Vanessa

“Mein Herz ist voller
Dankbarkeit, aber meine Armut an
deutschen Worten zwingt mich zu
großer Sparsamkeit des Ausdruckes.”
― Mark Twain, The Awful German Language / Die schreckliche deutsche Sprache

“That’s the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they’re suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world. That’s why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember. But when that child gets buried away under their adaptive and protective shells—he becomes one of the walking dead, a monster. So when you realise you’ve gone a few weeks and haven’t felt that awful struggle of your childish self — struggling to lift itself out of its inadequacy and incompetence — you’ll know you’ve gone some weeks without meeting new challenge, and without growing, and that you’ve gone some weeks towards losing touch with yourself. The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn’t live boldly enough, that they didn’t invest enough heart, didn’t love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.”
― Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes

“I wonder why I don't go to bed and go to sleep. But then it would be tomorrow, so I decide that no matter how tired, no matter how incoherent I am, I can skip on hour more of sleep and live.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Rather than being 'this not that' I am this *and* that... I've felt like a blossoming flower. As I become more fully me and as I'm more comfortable with each petal of my identity, I open myself up and look into the sun... As someone who identifies as bisexual and does see the world on a multitude of plains, my intellect and creativity, my head and my heart, are just further parallels of how I am able to find myself attracted to and love both men and women.

[Participant quote from the study 'The positive aspects of a bisexual self-identification' in Psychology and Sexuality 1 (2) by S. Scales Rostosky, D. E. Riggle, and D. Pascale-Hague pp.131-44]”
― Julia Shaw, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality