Time to leave now, get out of this room, go somewhere, anywhere; sharpen this feeling of happiness and freedom, stretch your limbs, fill your eyes, be awake, wider awake, vividly awake in every sense and every pore.
― Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl
I didn’t grow up in her shadow, I grew up in her light.
― Maya Angelou’s son
I hate this life of the fashionable world, always ordered, measured, ruled, like our music-paper. What I have always wished for, desired, and coveted, is the life of an artist, free and independent, relying only on my own resources, and accountable only to myself.
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
I’ve begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own.
― Chaim Potok, The Chosen
Believe in your flyness, conquer your shyness.
― Kanye West
Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.
― Kurt Vonnegut
I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.
― Anaïs Nin
I don’t want to pass through life like a smooth plane ride. All you do is get to breathe and copulate and finally die. I don’t want to go with the smooth skin and the calm brow. I hope I end up a blithering idiot cursing the sun - hallucinating, screaming, giving obscene and inane lectures on street corners and public parks. People will walk by and say, “Look at that drooling idiot. What a basket case.” I will turn and say to them, “It is you who are the basket case. For every moment you hated your job, cursed your wife and sold yourself to a dream that you didn’t even conceive. For the times your soul screamed yes and you said no. For all of that. For your self-torture, I see the glowing eyes of the sun! The air talks to me! I am at all times!” And maybe, the passers by will drop a coin into my cup.
― Henry Rollins
There are days when solitude is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.
― Colette, Oeuvres complètes en seize volumes
I’ve tried to be forgiving. And yet. There were times in my life, whole years, when anger got the better of me. Ugliness turned me inside out. There was a certain satisfaction in bitterness. I courted it. It was standing outside, and I invited it in.
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
