, Howard’s End

“what do you plan to do with all your freedom?” -Tori

“what good is a poker face/ when you’ve got an open hand/ i was supposed to be cool about this/ yeah, i remember cool was the plan…” -Ani

“What is sacred about all of our lives, even those of us who would never dream of using such a word for it, is that God speaks to us through what happens to use – even through such unpromising events as walking up the road to get the mail out of the mailbox, maybe, or seeing something in the TV news that brings you up short, or laughing yourself silly with a friend. If skeptics ask for an instance of God in their lives, I suggest that they pay closer attention to the next time when, for unaccountable reasons, they find tears in their eyes.” -Frederick Buechner

“What is to give light must endure burning.” -Unknown

“What my mind’s eye was trying to tell me was that the Vicar and Miss Marcy had managed to by-pass the suffering that comes to most people – he by his religion, she by her kindness to others. And it came to me that if one does that, one is liable to miss too much along with the suffering – perhaps in a way, life itself. …I said aloud: ‘I don’t want to miss anything.’ And then misery came rushing back like a river that had been damned up. I tried to open my heart to it, to welcome it as part of my life’s experience, and at first that made it easier to bear. Then it got worse than ever before – it was physical as well as mental, my heart and ribs and shoulders and chest, even my arms, ached. I longed so desperately for someone to comfort me that I went and laid my head on Miss Blossom’s bust – I thought of it as soft and motherly, under a royal-blue satin blouse, and imagined her saying: ‘That’s right – go through it, not round it, duckie. It’s the best way for most of us in the end.’” -I Capture the Castle

“What part of your memory is selective and tends to forget?” -Alanis Morissette

“What we cultivate and care about inwardly either freshens or poisons the bloodstream of humanity.” -Robert Corin Morris

“What you feel is what you are and what you are is beautiful.” -Goo Goo Dolls

“When did we start taking comfort in silence instead of the chance to explain?” -Winter Machine

“When everybody loves me, I will never be lonely.” -Counting Crows

“When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.” -Audre Lorde

“when i look at you i squint/ you are that beautiful” -Ani
“when I search my heart, it’s you I find.” -Ben Harper
“when I think about all the shit the world put her through, I want to rip the skin off someone and/or cry my eyes out, but what it comes down to is that I’ll just keep loving her instead, because eventually the world will balance out and it will not be against the rules for us to be in each other’s lives full form.” -Chordchild

“When I write, I cannot be the quiet one.” -Bemused

“When the day is long and the night, the night is yours alone,/ when you’re sure you’ve had enough/ of this life, well hang on./ Don’t let yourself go, everybody cries and everybody hurts/ sometimes. // Sometimes everything is wrong. Now it’s time to sing along/ When your day is night alone, (hold on, hold on)/ if you feel like letting go, (hold on)/ when you think you’ve had too much of this life, well hang on.” -REM

“When we don’t know who to hate, we hate ourselves.” -Invisible Monsters, Chuck Palahniuk

“When you are present, the world is truly alive.” -Writing Down the Bones

“When you dream,/ what do you dream about?/ When you dream,/ what do you dream about?/ Do you dream about/ music or mathematics/ or planets too far for the eye?/ Do you dream about/ Jesus or quantum mechanics/ or angels who sing lullabies?// His fontanelle pulses with lives that he’s lived/ With memories he’ll learn to ignore/ And when it is closed, he already knows/ he’s forgotten all he knew before/ But when sleep sets in/ history begins/ But the future will win// When you dream,/ what do you dream about?/ When you dream,/ what do you dream about?/ Are they colour or black and white,/ Yiddish or English/ or languages not yet conceived?/ Are they silent or boisterous?/ Do you hear noises just/ loud enough to be perceived?/ Do you hear Del Shannon’s “Runaway” playing/ on transistor radio waves?/ With so little experience,/ your mind not yet cognizant/ Are you wise beyond your few days?/ When you dream,/ what do you dream about?/ When you dream,/ what do you dream about?” -Barenaked Ladies

“When you like music more than life, something’s wrong.” -Ks Choice

“When your work speaks for itself, don’t interrupt.” -Henry J. Kaiser

“Whenever you get there, there’s no there there.” -Gertrude Stein

“Whether or not we realize it each of us has within us the ability to set some kind of example for people. Knowing this would you rather be the one known for being the one who encouraged others, or the one who inadvertently discouraged those around you?” -Josh Hinds

“Where the river cross/ crosses/ the lake/ Where the words/ Jump off my pen and/ into your pages/ Do you think/ just like that/ You can divide/ This/ You as yours/ Me as mine/ to before we were/ Us // If the rain/ Has/ to separate from/ Itself/ does it say/ ‘pick out your/ cloud?’/ pick out your/ cloud?” -Tori

“Why do we remember the past but not the future?” -Stephen Hawking

“Why do you come to sit meditation? Why don’t you make writing your practice? If you go deep enough in writing, it will take you anyplace.” -Katagiri Roshi to Natalie Goldberg

Why does nothing matter as much as this? // How do you seem to write me to myself? // I am a message. You change the meaning. // I am a map that you redraw. -The Powerbook

“Why else keep a journal if not to examine your own filth?” -Anne Sexton

“why procrastinate now when I could procrastinate later?” -braveatoms

“‘Will I ever be young?’ I asked my mother.” -The Powerbook

“Without weekends, Monday would be a day like any other. Instead, it’s a day like tomorrow.” -pinkpajamas

“Would it be all right? Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something?” -Beloved

“Writers do like money; artists, contrary to popular belief, do like to eat.” -Natalie Goldberg

“Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as the headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” -E.L. Doctorow

“Writing is everything, unconditional. There is no separation between writing, life, and the mind. If you think big enough to let people eat cars, you will see that ants are elephants and men are women. You will be able to see the transparency of all forms as so that all separation disappears. …This is what metaphor is. [Metaphor] comes from a place that is very courageous, willing to step out of our preconceived ways of seeing things and open so large that it can see the oneness in an ant and in an elephant.” -Natalie Goldberg

“Yesterday I started making an effort to retrain myself in food appreciation” -liegt_am_meer

“you and I/ we’re like 4 year olds/ we want to know why and how come/ about everything/ we want to reveal ourselves at will/ and speak our minds/ and never talk small/ and be intuitive/ and question mightily and/ find god.” -Alanis

“You are a splendid butterfly.” -Stephen Merrit

“You better believe I’m trying to beat this.” –Lifehouse

“You breathe like asthma/ you always do/ I don’t believe in God/ I believe in you.” -Gina Young

“You can have your fill/ but don’t take too much.” -“God Bless The Child”

“You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out God hates all the same people you do.” -Bird By Bird

“You can tell more about a person by what he says about others than you can by what others say about him.” -Leo Aikman

“You can say anything if enough people will listen.” -Invisible Monsters, Chuck Palahniuk

“you can’t really place blame cuz blame is much too messy some was bound to get on you while you were trying to put it on me” -Ani

“You could never be a vegetable. Even artichokes have hearts!” -Amelie

“You know, you’re always going to be met with challenges you think you can never overcome, but everyone has the ability to surprise themselves.” -Joan of Arcadia

“You left me with nothing/ but I’ve worked with less.” -Ani

‘You lost her?’
‘Of course I did.’
‘It was a love affair not an assault course.’
‘Love is an assault course.’” -The Powerbook

“You lost yourself in your search to find something else to hide behind/ The fearful always preyed upon your confidence/ Did they see the consequence, when they pushed you around/ The arrogant build kingdoms made of the different ones/ Breaking them ’til they’ve become just another crown/ Refuse to feel/ Anything at all/ Refuse to slip/ Refuse to fall.” -Lifehouse

“You needn’t be so scared. Love doesn’t end. Just because we don’t see each other… People go on loving God, don’t they, all their lives without seeing Him?” -The End of the Affair

“Your heart has a home in mine.” -Ben Harper

“You’re the excuse that I use when I want to stop trying.” -Matt Nathanson