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#2

“Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

tags: books, literature, untold-stories

177 likes

#2

“Books mean all possibilities. They mean moving out of yourself, losing yourself, dying of thirst and living to your full. They mean everything.”
― Ali Smith

194 likes

#3

“Man will become better when you show him what he is like.”
― Anton Chekhov

168 likes

#4

“We feel an affinity with a certain thinker because we agree with him; or because he shows us what we were already thinking; or because he shows us in a more articulate form what we were already thinking; or because he shows us what we were on the point of thinking; or what we would sooner or later have thought; or what we would have thought much later if we hadn’t read it now; or what we would have been likely to think but never would have thought if we hadn’t read it now; or what we would have liked to think but never would have thought if we hadn’t read it now.”
― Lydia Davis, Almost No Memory

31 likes

#5

“A conclusion is simply the place where you got tired of thinking.”
― Dan Chaon, Stay Awake

tags: conclusion, thinking, tired

81 likes

#6

“We don’t create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay.”
― Lynda Barry

95 likes

#7

“The groove is so mysterious. We're born with it and we lose it and the world seems to split apart before our eyes into stupid and cool. When we get it back, the world unifies around us, and both stupid and cool fall away.
I am grateful to those who are keepers of the groove. The babies and the grandmas who hang on to it and help us remember when we forget that any kind of dancing is better than no dancing at all.”
― Lynda Barry, One Hundred Demons

tags: adolescence, babies, confidence, cool, dance, dancing, demons, grandma, groove, growing-up, lynda-barry, one-hundred-demons, self-love, stupid

50 likes

#8

“A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

tags: life, love

3747 likes

#9

“My dear fellow,' Burlingame said, 'we sit here on a blind rock careening through space; we are all of us rushing headlong to the grave. Think you the worms will care, when anon they make a meal of you, whether you spent your moment sighing wigless in your chamber, or sacked the golden towns of Montezuma? Lookee, the day's nigh spent; 'tis gone careening into time forever. Not a tale's length past we lined our bowels with dinner, and already they growl for more. We are dying men, Ebenezer: i'faith, there's time for naught but bold resolves!”
― John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor

48 likes

#10

“It seems that in our society Christianity has made permanent inroads in the eye-for-an-eye department but has made little progress on the practical application of forgiveness.”
― Steve Toltz

1 likes

#11

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”
― Cicero

tags: books

6573 likes

#12

“It took years after I’d graduated from Amherst to realize that people were actually far more complicated and interesting than books, that almost everyone else suffered the same secret fears and inadequacies as I, and that feeling alone and inferior was actually the great valent bond between us all. I wish I’d been smart enough to understand that when I was an adolescent.”
― David Foster Wallace

36 likes

#13

“I am sifting my memories, the way men pan the dirt under a barroom floor for the bits of gold dust that fall between the cracks. It's small mining-- small mining. You're too young a man to be panning memories, Adam. You should be getting yourself some new ones, so that the mining will be richer when you come to age.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

tags: maturity, on-writing

64 likes

#14

“It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Prose Works Of Ralph Waldo Emerson

tags: essay, inspirational, lecture, nonfiction, philosophy, self-reliance, social-commentary, transcendentalism

2648 likes

#15

“We all suffer alone in the real world. True empathy's impossible. But if a piece of fiction can alow us imaginatively to identify with a character's pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with their own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple.”
― David Foster Wallace

142 likes

#16

“Never make your home in a place. Make a home for yourself inside your own head. You'll find what you need to furnish it- memory, friends you can trust, love of learning, and other such things. That way it will go with you wherever you journey.”
― Tad Williams

195 likes

#17

“We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

3340 likes

#18

“To live at all is miracle enough.”
― Mervyn Peake, Collected Poems

tags: life, living, miracle, miracles

93 likes

#19

“But I believe in love, you know; love is a uniquely portable magic. I don’t think it’s in the stars, but I do believe that blood calls to blood and mind calls to mind and heart to heart.”
― Stephen King, 11/22/63

tags: love

223 likes

#20

“Now I began to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters. He enters in one state of mind and exits in another. The writer gets no points just because what's inside the box bears some linear resemblance to "real life" -- he can put whatever he wants in there. What's important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit.”
― George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone

29 likes

#21

“Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.”
― William Hazlitt

tags: laughter, life

109 likes

#22

“He who is certain he knows the ending of things when he is only beginning them is either extremely wise or extremely foolish; no matter which is true, he is certainly an unhappy man, for he has put a knife in the heart of wonder.”
― Tad Williams, The Dragonbone Chair

tags: ending, foolish, wisdom, wonder

280 likes

#23

“We are all our own graveyards, I believe; we squat amongst the tombs of the people we were. If we're healthy, every day is a celebration, a Day of the Dead, in which we give thanks for the lives that we lived, and if we are neurotic we brood and mourn and wish that the past was still present.”
― clive barker

130 likes

#24

“And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., A Man Without a Country

3164 likes

#25

“I think that's the real loss of innocence: the first time you glimpse the boundaries that will limit your potential.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

tags: self-awareness, self-discovery

155 likes

#26

“That's how we slide, and while we slide we blame the world's problems on colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, corporatism, stupid white men, and America, but there's no need to make a brand name of blame. Individual self-interest: that's the source of our descent, and it doesn't start in the boardrooms or the war rooms either. It starts in the home.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

40 likes

#27

“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

tags: amorality, correct-way, individuality, my-way, only-way, right-way, the-way, your-way

6752 likes

#28

“The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

tags: inspirational

936 likes

#29

“A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.”
― Lao Tzu

tags: life, travel

3759 likes

#30

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

tags: attitude, distress, mind-over-body, pain, stoicism

2615 likes

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