Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.
Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions
What I say is, a town isn’t a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it’s got a bookstore it knows it’s not fooling a soul.
Neil Gaiman, American Gods
There’s no way for them to take away my sadness, but they can make sure I am not empty of all the other feelings.
David Levithan, Love is the Higher Law
Thank you, dear God, for this good life and forgive us if we do not love it enough.
Garrison Keillor, Leaving Home
I record my life, sifting and trying to separate what is real from what I’ve dreamed. I have decided not to tell you what is fact versus what is unfact primarily because (a) I am giving you a portrait of the essence of me, and (b) because, living where I do, living in the chasm that cuts through thought, it is lonely… come with me, reader. I am toying with you, yes, but for a real reason. I am asking you to enter the confusion with me, to give up the ground with me, because sometimes that frightening floaty place is really the truest of all. Kierkegaard says, ‘The greatest lie of all is the feeling of firmness beneath our feet. We are most honest when we are lost.’ Enter that lostness with me. Live in the place I am, where the view is murky, where the connecting bridges and orienting maps have been surgically stripped away.
Lauren Slater, Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir
Where there’s hope, there’s life. It fills us with fresh courage and makes us strong again.
Anne Frank, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl
When you are pushed by circumstance to do the one thing you have always most specifically loathed and feared, this can be, at the very least, an interesting growth opportunity.
Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
Do yourself a favor. Before it’s too late, without thinking too much about it first, pack a pillow and a blanket and see as much of the world as you can. You will not regret it. One day it will be too late.
Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake
‘And now,’ cried Max, ‘let the wild rumpus start!’

Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are

RIP

The whole reason I’m having us talk about my record and what I get afraid might happen is that I don’t want it to happen, see? […]I don’t want to get all testy or hypercritical or pull away and not be around for days at a time… Does this make any sense? Can you believe that I’m honestly trying to respect you by warning you about me, in a way? That I’m trying to by honest instead of dishonest? That I’ve decided that the best way to head off this pattern where you get hurt and fell abandoned and I fell like sh!! Is to try to be honest for once. Even if I should have done it sooner?[…]Do you understand that I’m trying as hard as I can to love you? That I’m terrified that I can’t love?
David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
Writing’s a lot like cooking. Sometimes the cake won’t rise, no matter what you do, and every now and again the cake tastes better than you ever could have dreamed it would.
 Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things
Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficity disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.
Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman (via overflowing)

Source: overflowing

Having a baby is like getting a tattoo on your face. You really need to be certain it’s what you want before you commit.
Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
I’m an outsider by choice, she said, but I’m hoping that won’t be my choice forever.
Brian Andreas, Trusting Soul : Collected Stories & Drawings
Your problem, my darling daughter, is that you’re afraid you’re going to miss something. But what you don’t realize is that, by not making a decision, you’re missing it all.
Claire Cook, Life’s a Beach