“Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us, even in the leafless winter, even in the ashy city. I am thinking now of grief, and of getting past it; I feel my boots trying to leave the ground, I feel my heart pumping hard. I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing, as though I had wings.”
—Mary Oliver
(via elbenwald)
Oh have some heart and hold it to your chest,
We weren’t in love, we were too young.
We throw our words around as if they were not gold,
Well they are
Liar and the Lighter - Gabrielle Aplin
“We read to find the end, for the story’s sake. We read not to reach it, for the sake of the reading itself. We read searchingly, like trackers, oblivious of our surroundings. We read distractedly, skipping pages. We read contemptuously, admiringly, negligently, angrily, passionately, enviously, longingly. We read in gusts of sudden pleasure, without knowing what brought the pleasure along. ‘What in the world is this emotion?’ asks Rebecca West after reading King Lear. ‘What is the bearing of supremely great works of art on my life which makes me feel so glad?’ We don’t know: we read ignorantly. We read in slow, long motions, as if drifting in space, weightless. We read full of prejudice, malignantly. We read generously, making excuses for the text, filling gaps, mending faults. And sometimes, when the stars are kind, we read with an intake of breath, with a shudder, as if someone or something has ‘walked over our grave,’ as if a memory had suddenly been rescued from a place deep within us—the recognition of something we never knew was there, or of something we vaguely felt as a flicker or shadow, whose ghostly form rises and passes back into us before we can see what it is, leaving us older and wiser.”
—Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading
(Source: vedrai, via fleurs--sauvages)
“I am determined to be cheerful and happy in whatever situation I may find myself. For I have learned that the greater part of our misery or unhappiness is determined not by our circumstance but by our disposition.”
—Martha Washington
(Source: stabmebecauseiloveu, via pressure-makesdiamonds)
“At a certain point in your life, probably when too much of it has gone by, you will open your eyes and see yourself for who you are, especially for everything that made you so different from all the awful normals. And you will say to yourself, but I am this person. And in that statement, that correction, there will be a kind of love.”
—Mrs. Dodger - Phoebe in Wonderland
(Source: moanarch, via heartskippedabeatsue)
“When you do something noble and beautiful and nobody noticed, do not be sad. For the sun every morning is a beautiful spectacle and yet most of the audience still sleeps”
- John Lennon
(via princesaquil)
“She made herself stronger by fighting with the wind.”
—Frances Hodgson Burnett
(via thejazzloftproject)
“Believing that you are worthy and deserving of love, or that the act itself is even possible, is certainly something that we come to terms with slowly over a lifetime. We start and stop many times with different people, people who both affirm and erode our confidence in ourselves. But perhaps the most profound way to understand how you could be loved is to love another unconditionally, to love them for both the conventionally attractive and the typically unappealing qualities they possess. You love them for their charming sense of humor, but you also love them for their habit of eating naked on the couch. You love them both in equal measure because, without either, they wouldn’t be precisely who they are and you wouldn’t have them so entirely. Because at the end of the day, that is who we love: it is not some airbrushed image of a prince on a white horse, it is the prince long after he rides off into the sunset and shows you that he, too, is only human.”
—“When Will We Be Ready to Be Loved?” by Chelsea Fagan
(Source: alta-mente-repostum, via pressure-makesdiamonds)
“Stars should not be seen alone. That’s why there are so many. Two people should stand together and look at them. One person alone will surely miss the good ones.”
—Augusten Burroughs, Dry
(Source: f4lconpunch, via elbenwald)
“The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.”
—Fernando Pessoa
(Source: yachttweiler, via elbenwald)
“We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.”
—ee cummings
(Source: deprincessed, via fortheloveoftomford)
“Compassion hurts. When you feel connected to everything, you also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away. Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others. You must either learn to carry the Universe or be crushed by it. You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors.”
—Andrew Boyd
(Source: definitelydope, via resisted)
“When she spoke again it was in the thin, careful and above all brave voice of someone who has pulled themselves together despite overwhelming odds but might let go again at any moment.”
(Source: extraordinarytime, via heartskippedabeatsue)
“But it seemed to me that this was the way we all lived: full to the brim with gratitude and joy one day, wrecked on the rocks the next. Finding the balance between the two was the art and the salvation.”
“The Year of Pleasures” by Elizabeth Berg
(Source: bellenoiseuse, via ohfairies)
“She believed a great happiness awaited her somewhere, and for this reason she remained calm as the days flew by.”
—Gyula Krudy
(Source: opiatevapor, via fleurs--sauvages)
