"We are dying from overthinking. We are slowly killing ourselves by thinking about everything. Think. Think. Think. You can never trust the human mind anyway. It’s a death trap."

Anthony Hopkins 

Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it isn't so

- Lemony Snicket: The Blank Book

She was not happy - she never had been. Whence came this insufficiency in life - this instantaneous turning to decay of everything on which she leaned? But if there were somewhere a being strong and beautiful, a valiant nature, full at once of exaltation and refinement, a poets heart in angels form, a lyre with sounding chords ringing out elegiac epithalamia to heaven, why, perchance, should she not find him? Ah! How impossible! Besides, nothing was worth the trouble of seeking it; everything was a lie. Every smile hid a yawn of boredom, every joy a curse, all pleasure satiety, and the sweetest kisses left upon your lips only the unattainable desire for greater delight.

 Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary

"As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world - that is the myth of the atomic age - as in being able to remake ourselves."

— Mohandas Gandhi 

"Life begins at the end of your comfort zone."

— Donald Walsch

Do not follow me! Let's just be fabulously where we are and who we are. You be you and I'll be me, today and today and today,and let's trust the future to tomorrow. Let the stars keep track of us. Let us ride our own orbits and trust that they will meet. May our reunion be not a finding but a sweet collision of destinies!

- Jerry Spinelli: Love, Stargirl

"Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened"
- Margaret Atwood: The Cats Eye

“A rowdy bunch on the whole, they were most of them so violently individualistic as to be practically interchangeable.”

—Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado

“Everyone, either from modesty or egotism, hides away the best and most delicate of his soul’s possessions; to gain the esteem of others, we must only ever show our ugliest sides.” 

— Gustave Flaubert, November

“She loves you, but not the way you love her. No molecular-level longing on her end. She doesn’t experience temporary retardation in your presence, as you do in hers.”

—Ron Currie, Jr., Everything Matters

“Henry told me he is often the life of the party, as if he didn’t already know that to be the life of the party is the most sad and pathetic of all things to be.”
— Binnie Kirshenbaum, The Scenic Route

“All this time Dahlia had been convinced that she was superior: the kind of person who can face shit, who can stare it down and name it and live with it and regularly feel around in her pocket for the sharp edges of it. But all this time it had just been piling up, accumulating like lint in the dryer filter of self. So now her mixed-metaphorical cup runneth over. With shit.”

—Elisa Albert, The Book of Dahlia

I wonder which is preferable, to walk around all your life swollen up with your own secrets until you burst from the pressure of them, or to have them sucked out of you, every paragraph, every sentence, every word of them, so at the end you're depleted of all that was once as precious to you as hoarded gold, as close to you as your skin - everything that was of the deepest importance to you, everything that made you cringe and wish to conceal, everything that belonged to you alone - and must spend the rest of your days like an empty sack flapping in the wind, an empty sack branded with a bright fluorescent label so that everyone will know what sort of secrets used to be inside you?

- Margaret Atwood