While I can’t have you, I long for you. I am the kind of person who would miss a train or a plane to meet you for coffee. I’d take a taxi across town to see you for ten minutes. I’d wait outside all night if I thought you would open the door in the morning. If you call me and say ‘Will you…’ my answer is ‘Yes’, before your sentence is out. I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close.
—Jeanette Winterson
I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her. Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
We the mortals touch the metals,
the wind, the ocean shores, the stones,
knowing they will go on, inert or burning,
and I was discovering, naming all the these things:
it was my destiny to love and say goodbye.
—Pablo Neruda, Still Another Day
When it comes to being gentle, start with yourself. Don’t get upsest with your imperfections. Being disappointed by failure is understandable, but it shouldn’t turn into bitterness or spite directed at yourself. It’s a great mistake because it leads nowhere—to get angry because you are angry; upset at being upset; disappointed because you are disappointed.
—St. Frances De Sales
A bouquet of clumsy words: you know that place between sleep and awake where you’re still dreaming but it’s slowly slipping? I wish we could feel like that more often. I also wish i could click my fingers three times and be transported to anywhere I like. I wish that people didn’t always say ‘just wondering’ when you both know there was a real reason behind them asking. And I wish I could get lost in the stars. Listen, there’s a hell of a good universe next door, let’s go.
—e.e. cummings
The opposite of courage is not cowardice. It is conformity.
—Earl Nightingale, Submitted by (matt-h)
Faith is the ability to see the invisible, believe in the incredible, to receive what the masses think is impossible.
—Quote by Clarence Smithison
Submitted by (matt-h) (Again, not his true tumblr username, but for the sake of privacy..)
After the flower wilts
It is only then the leaves can be seen
The shape of the leaf fringe and
The shape of the veins
More beautiful than the flower
Springing forth as the seed
Rounded, long
Sharp, wide
The people I have met
All different faces
Smile at me from atop the trees
Opposite leaves, alternate leaves
Leaves left alone, impossible leaves
The people I have loved
their different fates
Lie voiceless atop the tree of life
—“Just as after the flower wilts, the leaves can be seen”, translated from Korean poet Lee Hae-In’s Poetry Book (unofficial translation)
I looked up at the blue sky, took off my dark glasses, and allowed myself to be filled by that light, by the feeling of being simultaneously nowhere and everywhere.
—The Zahir, Paulo Coelho pg. 319
I saw the flat horizon, the vast empty space, heard the sound of horses’ hooves, the quiet wind, and then, all around us, nothing, absolutely nothing. It was as if the world had chosen this place to display, at once, its vastnes, simplicity and complexity. It was as if we could—and should—become like the steppes, empty, infinite and, at the same time, full of life.
—The Zahir, Paulo Coelho pg. 319
