Dhanamusil

“Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it. You must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“Fear and excitement are chemically the same. Sadness is a hair away from melancholy. Melancholy is almost pleasure, brushing against happiness. It’s all the fucking same.”
― Catherine Hanrahan, Lost Girls and Love Hotels

“This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.”
― Ben Okri, The Famished Road

“Intimacy is a word with eight letters. A word with a sly hiss to it. But then it begins, like love affairs do, with a chance meeting, and then a raw empty something needing to be sated, something you didn‘t notice before…but suddenly it squawks like a hungry bird, day and night, refusing to be ignored. You love and revile it, this sore shrieking something. Or is it nothing? Or everything? It doesn‘t matter. It‘s yours. It‘s you.”
― Catherine Hanrahan, Lost Girls and Love Hotels