“There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.”
— Anaïs Nin, Journals of Anaïs Nin Volume 3

“Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It’s everyone’s, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet.” 

— Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

"Life is not a struggle; the only struggle is your resistance to allowing reality to be exactly as it is. Struggles would disappear if you could allow the comings and goings of life flow through you with the trust that everything that is happening to you is for your best interest, even if you can’t see it right now. Allowing reality to be exactly as it is - this is the first step towards transformation."

Jackson Kiddard

“None are so fallible as those who are sure they’re right.” — Strunk & White, The Elements of Style

“It was important for him to believe that he’d spent his life among people who kept missing the point.”
— Don DeLillo, White Noise

And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual.

- East of Eden by John Steinbeck

“She has often felt that her outsides were too dull for her insides, that deep within her there was something better than what everyone else could see.”
— Myla Goldberg, Bee Season 

You know, it’s quite an undertaking to start loving somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness… There is even a moment, right at the start, where you have to jump across an abyss; if you think about it you don’t do it.

— Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

"The mind I love must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody’s fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind." 

— Katherine Mansfield

"I want to tear myself from this place, from this reality, rise up like a cloud and float away, melt into this humid summer night and dissolve somewhere far, over the hills. But I am here, my legs blocks of concrete, my lungs empty of air, my throat burning. There will be no floating away." — Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner 

“But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into the depths of confusion you didn’t know existed.” — Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited 

“So many people at college were jacked up on ambition, possessors of steroidal egos, clever but cutthroat, diligent but insensitive, shiny but dull, that everyone felt compelled to be upbeat, down with the program, all system firing, when everyone knew, in his or her heart, that this wasn’t how they really felt.”

—Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

I’m attracted to the extreme light and the extreme dark. I’m interested in the human condition and what makes people tick. I’m interested in the things people try to hide.

Johnny Depp

People who love only once in their lives are shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy or custom or their lack of imagination.

Oscar Wilde