these strangers are friends that you never met

“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.”

— E.E. Cummings

“He hadn’t once ceased looking at Daisy and I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“I wondered if I would spend the rest of my life inventing complicated ways to depress myself.” 

― Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

“I wanted you to see what real courage is… It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.”

- Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“… it occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again.”

— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“People are strange: They are constantly angered by trivial things, but on a major matter like totally wasting their lives, they hardly seem to notice.”

— Charles Bukowski, The Last Night of the Earth Poems

“You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“Talk nonsense, but talk your own nonsense, and I’ll kiss you for it. To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s.”

- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them. They move on. They move away. The moments that used to define them - a mother’s approval, a father’s nod - are covered by moments of their own accomplishments. It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the waters of their lives.”

― Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven 

“I wish I had the courage not to fight and doubt everything… I wish, just once, I could say, ‘This. This is good enough.’”

— Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“‘You… are a terribly real thing in a terribly false world, and that, I believe, is why you are in so much pain.’”

— Emilie Autumn, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls

“It was one of those times you feel a sense of loss, even though you didn’t have something in the first place. I guess that’s what disappointment is — a sense of loss for something you never had.”

— Deb Caletti, The Nature Of Jade

“In your life you meet people. Some you never think about again. Some, you wonder what happened to them. There are some that you wonder if they ever think about you. And then there are some that you wish you never have to think about again. But you do.”

— C.S. Lewis

“We all create stories to protect ourselves.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“There are some things about myself that I can’t explain to anyone. There are some things I don’t understand at all. I can’t tell what I think about things or what I’m after. I don’t know what my strengths are or what I’m supposed to do about them. But if I start thinking about these things in too much detail, the whole thing gets scary. And if I get scared, I can only think about myself. I become really self-centered, and without meaning to, I hurt people. So I’m not such a wonderful human being.”

— Haruki Murakami, A Slow Boat To China