Blood-Remembering

I just had to share this beautiful passage from Rainer Maria Rilke's book, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Bridge. It almost made me cry.

"Ah! but verses amount to so little when one writes them young. One ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness a whole life long, and a long life if possible, and then, quite at the end, one might perhaps be able to write ten lines that were good. For verses are not, as people imagine, simply feelings (those one has early enough), —they are experiences. For the sake of a single verse, one must see many cities, men and things, one must know the animals, one must feel how the bids fly and know the gestures with which the little flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and partings one had long seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents whom one had to hurt when they brought one some joy and one did not grasp it (it was a joy for someone else); to childhood illnesses that so strangely begin with such a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars—and it is not yet enough if one may think of all of this. One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again. But one must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the window open and the fitful noises. And still it is not yet enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not till they have turned to blood within us, to glance and gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves—not till then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them."

                                                                         

My Favorite Quotations From "Letters to a Young Poet"

                                                                      

“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.”

"How can we forget that old myth, which is to be found at the beginning of all peoples-the myth of the dragon, which at the last moment changes into a princess? Perhaps all the dragons of your life are princesses, who are only waiting for us to show a little beauty and courage. Perhaps at the bottom of every horror is something helpless, that wants help from us."

"If it were possible for us to see a little further than our knowledge can reach, to see out a little farther over the outworks of our surmising, we should perhaps bear our griefs with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moment when something new, something unknown enters into us."

"I believe that nearly all our griefs are moments of suspense, which we experience as paralysis, because we can no longer hear our estranged feeling living. Because we are alone with that foreign thing, which has entered into us; because everything in which we have confidence and to which we are accustomed is for a moment taken away from us; because we are in the midst of a state of transition, in which we cannot remain. The grief, too, passes.

"So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloud shadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you.”

"Rejoice in your growth, into which you can take no one with you, and be good to those who remain behind. Be assured and peaceful in their presence, do not torture them with your doubts and do not frighten them with your confidence or your joy, which they could not comprehend."

“Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.”

"And if we speak once more of loneliness, it becomes even clearer that that is not a thing which one can choose or reject. We are lonely. One can deceive oneself over and over and behave as if it were not so. That is all. But how much better it is to realize that we are lonely and candidly to make that realization our starting point."

"Avoid adding new material to that strained dram which-is ever played between parents and children. It uses up much of the children's strength and consumes the love of the parents, which is always active and warm, even if it does not understand."

"Men have already had to change their conceptions of many processes, and they will gradually come to realize that what we call fate comes out of human beings themselves and does not come upon them from without."

My 10 Favorite Martin Luther King Jr. Quotations

1. “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

2. “Forgiveness is not an occasional act, it is a constant attitude.”

3. “Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”

4. “Faith is taking the first step even when you can't see the whole staircase.”

5. “I have decided to stick to love...Hate is too great a burden to bear.”

6. “There comes a time when silence is betrayal.”

7. “Let no man pull you so low as to hate him.”

8. “Never, never be afraid to do what's right, especially if the well-being of a person or animal is at stake. Society's punishments are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way.”

9. “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.”

10. “As my sufferings mounted I soon realized that there were two ways in which I could respond to my situation -- either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course.”

100 Quotations From New York’s 100 Most Important Living Writers

Last week, Flavorwire published a list of New York's 100 most important living writers (Find article here: http://www.flavorwire.com/350137/new-yorks-100-most-important-living-writers). Being a self-admitted quotation junkie, I decided to make a list of 100 quotations that I personally like selected from the work of a few of these writers. I must site one of my favorite websites, goodreads.com, as the source of some of these quotations. Enjoy:)

1) “Everything becomes symbol and irony when you've been betrayed”
 -Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City

2) “It is not easy to be honest because it is impossible to be complete.”
-Ariana Reines

3) “One changes, as a writer, fairly quickly; what you wrote six months or a year ago might not sound right anymore.”
-Keith Gessen

4) “Everyone agreed that Edie was a tough woman to love, though she was worth loving.”
     -Jami Attenberg

5) “Love wasn't a thing you fell in, but rose to. It was what stopped you from falling.”
     -Darin Strauss, More Than It Hurts You


6) “If God made anything better than Coffee and Chocolate, he kept it to himself.”
     -Sapphire, The Kid

7) “You know what they say - sleep is the mother's drug of choice, but like heroin, only the very rich and the very poor can afford it.”
-Elissa Schappell, Blueprints for Building Better Girls: Fiction

8) “I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky.”
-Sharon Olds

9) “Once you lose someone it is never exactly
    the same person who comes back.”
-Sharon Olds, Satan Says (Pitt Poetry Series)

10) “Dreams: the place most of us get what we need.”
 -Amy Hempel, The Collected Stories


11) “Sometimes you don't even know what you want until you find out you can't have it.”
-Meghan O'Rourke, The Long Goodbye: A Memoir


12) “Yet the story of Orpheus, it occurs to me, is not just about the desire of the living to resuscitate the dead but about the ways in which the dead drag us along into their shadowy realm because we cannot let them go. So we follow them into the Underworld, descending, descending, until one day we turn and make our way back.”
-Meghan O'Rourke

13) “And I do think that great fiction, even when it's comedic, has an urgency or an inevitability to it, a sense that the writer absolutely had to write this particular story in this way.”
-Karen Russell

14) “Love, I think, is a gateway to the world, not an escape from it.”
-Mark Doty

15) “There are those fortunate hours when the world consents to be made into a poem.”
-Mark Doty

16) “Find what causes a commotion in your heart. Find a way to write about that”
-Richard Ford

17) “Some idiotic things are well worth doing.”
-Richard Ford, Independence Day

18) “At the exact moment any decision seems to be being made, it's usually long after the real decision was actually made--like light we see emitted from stars.”
-Richard Ford, The Lay of The Land

19) “Things happen when people are not where they belong, and the world moves forward and back by that principle.”
-Richard Ford, Canada

20) “Just exactly what that good life was--the one I expected--I cannot tell you now exactly, though I wouldn't say it has not come to pass, only that much has come in between.”
-Richard Ford, The Sportswriter


21) “Uniqueness is wasted on youth. Like fine wine or a solid flossing habit, you'll be grateful for it when you're older.”
-Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays


22) “Suburbia is too close to the country to have anything real to do and too close to the city to admit you have nothing real to do.”
-Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays

23) “You told me once that a soul isn't something a person is born with but something that must be built, by effort and error, study and love. And you did that with more dedication than most, that work of building a soul-not for your own benefit but for the benefit of those that knew you.”
-Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding: A Novel

24) “Literature could turn you into an asshole: he’d learned that teaching grad-school seminars. It could teach you to treat real people the way you did characters, as instruments of your own intellectual pleasure, cadavers on which to practice your critical faculties.”
-Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding: A Novel


25) “True stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.”
-Siri Hustvedt

26) “I live for coincidences. They briefly give to me the illusion or the hope that there's a pattern to my life, and if there's a pattern, then maybe I'm moving toward some kind of destiny where it's all explained.”
 -Jonathan Ames

27) “There are two types of people in the world: those who prefer to be sad among others, and those who prefer to be sad alone.” -Nicole Krauss

28) “Even now, all possible feelings do not yet exist, there are still those that lie beyond our capacity and our imagination. From time to time, when a piece of music no one has ever written or a painting no one has ever painted, or something else impossible to predict, fathom or yet describe takes place, a new feeling enters the world. And then, for the millionth time in the history of feeling, the heart surges and absorbs the impact.”
 -Nicole Krauss

29) “Perhaps everyone has a story that could break your heart...” -Nick Flynn

30) “I am simply looking for a companion with whom to spend my days, a companion who will cherish as much as I the stupidity of living in the moment, and spend every dull, amazing second with me.”-Heidi Julavits

31) “I got my heart's desire, and there my troubles began.”-Lev Grossman

32) “That was the thing about the world: it wasn't that things were harder than you thought they were going to be, it was that they were hard in ways that you didn't expect.” -Lev Grossman

33) “Love, as the poet says, is like the spring. It grows on you and seduces you slowly and gently, but it holds tight like the roots of a tree. You don't know until you're ready to go that you can't move, that you would have to mutilate yourself in order to be free. That's the feeling. It doesn't last, at least it doesn't have to. But it holds on like a steel claw in your chest. Even if the tree dies, the roots cling to you. I've seen men and women give up everything for love that once was.”  -Walter Mosley

34) “Yet for all the depression no one ever quit. When someone quit, we couldn't believe it. 'I'm becoming a rafting instructor on the Colorado River,' they said. 'I'm touring college towns with my garage band.' We were dumbfounded. It was like they were from another planet. Where had they found the derring-do? What would they do about car payments? We got together for going away drinks on their final day and tried to hide our envy while reminding ourselves that we still had the freedom and luxury to shop indiscriminately.”
 -Joshua Ferris

35) “My mother always says that fear and pain are immediate, and that, when they're gone we're left with the concept, but not the true memory.”  -Téa Obreht

36) “You meet a new person, you go with him and suddenly you get a whole new city...you go down new streets, you see houses you never saw before, pass places you didn't even know were there. Everything changes.”  -Samuel R. Delany

37) “But I realized something. About art. And psychiatry. They're both self-perpetuating systems. Like religion. All three of them promise you a sense of inner worth and meaning, and spend a lot of time telling you about the suffering you have to go through to achieve it. As soon as you get a problem in any one of them, the solution it gives is always to go deeper into the same system. They're all in rather uneasy truce with one another in what's actually a mortal battle. Like all self-reinforcing systems. At best, each is trying to encompass the other two and define them as sub-groups. You know: religion and art are both forms of madness and madness is the realm of psychiatry. Or, art is the study and praise of man and man's ideals, so therefore a religious experience just becomes a brutalized aesthetic response and psychiatry is just another tool for the artist to observe man and render his portraits more accurately. And the religious attitude I guess is that the other two are only useful as long as they promote the good life. At worst, they all try to destroy one another. Which is what my psychiatrist, whether he knew it or not, was trying, quite effectively, to do to my painting. I gave up psychiatry too, pretty soon. I just didn't want to get all wound up in any systems at all.”  -Samuel R. Delany

38) “There are 10,000 books in my library, and it will keep growing until I die. This has exasperated my daughters, amused my friends and baffled my accountant. If I had not picked up this habit in the library long ago, I would have more money in the bank today; I would not be richer.”  -Pete Hamill

39) “I don't ask for the meaning of the song of a bird or the rising of the sun on a misty morning. There they are, and they are beautiful.”  -Pete Hamill

40) “Human beings want to know too much abut each other, and that's why there are so many lies.”
-Pete Hamill

41) “The only way to fight nostalgia is to listen to somebody else's nostalgia”  -Pete Hamill

42) “The boy admonished himself for wanting everything to be a story. And now realized that some journeys were not stories. On some journeys, nothing really happened. You just kept taking steps.” -Pete Hamill

43) “A good novel begins with a small question and ends with a bigger one.”  -Paula Fox

44) “People see everything through the lens of their obsessions.” -Francine Prose

45) “To be ourselves we must have ourselves – possess, if need be re-possess, our life-stories. We must “recollect” ourselves, recollect the inner drama, the narrative, of ourselves. A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity, his self.”  -Oliver Sacks

46) “Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.”-Anne Carson

47) “When I desire you a part of me is gone...”-Anne Carson

48) “There's a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we've left it.”
 -Colum McCann

49) “Every one of Joel's important songs--including the happy ones--are ultimately about loneliness. And it's not 'clever lonely' (like Morrissey) or 'interesting lonely' (like Radiohead); it's 'lonely lonely,' like the way it feels when you're being hugged by someone and it somehow makes you sadder.” -Chuck Klosterman

50) “Emotion is contagious.”  -Malcolm Gladwell

51) “Our world requires that decisions be sourced and footnoted, and if we say how we feel, we must also be prepared to elaborate on why we feel that way...We need to respect the fact that it is possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that - sometimes - we're better off that way.”
 -Malcolm Gladwell

52) “My earliest memories of my father are of seeing him work at his desk and realizing that he was happy. I did not know it then, but that was one of the most precious gifts a father can give his child.”
-Malcolm Gladwell

53) “Tangled in one another's arms and nine times out of ten the things you think about a person make it impossible to touch them.”  -Rick Moody

54) “A pool game mixes ritual with geometry.” -Mary Karr

55) “When people ask me how to find happiness in life I tell them, First learn how to cook.”
 -Charles Simic

56) “He who cannot howl will not find his pack.”  -Charles Simic

57) “Literature differs from life in that life is amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs us toward it, wheras literature teaches us to notice. Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life.”
-James Wood

58) “Life, then will, always contain an inevitable surplus, a margin of the gratuitous, a realm in which there is always more than we need: more things, more impressions, more memories, more habits, more words, more happiness, more unhappiness.”  -James Wood

59) “We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.”  -Cynthia Ozick

60) “Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the strong possibilities that they are founded on nothing.”
-John Ashbery

61) “A writer should always feel like he's in over his head” -Michael Cunningham

62) “Why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future.”  -Jonathan Safran Foer

63) “I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love.”  -Jonathan Safran Foer

64) “It's the tragedy of loving, you can't love anything more than something you miss.”
 -Jonathan Safran Foer

65) “I like to see people reunited, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can't tell fast enough, the ears that aren't big enough, the eyes that can't take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone.”
-Jonathan Safran Foer

66) “You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.”
-Jonathan Safran Foer

67) “If you don’t write the book you have to write, everything breaks.”  -A.M. Homes

68) “Sometimes you can do things for others that you can't do for yourself.”  -A.M. Homes

69) “Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don't abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book."-Patti Smith

70) “The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm. He must return to the material world in order to do his work. It's the artist's responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation.”  -Patti Smith

71) “Finally, by the sea, where God is everywhere, I gradually calmed.”  -Patti Smith

72) “Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.”  -Jhumpa Lahiri

73) “They were things for which it was impossible to prepare but which one spent a lifetime looking back at, trying to accept, interpret, comprehend."  -Jhumpa Lahiri

74) “Pack a pillow and blanket and see as much of the world as you can.You will not regret it.”
 -Jhumpa Lahiri

75) “Nothing more exhilarating ... than saving yourself by the simple act of waking.”
-Junot Díaz

76) “It's never the changes we want that change everything.” -Junot Díaz

77) “In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.”  -Junot Díaz

78) “If you didn't grow up like I did then you don't know, and if you don't know it's probably better you don't judge.”  -Junot Díaz

79) “Love was a rare thing, easily confused with a million other things, and if anybody knew this to be true it was him.”  -Junot Díaz

80) “This is what it is the business of the artist to do. Art is theft, art is armed robbery, art is not pleasing your mother.”  -Janet Malcolm

81) “One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.”
 -Tom Wolfe

82) “You have a good heart and you think the good thing is to be guilty and kind but it's not always kind to be gentle and soft, there's a genuine violence softness and kindness visit on people. Sometimes self-interested is the most generous thing you can be.” -Tony Kushner

83) “In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead.”  -Tony Kushner

84) “You'll find, my friend, that what you love will take you places you never dreamed you'd go.”
 -Tony Kushner

85) “I don't understand why I'm not dead. When your heart breaks, you should die”
 -Tony Kushner

86) "Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.” -Zadie Smith

87) “The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.”  -Zadie Smith

88) “Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.”  -Zadie Smith

89) “The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.”  -Zadie Smith

90) “You don't have favourites among your children, but you do have allies.”-Zadie Smith

91) “Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.”  -Jonathan Franzen

92) “How wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been so gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said no, again and again, instead of yes.”  -Jonathan Franzen

93) “But the first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone.”  -Jonathan Franzen

94) “You're either reading a book or you're not.”  -Jonathan Franzen

95) “I guess my life hasn’t always been happy, or easy, or exactly what I want. At a certain point, I just have to try not to think too much about certain things, or else they’ll break my heart.”  -Jonathan Franzen

96) “I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I'm gone which would not have happened if I had not come.”  -Salman Rushdie

97) “Let's enjoy the aimless days while we still can.”  -Don DeLillo

98) “Writing is a concentrated form of thinking...a young writer sees that with words he can place himself more clearly into the world. Words on a page, that's all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions.”  -Don DeLillo

99) “If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things that others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.”  -Don DeLillo

100) “Whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself. Yourself as you were seen, as you were judged to be. Lover or enemy, mother or friend, those who know us construct us, and their several knowings slant the different facets of our characters like diamond-cutter's tools. Each such loss is a step leading to the grave, where all versions blend and end.”  -Salman Rushdie

Some of My Favorite Lines From "Sex and the City"

"Better alone than badly accompanied."

"Maybe some women aren't meant to be tamed. Maybe they just need to run free until they find someone just as wild to run with them."

"That's the key to having it all: stop expecting it to look like what you thought it was going to look like."

 "It's infuriating! Women sit around, obsessing about what went wrong, while men just say 'alrighty' and move on."

"I used to think those people who sat alone at Starbucks writing on their laptops were pretentious posers. Now I know: they are people who have recently moved in with someone."

 "People go to casinos for the same reason they go on blind dates: hoping to hit the jackpot. But mostly, you just wind up broke or alone in a bar."

"I will never be the woman with the perfect hair, who can wear white and not spill on it."

My 12 Favorite Quotations on Gratitude

“Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”  -Marcel Proust

“Piglet noticed that even though he had a Very Small Heart, it could hold a rather large amount of Gratitude.”
-A.A. Milne

“Gratitude is the ability to experience life as a gift. It liberates us from the prison of self-preoccupation.”
 -John Ortberg

"Maintain an attitude of gratitude, not for what was lost by moving on, but for what was gained by having been there." -Michael Rawls

“Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.” -Marcus Tullius Cicero

“One can never pay in gratitude: one can only pay 'in kind' somewhere else in life.”
-Anne Morrow Lindbergh

"Be thankful for what you have; you'll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don't have, you will never, ever have enough." Oprah Winfrey

“Gratitude is medicine for a heart devastated by tragedy. If you can only be thankful for the blue sky, then do so. ” -Richelle E. Goodrich

"At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us." -Albert Schweitzer

“If the only prayer you said was thank you, that would be enough.”  -Meister Eckhart

“When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.”
 -G.K. Chesterton

"Gratitude is the sign of noble souls." -Aesop

My 7 Favorite Anne Morrow Lindbergh Quotations

1) “One writes not to be read but to breathe...one writes to think, to pray, to analyze. One writes to clear one's mind, to dissipate one's fears, to face one's doubts, to look at one's mistakes--in order to retrieve them. One writes to capture and crystallize one's joy, but also to disperse one's gloom. Like prayer--you go to it in sorrow more than joy, for help, a road back to 'grace'."

2) “If you surrender completely to the moments as they pass, you live more richly those moments.”

3) “One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can only collect a few. One moon shell is more impressive than three. There is only one moon in the sky.”

4) “When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.

The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits - islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.”

5) “I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living."

6) “Him that I love, I wish to be free -- even from me.”

7) “Parting is inevitably painful, even for a short time. It's like an amputation, I feel a limb is being torn off, without which I shall be unable to function. And yet, once it is done... life rushes back into the void, richer, more vivid and fuller than before. ”

Great Morrissey Song Lyrics

“Disappointment came to me,
and booted me,
and bruised and hurt me,
but that's how people grow up.”

“Now this might disturb you, but I find I'm OK by myself;
and I don't need you or your benevolence to make sense.”

“I can chase you, and I can catch you,
but there is nothing I can do to make you mine.”

“Don't leave it all unsaid,
somewhere in the wasteland of your head.”

“When I'm lying in my bed I think about life and I think about death and neither one particularly appeals to me.”

“I don't mind if you forget me.
Having learned my lesson,
I never left an impression on anyone.”

“I was wasting my time, praying for love.
For a love that never comes, from someone who does not exist.”

“I am hated for loving.
I am haunted for wanting.”

“So the life I have made
May seem wrong to you
But, I've never been surer
It's my life to ruin
My own way...”

“There are more than enough
to fight and oppose;
why waste good time
fighting the people you like?”

“You say: 'Oh, please forgive'
You say: 'Oh, live and let live.'
But sorry doesn't help us.
Sorry will not save us.
Sorry is just a word you find so easy to say (so you say it anyway).
Sorry doesn't help us.
Sorry won't protect us.
Sorry won't undo all the good gone wrong.”

“Age shouldn't affect you. It's just like the size of your shoes - they don't determine how you live your life! You're either marvelous or you're boring, regardless of your age.”

“A sad fact widely known
The most impassionate song
To a lonely soul
Is so easily outgrown..."

"And when you're dancing and laughing
And finally living
Hear my voice in your head
And think of me kindly”

Favorite Quotations From the Movie "Closer"

Dan: And you left him, just like that?

Alice: It's the only way to leave. "I don't love you anymore. Goodbye."

Dan: Supposing you do still love them?

Alice: You don't leave.

Dan: You've never left someone you still love?

Alice: Nope.

Dan: I fell in love with her, Alice.

Alice: Oh, as if you had no choice? There's a moment, there's always a moment, "I can do this, I can give into this, or I can resist it", and I don't know when your moment was, but I bet you there was one.

Dan: Deception is brutal, I'm not pretending otherwise.

Alice: How? How does it work? How do you do this to someone?

 [Dan is silent]

Alice: Not good enough!

Dan: It's not safe out there.

Alice: Oh, and it's safe in here?

Alice: I don't want to lie. I can't tell the truth. So it's over.

Alice: How can one man be so endlessly disappointing?

Dan: That's my charm.

Larry: She doesn't want to be happy.

Dan: Everybody wants to be happy.

Larry: Depressives don't. They want to be unhappy to confirm they're depressed. If they were happy they couldn't be depressed anymore. They'd have to go out into the world and live. Which can be depressing.

Alice: Where is this love? I can't see it, I can't touch it. I can't feel it. I can hear it. I can hear some words, but I can't do anything with your easy words.

                                                                           

My Favorite Quotations from "High Fidelity"

I wanted to share four of my favorite quotations four of my favorite quotations from “High Fidelity” by Nick Horby.

                                                          

“It seems to me if you add music (and books, probably, and films, and plays, and anything that makes you feel) at the center of your being, then you can't afford to sort out your love life, start to think of it as the finished product. You've got to pick at it, keep it alive and in turmoil, you've got to pick at it and unravel it until it all comes apart and you're compelled to start all over again. Maybe we live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as a consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship.”

“It's a mystery of human chemistry and I don't understand it, some people, as far as their senses are concerned, just feel like home.”

“A while back, when Dick & Barry & I agreed that what really matters is what you like, not what you *are* like, Barry proposed the idea of a questionnaire for potential partners, a 2 or 3 page multiple-choice document that covered all the music/film/TV/book bases. It was intended: a) to dispense with awkward conversation, and b) to prevent a chap from leaping into bed with someone who might, at a later date, turn out to have every Julio Iglesias record ever made. It amused us at the time... But there was an important & essential truth contained in the idea, and the truth was that these things matter, and it's no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently, or if your favorite films wouldn't even speak to each other if they met at a party.”

“Did I do and say these things? Yes, I did. Are there any mitigating circumstances? Not really, unless any circumstances {in other words, context) can be regarded as mitigating. And before you judge, although you have probably already done so, go away and write down the four worst things you have done to a partner, even if - especially if - your partner doesn't know about them. Don't dress things up, or try to explain them; just write them down, in a list, in the plainest language possible. Finished? Ok, so who's the arsehole now?”

My Favorite Nora Ephron Quotations

In memory of Nora Ephron, an American filmmaker, director, producer, screenwriter, novelist, playwright, journalist, author, and blogger, I would like to share just a few of my favorite Nora Ephron quotations. It was hard to choose my favorites because there are so many that I love!

“Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.”

“Reading is one of the main things I do. Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel 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 deficit 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.”

“In my sex fantasy, nobody ever loves me for my mind.”

                                                                         

“And then the dreams break into a million tiny pieces. The dream dies. Which leaves you with a choice: you can settle for reality, or you can go off, like a fool, and dream another dream.”

“I have no desire to be dominated. Honestly I don't. And yet I find myself becoming angry when I'm not.”

“I look out the window and I see the lights and the skyline and the people on the street rushing around looking for action, love, and the world's greatest chocolate chip cookie, and my heart does a little dance.”

“Don't you love New York in the fall? It makes me want to buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address.”

“The desire to get married is a basic and primal instinct in women. It's followed by another basic and primal instinct: the desire to be single again.”

“I don’t care who you are. When you sit down to write the first page of your screenplay, in your head, you’re also writing your Oscar acceptance speech.”

“My mother was a good recreational cook, but what she basically believed about cooking was that if you worked hard and prospered, someone else would do it for you.”

                                                                        

3 Quotations to Live By

Hello my friends.

There are 3 things I am constantly trying to remind myself. I would like to share those with you. Some of you might not agree, some of you might see these points as being so obvious that they hardly bear repeating to yourself over and over again. But I hope that a few of you find these quotations as important as I have in my life.

You see, I think we can underestimate the power of inspirational quotations sometimes, their ability to define us, how much words that we consistently repeat ourselves in our heads can shape our thoughts, our lives, and our actions.

Many of you, already do this on a regular basis. But not all of you. And the three quotations that I’ll share may not mean much to you, and that’s ok. But I encourage you do find words that do. And try as much as you can to live by them.

So here is the first.

“Everyone must learn this lesson somewhere. It costs something to be who you are.”

Most things in life require a certain degree of sacrifice. Everything has a price. And a big part of the price we pay for something is our time. This simple fact is obvious in some areas. For example, most of us understand that a perfect GPA cost us hours of time studying, or that most sports achievements required hours of training. And there are few shortcuts.

But sometimes we forget this in other aspects of our lives. For example, most of you that are very popular spent hours talking and spending time with other people. And those that have artistic talent spend hours with that art. And many people that are good cooks spend hours in the kitchen, and history buffs spend hours watching the history channel and so forth.

So because we each have a limited number of hours, we can’t have everything, and we absolutely cannot be everything that we might want to be. So we are constantly giving up pieces of who we might have been. For everything we gain, a friendship, children, degrees, careers, learning to play a song, vacations, gardening skills, video game accomplishments, knowledge about other people, we are losing something. And for everything we lose we gain something. And we don’t always understand at the time what we are gaining or losing.

Some of the most successful people didn’t always have a lot friends growing up or a family that spent a lot of time together. Some of the greatest artists had hard childhoods. Even the time we spend suffering matters. So every time you miss out on something you would have liked to have think about what you might gain instead. Because you are going to have unfortunate things happen to you in your life and you are going to have to decide how much time you want to sit around feeling sorry for yourself and how much time you want to spend turning that experience into an opportunity to learn something new, or meet someone new, or become someone new.

The late Steve Jobs, the genius behind many of Apple’s greatest innovations, once said, “You can’t connect the dots going forward; you can only connect them backwards.” There are things you might learn today that you might not use for years. But eventually it might help you in ways you never imagined. It’s just so important to try to get the most out of every experience.

                                                                 

Think about if the way you are spending your time is worth it. Think about if it is getting you closer to where you really want to be. Never forget the cost.

The next bit of advice I’d like to give you is this. “Always remember what your true values are and be conscious to whether or not the life you are living is consistent with them.”

And when I say your values I mean YOUR values. These may not be the same values your parents have. These may not be the same values some of your friends have. They may not be the values you were taught growing up, or from a religion, or the same values you had two years ago. Of course, they may very well be, but the point here is to decide for yourself what your true values are and to understand that as you grown and learn and have new experiences these may very well change and that’s okay. What’s not okay, is when deep down your values haven’t changed, but you have, and you start behaving in a way that is no longer consistent with what you really believe in.

When I ask you today what you want out of life, most of your answers to could be translated to, “I want to be successful.” But what does this mean? Doesn’t this mean different things to different people? I don’t think success is about particular goals or achievements. I think that true success is living a life that is consistent with what you truly value.

Having this kind of success is not easy. Because first of all you have to know what you truly value. Sometimes this requires digging deep inside your soul, asking yourself difficult questions, questions that may be painful, questions that may take days or months or even years to answer. And you can never stop being conscious of how the answers might change over time, because what you truly value at 25 might not be the same as what you truly value at 50, and you have to accept this, you have to be willing to grow. No one else can do this for you, or can tell you what your heart believes in, and although wiser people, or culture, or religion, can help guide you to what the answer is, you must not depend on them to give it to you. Because there is no “one size fit all” answer to what you should value, and the only “right” answer is the one you find by searching your soul.

And then, once you have some idea of what’s truly important to you, you have to remember it. This might be the hardest part because so many things, so many other obsessions, and distractions, and people, and jobs, and family, and obligations, and day to day life can get in the way. But if you fail to remember, you might find yourselves working to become “successful” at the wrong thing. It is so easy to get caught up in other lifestyles, to be influenced by those around you into believing that happiness can be found in something else. And it’s not really a good feeling to find you’ve succeeded at getting something you thought you wanted but still not being happy because you let yourself forget what you really value.

So please, find a way to remember every day, maybe through meditation, or reading, or solitary walks, or appreciating nature, or listening to certain music, or through conversations with certain people, or going to a church, or a graveyard, or the sea, whatever is you need to do to remind yourself.

So after you know what you value, and remind yourself of it, you need to make sure you are living a life that is consistent with it, and when you find that you aren’t, you need to have the courage to change. Because sometimes this means walking away of from things, a career you may have been successful at, people that you love, places in which you were comfortable. It might mean having to take risks, having to give up a certain level of security, and perhaps having to deal with failure, uncertainty, criticism, and poverty. So no, I’m not telling you that it will be easy. But I promise you that it will be worth it.

Finally, the final quotation I would like to share with you today is by author Rainer Maria Rilke.

"Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day."

                                                                  

Learn to live with uncertainty. The way you deal with uncertainty and the amount you are able to handle without going crazy will define you in a lot of ways. Sometimes taking the initial plunge the easy part, but learning to live with immense uncertainty day in and day out and to stay in the water long enough for something to happen is what will set you apart. Good luck.