"After a while, you learn the subtle difference between holding a hand and chaining a soul. And you learn that love doesn’t mean leaning, and company doesn’t always mean security. And you begin to learn that kisses aren’t contracts, and presents aren’t promises. And you begin to accept your defeats with your head up and your eyes open, with the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child. And you learn to build all your roads on today, because tomorrow’s ground is too uncertain for plans and futures have a way of falling down in mid-flight. And after a while you learn that even sunshine burns if you get too much, so you plant your own garden and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers. And you learn that you really can endure, that you really are strong, and you really do have worth. And you learn, and you learn. With every goodbye you learn." — Veronica Shoffstall

You’re mine,” she whispered. “Mine, as I’m yours. And if we die, we die. All men must die...But first, we’ll live."

— George R.R. Martin 

"Freedom and love go together. Love is not a reaction. If I love you because you love me, that is mere trade, a thing to be bought in the market; it is not love. To love is not to ask anything in return, not even to feel that you are giving something- and it is only such love that can know freedom."

Jiddu Krishnamur

my eyes opened.

i gained the whole world

and lost you.

billy ramsell,

Go and get a job. Go and find a flat. Find somebody else. Put them in the flat. Make them stay. Get a toaster. Go to work. Get on the bus. Look at your boss. Say, “fuck”. Sit down. Pick up the thing. Go blank. Scream internally. Go home. Listen to the radio. Look at the other person. Think, “WHY? Why did this happen?”. Go to bed. Lie awake! At night! Get up. Feel groggy. Put the things on - your clothes - whatever they’re called. Go out the door, into work - same thing! Same people, again. It’s real, it is happening to you. Go home again! Sit. Radio. Dinner - mmm. GARDENING, GARDENING, GARDENING, death.

Dylan Moran

Suppose I love music more than life itself. Other things being equal, then, I should be free to live my life in pursuit of the exaltation of music, the thing I love most, with all my heart and soul. But that still doesn’t give me the right to force my children to practice their instruments night and day, or the right to impose musical education on everybody in the country of which I am the dictator, or to threaten the lives of those who have no love of music. If my love of music is so great that I am simply unable to consider its implications objectively, then this is an unfortunate disability, and others may with good reason assert the right to act as my surrogate, conscientiously deciding what is best for all, since my love has driven me mad, and I cannot rationally participate in the assessment of my own behavior and its consequences. There may well be nothing more wonderful than love, but love is not enough. A world in which baseball fans’ love of their teams led them so to hate the other teams and their fans that murderous war accompanied the playoffs would be a world in which a particular love, pure and blameless in itself, led to immoral and intolerable consequences. So, although I understand and sympathize with those who take offense at my invitation to consider the pros and cons of religion, I insist that they have no right to indulge themselves by declaring their love and then hiding behind the veil of righteous indignation or hurt feelings. Love is not enough.

— Dan Dennett - on why free inquiry must be allowed to proceed no matter how strongly some may feel about religion from Breaking the Spell: Religion As A Natural Phenomenon 

“He advances on her and she feels herself ransacked from top to bottom, flooded with relief, assaulted by happiness. How astonishing this is. How close to dismay.”

—Alice Munro, Runaway

In my life nothing goes wrong. When things seem to not meet my expectations, I let go of how I think things should be. It’s a matter of not having any attachment to any fixed outcome.

— Deepak Chopra 

A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called “leaves”) imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic. - Carl Sagan 

I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting. Many a man has borne himself proudly on the scaffold; surely the same pride should teach us to think truly about man’s place in the world. Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour of their own.

— Bertrand Russell 

Water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. What if someone says, “Well, that’s not how I choose to think about water.”? All we can do is appeal to scientific values. And if he doesn’t share those values, the conversation is over. If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide to prove they should value it? If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument could you provide to show the importance of logic?

— Sam Harris

Assumptions are the death of a relationship. If you think you know what’s going on inside someone else’s head, think again. We imagine that love gives us the power to read one another’s mind, when all we are really doing is reading our own. It’s a great self-defense mechanism but no substitute for actual communication. 

Tonya Hurley 

"It shouldn’t be the consumer’s responsibility to figure out what’s cruel and what’s kind, what’s environmentally destructive and what’s sustainable. Cruel and destructive food products should be illegal. We don’t need the option of buying children’s toys made with lead paint, or aerosols with chlorofluorocarbons, or medicines with unlabeled side effects. And we don’t need the option of buying factory-farmed animals."

— Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals.

Isn’t that what happens? You meet someone, and if you give it a chance, maybe love grows?

Mary Stanley (The Lost Garden)

She felt nothing. not even a sense of loss. More the awareness off inconvenience . She knew this lack of feelings was not natural, but it was natural to her. She had no idea what the norm was, as she could not relate to it. what she needed was to make a plan. a new one.

Mary Stanley (The Lost Garden)

He stared up at the stars: and it seemed to him then that they were dancers stately and graceful, performing a dance almost infinite in its complexity. He imagined he could see the very faces of the stars; pale, they were, and smiling gently, as if they had spent so much time above the world, watching the scrambling and the joy and the pain of the people below them, that they could not help being amused every time another little human believed itself the center of its world, as each of us does.

— Neil Gaiman, Stardust