"Sometimes, when we’re lying together, I look at her and I feel dizzy with the realization that here is another distinct person from me, who has memories, origins, thoughts, feelings that are different from my own. That tension between familiarity and mystery meshes something strong between us. Even if one builds a life together based on trust, attentiveness and mutual support, I think that it’s important that a partner continues to surprise."

Barack Obama

"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."

CS Lewis

The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case."

Chuck Close

I don't want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic. I try to give that to people. I do misrepresent things. I don't tell truths. I tell what ought to be truth."

-Blanche DuBois, A Streetcar Named Desire

“infinite grace. infinite possibility. the mercy of the universe extended in its own laws. according to quantum theory, there are not only second chances, but multiple chances. space is not simply connected. history is not unalterable. The universe itself is forked. if we knew how to manipulate space-time as space-time manipulates itself, the illusion of our single linear lives would collapse. and if our lives here are not the total, our deaths here will not be the final.”

jeanette winterson

the most important lesson in life: you cannot count on anyone except yourself. it’s sad but true, and the sooner you learn it, the better.

carolyn burnham, american beauty

So avoid using the word ‘very’ because it is lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don’t use very sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason, boys - to woo women - and, in that endeavour, laziness will not do. It also won’t do in your essays."

John Keating, Dead Poet’s Society

I want to sparkle for a moment.

Before I just fizzle out and die.

The Boy Least Likely To, 'Be Gentle With Me'