-Stop living your life like you’re in some kind of movie.
-Excuse me?
-Stop trying to cast your true love instead ofjust meeting him.
- When I meet him, I’ll know.
- I’m not so sure.
-Love isn’t always a lightning bolt, you know?
Maybe sometimes it’s just a choice.
-Well, that’s easy for you to say!
You’re flying to Argentina to meet the love of your life!
-That’s just it. I don’t know that Paolo’s the love of my life’
but I’ve decided to give him the chance to be.
Maybe true love is a decision.
You know, a decision to take a chance with somebody.
To give to somebody without worrying whether they’ll give anything back.
Or if they’re gonna hurt you, or if they really are the one.
Maybe love isn’t something that happens to you.
Maybe it’s something you have to choose.
-So what do I do?
-Well, you could start by putting all of those fantasies of
true love where they belong into your work of fiction.

 

 

 

The only way to be happy is to love.
Unless you love,
your life will flash by.

                                                                                                                                                  

A man’s heart has heard two ways through life.
The way of nature.
And the way of grace.
You have to choose which one you’ll follow.
Grace doesn’t try to please itself.
It accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked…
It accepts insults and injuries.
Nature only wants to please itself.
Get others to please it too.
It likes to lord it over them.
To have its own way.
It finds reasons to be unhappy.
When all the world is shining around it.
And love is smiling through all things.
They taught us, that no one who loves the way of grace, ever comes to a bad end.

 

Sometimes we love people so much that we have to be numb to it.
Because if we actually felt how much we love them, it would kill us.
That doesn’t make you a bad person. It just means your heart’s too big.

 

 

“‎People will tell you nothing matters, the whole world is about to end soon
anyway. But those people are looking at life the wrong way. I mean, things don’t
need to last forever to be perfect.”

 

“l don’t have any friends.”

“This is very tough thing to learn.”

                                                                               ( It’s Kind of a Funny Story )

 

“Live the life you’ve dreamed”
David Henry Thoreau

 

 “A human being is a part of a whole, called by us <universe>, a part limited in time and space.
He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest…
a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us,
restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion
to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

 
“Poets represent love as sculptors design beauty, as musicians create melody;
that is to say, endowed with an exquisite nervous organization,
they gather up with discerning ardor the purest elements of life,
the most beautiful lines of matter, and the most harmonious voices of nature.
There lived, it is said, at Athens a great number of beautiful girls;
Praxiteles drew them all one after another; then from these diverse types of beauty,
each one of which had its defects, he formed a single faultless beauty and created Venus.
The man who first created a musical instrument,
and who gave to harmony its rules and its laws,
had for a long time listened to the murmuring of reeds and the singing of birds.
Thus the poets, who understand life, after knowing much of love, more or less transitory,
after feeling that sublime exaltation which real passion can for the moment inspire,
eliminating from human nature all that degrades it, created the mysterious names
which through the ages fly from lip to lip:
Daphnis and Chloe, Hero and Leander, Pyramus and Thisbe.

To try to find in real life such love as this, eternal and absolute,
is but to seek on public squares a woman such as Venus,
or to expect nightingales to sing the symphonies of Beethoven.”

 

I envy not in any moods
The captive void of noble rage,
The linnet born within the cage,
That never knew the summer woods;

I envy not the beast that takes
His license in the field of time,
Unfetter’d by the sense of crime,
To whom a conscience never wakes;

Nor, what may count itself as blest,
The heart that never plighted troth
But stagnates in the weeds of sloth;
Nor any want-begotten rest.

I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
’Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

 

Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth; oh nevermind; you will not
understand the power and beauty of your youth until they have faded.
But trust me, in 20 years you’ll look back at photos of yourself and
recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before
you and how fabulous you really looked….You’re not as fat as you
imagine. Don’t worry about the future; or worry, but know that worrying is as
effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing
bubblegum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that
never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside you at 4pm
on some idle Tuesday. Do one thing everyday that scares you
Sing Don’t be reckless with other people’s hearts, don’t put up with
people who are reckless with yours. Floss Don’t waste your time on jealousy;
sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes
you’re behind…the race is long, and in the end, it’s only with
yourself. Remember the compliments you receive, forget the insults; if you
succeed in doing this, tell me how. Keep your old love letters, throw away your old bank statements.
Stretch Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your
life…the most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they
wanted to do with their lives, some of the most interesting 40 year
olds I know still don’t. Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees,
you’ll miss them when they’re gone. Maybe you’ll marry, maybe you won’t,
maybe you’ll have children,maybe
you won’t, maybe you’ll divorce at 40, maybe you’ll dance the funky
chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary…what ever you do, don’t
congratulate yourself too much or berate yourself either – your
choices are half chance, so are everybody else’s. Enjoy your body,
use it every way you can…don’t be afraid of it, or what other people
think of it, it’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever
own.. Dance…even if you have nowhere to do it but in your own living room.
 Read the directions, even if you don’t follow them. Do NOT read beauty magazines,
they will only make you feel ugly.
 Get to know your parents, you never know when they’ll be gone for
good. Be nice to your siblings; they are the best link to your past and the
people most likely to stick with you in the future.
Understand that friends come and go,but for the precious few you
should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and
lifestyle because the older you get, the more you need the people you
knew when you were young.

                                                                                                           

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoyed
Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vexed the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honoured of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers;
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this grey spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle —
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and through soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me —
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads — you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

 

Whatever you do in life
will be insignificant,
but it’s very important that you do it,
because nobody else will.
Like when someone comes into your Life,
and half of you says,
“You’re nowhere near ready,”
but the other half says,
“Make her yours forever.”

 

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods;
There is a rapture on the lonely shore;
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its eoar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more…

 

From the bits and pieces I put together,
you know, from what you told me about
your family, your mother and your dad.
And I know you’ve got your problems
with the church, too.
But there’s some kind of bigger thing
we can all appreciate,
and it sounds like
you don’t mind calling it God.
But when you forgive, you love.
And when you love,
God’s light shines on you.

 

Chris had always been driven, had always been an adventurer.
When he was four years old, he once wandered six blocks away
from home at 3:00 in the morning.
He was found in a neighbor’s kitchen up on a chair,
digging through their candy drawer.
Whatever drawer he was opening now
must have something pretty sweet in it.

 

The sea’s only gifts are harsh blows, and, occasionally, the chance to feel strong.
Now, I don’t know much about the sea, but I do know that
that’s the way it is here.
And I also know how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong,
but to feel strong, to measure yourself at least once,
to find yourself at least once in the most ancient of human conditions,
facing the blind, deaf stone alone with nothing to help you
but your hands and your own head.

 
I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges.
I see my father strolling out under the ochre sandstone arch,
the red tiles glinting like bent plates of blood behind his head.
I see my mother with a few light books at her hip,
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the wrought-iron gates
still open behind her, its sword-tips black in the May air.
They are about to graduate.
They are about to get married.
They are kids. They are dumb.
All they know is they are innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say,
“Stop, don’t do it. She’s the wrong woman, he’s the wrong man.
You are going to do things you cannot imagine you would ever do.
You are going to do bad things to children.
You are going to suffer in ways you never heard of.
You are going to want to die.”
I want to go up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it.
But I don’t do it. I want to live.
I take them up like the male and female paper dolls, and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint, as if to strike sparks from them. I say,
“Do what you are going to do and I will tell about it.”

 

remember me when you are at the beach and above all
when you paint crackling things and little ashes.
oh my little ashes!
put my name in hte picture so that my name will serve
for something in the world.

 

Gandhi said that
whatever you do in Life will be insignificant,
but it’s very important that you do it.
I tend to agree with the first part.
Michael, you know what day I’m staring at.
By 22, Gandhi had three kids,
Mozart, 30 symphonies,
and Buddy Holly was dead.
You once told me,
“Our fingerprints don’t fade
from the lives we touch.”
Is that true for everybody?
Or was that just poetic bullshit?

 

Hey, Michael,
remember that Greek myth you read to me
about the god who banished
all his children to the underworld,
and how his youngest son,
to get even, castrated him with a sickle?
It’s a IittIe excessive, maybe,
but I get it.

 

I think I could really fall in love when I know everything about someone.
The way he’s gonna part his hair. Which shirt he’s gonna wear that day.
Knowing the exact story he’d tell in a given situation.
I’m sure that’s when I’d know I’m really in love.

 

So often in my life I’ve been with people, and shared beautiful moments
like travelling, or staying up all night and watching the sunrise,
and I knew those were special moments.
But something was always wrong.
I wished I’d been with someone else.
I knew that what I was feeling, exactly
what was so important to me, they didn’t understand.

 
I kind of see this all love as this
escape for two people who don’t know how to be alone.
 I mean, y’know its funny. People always talk about how
love is this totally unselfish, giving thing,
 but if you think about it, there’s nothing more selfish.

 
Most people, you know, a lot of people talk about the past lives,
and things like that, and even if they don’t believe in it in some specific way,
people have some kind of notion of an eternal soul, right?
Okay. Well, this is my thought.
50,000 years ago, there are not even a million people on the planet.
10,000 years ago, there’s like 2,000,000 people on the planet.
Now, there’s between 5 and 6 billion people on the planet, right?
Now, if we all have our own, like, individual,
unique soul, right, where do they all come from?
Are modern souls only a fraction of the original souls?
Because if they are, that represents a 5,000-to-1  split of each soul
in just the last 50,000 years which is like a blip in the earth’s time.
You know, so, at best, we’re like these tiny
fractions of people, you know, walking…
I mean, is that why we’re all so scattered?
 Is that why we’re all so specialized?

                                                                                                                                                              

Have you ever heard that as couples get older,
they lose their ability to hear each other?

Well, supposedly, men lose the ability to hear higher-pitched sounds
and women eventually lose hearing in the low end
I guess they sort of nullify each other, or something.

I guess. Nature’s way of allowing couples
to grow old together without killing each other.

                                                                                                                                                                                         .

When you’re lonely in the night,
I’ll be near to hold you tight,
If you ever want to cry,
I’ll be there to kiss your eyes!

                                                                                                        Arsenie

 

Life is so disappointing.
Here you are.
You have arrived.
You are here.
This is your moment.
What do you have?
You have pain.
When you have everything…
what do you have?
You have nothing.
When everything is right, everything is wrong.
It’s disappointing.
It’s confusing.
This is life.
What can you do?

People keep going away from me.
That hurts.

Work.
You have a gift.
Use it.
Life will be there later.
When you’ve worked and you’ve lived and you know who you are, life is easy.
Work.
It’s the only answer I know.

                                                                                                                                                                                .

I have to go, I have to go.

Everybody has to go.

Where the fuck does everybody go

 when they have to go?

 

What exactly needs explanation?
The fact that I’ve been waiting around like a moron
hoping that one day you’ll actually
feel about me the way I feel about you?
Or the fact that you’re so obsessed with your future
that you completely forget about everyone
that you’re supposed to give a shit about?
I’m not waiting anymore. I’m done.
I may not know exactly what my future
looks like, but I do know one thing.
You’re not in it.

 
Wild animals never kill for sport.
Man is the only one to whom the torture and death
of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself.

 

Lord, I’ve never lived where churches grow
I loved creation better as it stood
That day you finished it so long ago
And looked upon your work and called it good
I know that others find you in the light
That sifted down through tinted window panes
And yet I seem to feel you near tonight
In this dim, quiet starlight on the plains
I thank you, Lord, that I’m placed so well
That you’ve made my freedom so complete
That I’m no slave to whistle, clock or bell
Nor weak eyed prisoner of Waller Street
Just let me live my life as I’ve begun
And give me work that’s open to the sky
Make me a partner of the wind and sun
And I won’t ask a life that’s soft or high
Let me be easy on the man that’s down
Let me be square and generous with all
I’m careless sometimes, Lord, when I’m in town
But never let them say I’m mean or small
Make me as big and open as the plains
And honest as the horse between my knees
Clean as a wind that blows behind the rains
Free as the hawk that circles down the breeze
Forgive me, Lord, if sometimes I forget
You know about the reasons that are hid
You understand the things that gall or fret
Well, you knew me better than my mother did
Just keep an eye on all that’s done or said
And right me sometimes when I turn aside
And guide me on that long, dim trail ahead
That stretched upward toward the great divide
Oh, bury me not on the lone prairie
These words came low and mournfully
From the pallid lips of a youth who lay
On his dying bed at the close of day
Oh, bury me not and his voice failed there
But we took no heed to his dying prayer
In a shallow grave just six by three
We buried him there on the lone prairie.

 

The way you’re moving in your sleep,
the way you look before you leap
the strange illusions that you keep,
you don’t know, but I’m noticing.

 

Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good.

The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.

I abhor vivisection with my whole soul. All the scientific discoveries stained
with innocent blood I count as of no consequence.

Experience teaches that animal food is unsuited to those who would curb their passions.
But it is wrong to over-estimate the importance of food in the formation of character
or in subjugating the flesh.

I hold today the same opinion as I held then. To my mind, the life of a lamb is no less precious
than that of a human being.

I hold flesh-food to be unsuited to our species. We err in copying the lower animal world
 if we are superior to it.

I do feel that spiritual progress does demand at some stage that
we should cease to kill our fellow creatures for the satisfaction of our bodily wants.

 

Be careful when you fight the monsters, lest you become one.

In heaven all the interesting people are missing.

It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!

Man is the cruelest animal.

No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

One must have a good memory to be able to keep the promises one makes.

The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.

The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.

The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others.

To predict the behavior of ordinary people in advance, you only have to assume that they will always
try to escape a disagreeable situation with the smallest possible expenditure of intelligence.
 
When one has much to put into them, a day has a hundred pockets.

There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.

 

A thousand years may scare form a state. An hour may lay it in ruins.

Always laugh when you can. It is cheap medicine.

Be thou the rainbow in the storms of life. The evening beam that smiles
the clouds away, and tints tomorrow with prophetic ray.

 Friendship is Love without his wings!

Friendship may, and often does, grow into love, but love never subsides into friendship.

I have great hopes that we shall love each other all our lives as much as if we had never married at all.

If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad.

It is useless to tell one not to reason but to believe – you might as well tell a man not to wake but sleep.

Like the measles, love is most dangerous when it comes late in life.

Man is born passionate of body, but with an innate though secret tendency to the love of Good
in his main-spring of Mind. But God help us all! It is at present a sad jar of atoms.

Man, being reasonable, must get drunk; the best of life is but intoxication.

Man’s love is of man’s life a part; it is a woman’s whole existence. In her first passion,
a woman loves her lover, in all the others all she loves is love.

Out of chaos God made a world, and out of high passions comes a people.

Smiles form the channels of a future tear.

The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain.

There is no instinct like that of the heart.

There is something pagan in me that I cannot shake off. In short, I deny nothing, but doubt everything.

They never fail who die in a great cause.

To have joy one must share it. Happiness was born a twin.

What a strange thing man is; and what a stranger thing woman.

 

Which of us, Lamartine, knows not by heart
That song adored by lovers whose souls smart?
‘Twas by a lake, one evening, thou didst sigh;
Who has not read a thousand times again
Those lines wherein thy mistress speaks betimes?
Who has not sobbed over those griefs divine,
Deep as the sky and pure as the sunshine?
Alas! those long regrets of love’s deceit,
Those ruins everywhere which one may meet,
Those flashes infinite of fleeting light,
What man is he that does not know their sight?
Whoever has loved once, he bears a scar
Deep in the heart, ready for open war,
And each one keeps the secret, sweet torment;
More smitten he, the less will he repent.
Shall I disclose, singer of suffering souls,
Thy glorious pain that my poor heart controls?

 

I don’t know whether you’ve ever seen a map of a person’s mind. Doctors sometimes
draw maps of other parts of you, and your own map can become intensely interesting,
but catch them trying to draw a map of a child’s mind, which is not only confused,
but keeps going round all the time. There are zigzag lines on it, just like your
temperature on a card, and these are probably roads in the island, for the Neverland is
always more or less an island.

 

Girls are taught a lot of stuff growing up:

If a guy punches you, he likes you.

Never try to trim your own bangs.

And someday you will meet a wonderful guy and get your very own happy ending.

Every movie we see, every story we’re told, implores us to wait for it.

The third act twist:

The unexpected declaration of love.

The exception to the rule.

But sometimes we’re so focused on finding our happy ending we don’t learn how to read the signs.

How to tell the ones who want us from the ones who don’t.

The ones who will stay from the ones who will leave.

And maybe this happy ending doesn’t include a wonderful guy.

Maybe it’s you…

on your own picking up the pieces and starting over.

Freeing yourself up for something better in the future.

Maybe the happy ending is just… moving on.

Or maybe the happy ending is this:

Knowing that through all the unreturned phone calls and broken hearts,  

through all the blunders and misread signals, through all of the pain and embarrassment

you never, ever gave up hope.

 

Well, my first husband was unimpressive.

I found him in bed with his big-breasted secretary when I came home early from the Maldives.

It was just so unoriginal.

Made me feel sorry for him.

My second husband was a pinch more creative.

Cheated on me with my sister but made me believe that I was insane for being suspicious.

So at least some mind games, some intrigue.

But my last husband, he was a gem.

He was a veritable master at covering his tracks.

I mean, I pored over his phone records, I intercepted his credit-card bills…

I had him followed on numerous occasions and never found a single shred of evidence.

It wasn’t until he died that I found out about the property he owned with his Austrian mistress.

But the real master, I have to say, is me.

Three husbands, countless boyfriends, I haven’t been caught yet.

 

If a girl’s into you, she’s sleeping with you.

If after a month, or two months at the very outside

…she’s not sleeping with you?

She doesn’t like you.

The trick is to spot this girl early.

Don’t wanna waste the one to seven weeks waiting to find out it’s never gonna happen.

So I’ve come up with some signs about how to spot this girl.

A girl will never sleep with you if she calls you “cuddly” or “dependable.”

If she pops a zit in front of you…

if her name is Amber or Christine…

if she takes a dump in your bathroom…

or she takes home leftovers on dates one, two, or three.

I know it’s not scientific but I’m just saying,

you were warned.

 

I used to think that I had never been dumped.

Yeah, then we started comparing notes.

Then we realized we’ve both been dumped by every man we’ve ever been with.

Every one.

But they do it so skillfully.

They just so sneaky that you think it was your idea.

Yeah. You’re sitting back and you’re like:

“Oh, yeah. This my idea. But wait a second, why am I alone?”

“Why am I unhappy? Why have I gained 20 pounds?”

They Jedi mind-trick you.

Yes, they do.

So they do a soft pass.

They got little lines they like to tell you.

Like, “I don’t wanna stand in your way.”

Or, “You’re perfect, it’s just I have to work on myself.”

Right. “I’m just thinking of your happiness.”

“Oh, I don’t deserve you.” That’s my favorite one.

You know the other one I like?

“I am so jealous of the guy who gets to marry you.”

Well, that could have been you.

Yeah.

That’s what I was leaning towards.

Yeah. And the second you hear that run to the store,

get yourself some ribs and some ice cream

because you have been dumped.

 

He doesn’t call because he has no interest in seeing you again.

If a guy doesn’t call you, he doesn’t wanna call you.

If a guy is treating you like he doesn’t give a shit… he genuinely doesn’t give a shit.

No exceptions.